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Guest Editorial
Special Section on Blind Signal Processingand Its ApplicationsW

ELCOME to this Special Section of the IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I onBlind Signal Processing and Its Applications. Blind signal
processing (BSP) is currently one of the most exciting areas ofresearch in statistical signal processing, unsupervised machinelearning, neural networks, information theory, and exploratory
data analysis. It has applications at the intersection of many
science and engineering disciplines concerned with understanding and extracting useful information from data as diverse
as neuronal activity and brain images, bioinformatics, communications, the World Wide Web, audio, video, and sensor
signals. Because BSP is an interdisciplinary research area, thecombination of ideas from the above disciplines is a developing
avenue of research.
The aim of this Special Section is to offer an opportunity tolink these techniques in different areas and to find effective waysof solving this problem. The Special Section constitutes a vehicle whereby researchers can present new studies of BSP, thus
paving the way for future developments in the field. We received
20 submissions for consideration. After the review process, weselected the following eight papers for publication that span theapproaches identified above. These are complex blind source extraction from noisy mixtures using second order statistics by Javidi et al.; complex independent component analysis by entropy
bound minimization by Li et al.; real-time independent vector
analysis for convolutive blind source separation by Kim; a nonnegative blind source separation model for binary test data by
Schachtner et al.; a matrix pseudoinversion lemma and its application to block-based adaptive blind deconvolution for MIMO
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSI.2010.2056430

systems by Kohno et al.; colored subspace analysis: dimension
reduction based on a signal’s autocorrelation structure by Theis;blind adaptive equalization of MIMO systems: new recursivealgorithms and convergence analysis by Radenkovic et al.; andnoise estimation using mean square cross prediction error forspeech enhancement by Wang et al.
We hope that this Special Section will stimulate interest in
the challenging area of BSP, and look forward to seeing an increasing body of high-quality research aligned to this idea. We
would like to express our gratitude to the authors of the papers
in this special section, and also to the more than 60 reviewers
who helped us evaluate the submissions. We also thank Gianluca
Setti, the Editor-in-Chief who initiated this project, and Wouter
Serdijn, the Editor-in-Chief under whom it was concluded.
SHOJI MAKINO, Guest Editor
University of Tsukuba
Ibaraki, 305-8577 JapanANDRZEJ CICHOCKI, Guest Editor
Riken, Brain Science Institute
Saitama, 351-0198 JapanWEI XING ZHENG, Guest Editor
University of Western Sydney
Penrith South DC, NSW1797 Australia
AURELIO UNCINI, Guest Editor
University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Rome, 00184, Italy

Shoji Makino (M’90-SM’99-F’04) received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Tohoku University, Japan, in 1979, 1981, and 1993, respectively.
He joined NTT in 1981. He is now a Professor at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. He is theauthor or coauthor of more than 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings and is responsible for more than 150 patents. His research interests include adaptive filtering technologies,
the realization of acoustic echo cancellation, blind source separation of convolutive mixtures ofspeech, and acoustic signal processing for speech and audio applications.
Prof. Makino is an Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE)
Fellow, a Council Member of the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), and a Member of EURASIP.
He received the ICA Unsupervised Learning Pioneer Award in 2006, the IEEE MLSP Competition
Award in 2007, the TELECOM System Technology Award in 2004, the Achievement Award of theIEICE in 1997, and the Outstanding Technological Development Award of the ASJ in 1995, thePaper Award of the IEICE in 2005 and 2002, the Paper Award of the ASJ in 2005 and 2002. Hewas a Keynote Speaker at ICA 2007, a Tutorial Speaker at ICASSP 2007. He has served on IEEE SPS Awards Board (2006–2008)
and IEEE SPS Conference Board (2002–2004). He is a Member of the James L. Flanagan Speech & Audio Processing Award
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Committee. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING (2002–2005) and is anAssociate Editor of the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. He is the Chair of the Blind Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and a member of the Audio and Electroacoustics Technical Committeeof the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was the Vice President of the Engineering Sciences Society of the IEICE (2007–2008),
and the Chair of the Engineering Acoustics Technical Committee of the IEICE (2006–2008). He is a Member of the International
IWAENC Standing committee and a member of the International ICA Steering Committee. He was the General Chair of WASPAA
2007, the General Chair of IWAENC 2003, the Organizing Chair of ICA 2003, and is the designated Plenary Chair of ICASSP
2012. He is an IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2009–2010).

