EUSiPCO 2026 Event recap

EUSIPCO, EURASIP’s flagship annual conference, brings together academic and industry specialists across signal processing and related fields. Its 34th edition was held from 31 August to 4 September 2026 at the Concertgebouw Brugge in Belgium. Led by Prof. Toon van Waterschoot of KU Leuven and Richard Heusdens of TU Delft, the conference was supported by an international organizing committee, with KU Leuven playing a prominent role in its technical program and local delivery. 

ADI sponsorship 

ADI’s Silver sponsorship of EUSIPCO 2026 strengthened its presence in the Benelux signal-processing and semiconductor ecosystem while demonstrating a long-term commitment to the region. With an established team in Leuven and close proximity to KU Leuven and imec, ADI is well positioned to connect academic research, advanced semiconductor innovation, and practical product development. 

The Leuven site develops audio DSP and machine-learning technologies for consumer products, including speech and voice enhancement, hearing enhancement, active noise cancellation, adaptive and personalized audio, and edge AI. The team delivers product applications such as Pure Voice calling, FastHA hearing enhancement, and AiNC adaptive noise cancellation for the Granite SoC family. These areas closely match the research strengths represented at EUSIPCO and are particularly relevant to the regional ecosystem, where KU Leuven contributes leading academic expertise and imec provides world-class semiconductor research and innovation capabilities. 

ADI’s local presence therefore creates opportunities to influence emerging research directions, build deeper technical collaborations, attract highly qualified talent, and accelerate the transition of promising ideas into deployable products. By engaging consistently through sponsorship, joint research, internships, recruitment, and industry participation, ADI can strengthen its role as a bridge between research and product development and become a more visible partner in the European ecosystem for audio, sensing, edge AI, and low-power semiconductor solutions. 

Program 

The full EUSIPCO 2026 technical program spanned five days. Monday focused on ten tutorials and the opening student-poster activities. The main conference then combined four keynotes, oral and poster sessions, 19 special sessions, seven industry expert talks and networking events, with four satellite workshops completing the program. Nearly 600 paper presentations covered the breadth of modern signal processing, from audio and speech to communications, imaging, biomedical applications, optimization and machine learning. 

Industry and technology highlights 

EUSIPCO 2026 strengthened the connection between academic research and industrial deployment through its new industry expert talks. Across the program, a clear trend emerged toward combining domain knowledge and classical signal-processing methods with machine learning to create solutions that are more adaptable, reliable, data-efficient, and practical to deploy. This direction strongly aligns with ADI’s work in voice enhancement, denoising, ANC, beamforming, acoustic-scene understanding, and hybrid DSP/ML processing, where performance must be balanced against power, memory, latency, and robustness constraints. More broadly, the conference highlighted growing interest in generative AI, trustworthy and data-efficient learning, model-based approaches, and advanced sensing and communications, confirming that future signal-processing systems will increasingly integrate physical models with deep learning to improve generalization while reducing data and computation requirements. 

ADI team attending 

The attending group from the Leuven team combined expertise in audio algorithms, machine learning, embedded implementation and program leadership. This is the same team developing and delivering the suite of state-of-the-art edge AI products: Pure Voice calling, hearing enhancement (FastHA) and Adaptive ANC (AiNC) applications for the Granite SoC family. 

Their participation provided broad coverage and attendance of the conference: technical sessions and emerging research, contacts with academic groups, assessment of topics relevant to ADI’s roadmap, and visibility for the Leuven audio team. 

Stefano Damiano’s role at EUSIPCO 2026 

Stefano joined ADI Leuven after completing postdoctoral research in Prof. Toon van Waterschoot’s group at KU Leuven. At EUSIPCO 2026, he participated both as a scientific contributor and as Student Activities Co-Chair, maintaining a strong link between ADI, KU Leuven, and the wider research community. 

Scientific contributions 

Stefano contributed to four research papers developed during his PhD and postdoctoral work, including three as first author. He presented two of these contributions during the conference and also chaired a poster session on machine learning for signal processing. 

Student activities 

As Student Activities Co-Chair, Stefano worked with the organizing team over the preceding year to prepare three major initiatives: the Three-Minute Thesis Competition, a new career-networking lunch connecting students with mentors from academia and industry, and the Best Student Paper Awards. His responsibilities included promoting the activities, coordinating participants and juries, evaluating finalists, and helping deliver the events during the conference. The new mentoring activity was particularly successful and received positive feedback from students. 

Takeaways from the team 

Stijn Robben 

“I focused on active noise control, beamforming, speech enhancement, and neural audio processing. I saw continued progress toward more adaptive and personalized listening systems, particularly solutions that help users focus on a desired speaker in noisy environments. The conference also gave me a useful overview of current research directions and valuable opportunities to reconnect with researchers and former colleagues.” 

Federico Maver 

“I valued the opportunity to exchange ideas with specialists in speech enhancement and audio processing. The difficulty of holding conversations during busy poster sessions was a practical reminder that communication in noisy environments remains an important challenge. I see strong potential for earbuds and headphones that help users focus on a chosen speaker, reinforcing the relevance of ADI’s work on clearer and more accessible communication.” 

Charles Fox 

“I noticed growing interest in using AI to guide and adapt established signal-processing techniques rather than replacing them entirely. I also saw greater emphasis on configurable models, synthetic data, and reducing dependence on manually labeled data. However, implementation size and edge-device constraints received relatively limited attention, which could be an area of differentiation for ADI. AI-assisted development is also changing engineering workflows and making effort and schedule estimation less predictable.” 

Stefano Damiano 

“I found the program particularly relevant to our team’s work, with strong coverage of audio, machine learning, and room acoustics. Compared with larger conferences, EUSIPCO offered more focused networking and discussions with specialists in audio and acoustics. I also welcomed the new industry-talk track, which brought practical applications into the academic program and could give ADI an opportunity to present its own work at a future edition.” 

Conclusion 

EUSIPCO 2026 was a valuable event for the ADI Leuven team, offering relevant technical insights, strong networking, and confirmation that ADI Leuven audio and edge-AI priorities align well with leading research. The key next step is to deepen engagement with KU Leuven through a focused roadmap exchange, one or two targeted collaboration topics, and continued contact with promising students and researchers.