Andrzej Cichocki received the M.Sc. (with honors), Ph.D., and Dr.Sc. (habilitation) degrees, allin electrical engineering, from Warsaw University of Technology, Poland.
Since 1972, he has been with the Institute of Theory of Electrical Engineering, Measurement andInformation Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology,
where he obtained a title of a full Professor in 1995. He also spent several years at University
Erlangen-Nuerenberg, Germany, at the Chair of Applied and Theoretical Electrical Engineering
directed by Prof. Rolf Unbehauen, as an Alexander-von-Humboldt Research Fellow and GuestProfessor. In 1995–1997 he was also a Team Leader in the Laboratory for Artificial Brain Systems, at Frontier Research Program RIKEN, Japan, in the Brain Information Processing Group.
He is currently a Senior Team Leader of the Laboratory for Advanced Brain Signal Processing,at RIKEN Brain Science Institute, JAPAN. He is coauthor of more than 250 technical papers and4 internationally recognized monographs (two of them translated to Chinese): Non-Negative Matrix and Tensor Factorizations—Applications to Exploratory Multi-Way Data Analysis and BlindSource Separation (Wiley, 2009), Adaptive Blind Signal and Image Processing (Wiley, 2003—rev. ed.), CMOS Switched-Capacitor and Continuous-Time Integrated Circuits and Systems (Springer-Verlag, 1989) and Neural Networks for Optimizations andSignal Processing (Teubner-Wiley, 1994). He is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.

Wei Xing Zheng (M’93-SM’98) was born in Nanjing, China. He received the B.Sc. degree inapplied mathematics and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Southeast
University, Nanjing, China, in 1982, 1984, and 1989, respectively.
From 1984 to 1991, he was with the Institute of Automation at Southeast University, Nanjing,China, first as a Lecturer and later as an Associate Professor. From 1991 to 1994, he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College ofScience, Technology and Medicine, London, U.K.; in the Department of Mathematics at University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; and in the Australian Telecommunications ResearchInstitute at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. Since 1994, he has been with theUniversity of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia, where he is currently a Full Professor. He has
also held various visiting positions in the Institute for Network Theory and Circuit Design at Munich University of Technology, Munich, Germany; in the Department of Electrical Engineering atUniversity of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Davis, CA. His research interests are in the areas of systems and controls, signal processing,and communications. He coauthored the book Linear Multivariable Systems: Theory and Design (SEU Press, Nanjing, 1991).
Dr. Zheng has received several science prizes, including the Chinese National Natural Science Prize awarded by the Chinese
Government in 1991. He has served on the technical program or organizing committee of numerous international conferences,such as the 42nd IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2009), the 15th IFAC Symposium on System
Identification (SYSID 2009) and the 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2010). He has also served on several IEEE or IFAC technical committees, and has been the Chair of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s Technical Committee
on Neural Systems and Applications, the Chair of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s Technical Committee on Blind Signal
Processing, a Member of IEEE Control Systems Society’s Technical Committee on System Identification and Adaptive Control,and a Member of IFAC Technical Committee on Modelling, Identification and Signal Processing. He has served as an Associate
Editor for four flagship journals: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I: FUNDAMENTAL THEORY AND APPLICATIONS(2002–2004), IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL (2004–2007), IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS II:EXPRESS BRIEFS (2008–2009), and IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS (2007–present). Since 2000, he has also been an Associate
Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society’s Conference Editorial Board.

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Aurelio Uncini (M’88) received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University ofAncona, Italy, in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Bologna,Italy, in 1994.
From 1984 to 1986, he was with the Ugo Bordoni Foundation, Rome, Italy, engaged in researchon digital processing of speech signals and automatic speech recognition. From 1986 to 1987,
he was with the Italian Ministry of Communication, Rome. From 1987 to 1993 he was a Free
Researcher affiliated with the Department of Electronics and Automatics, University of Ancona,
where from 1994 to 1998 he was an Assistant Professor. From 1999 to 2004, he was an Associate
Professor in the INFOCOM Department, University of Rome “La Sapienza.” At present he is a
Full Professor in the same department where he is teaching circuits theory, adaptive algorithms
for signal processing, and digital audio processing and where he is Founder and Director of theLaboratory of Intelligent Signal Processing and Circuits (ISPAC). He has authored and coauthored
several papers in the field of circuits theory, optimization algorithms for circuits design, neuralnetworks, and signal processing. His present research interests include also linear and nonlinear adaptive filters, blind signal processing, adaptive audio and array processing, and machine learning for signal processing.
Prof. Uncini is a Member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), the Associazione Elettrotecnica ed Elettronica Italiana (AEI),
and the Società Italiana Reti Neuroniche (SIREN).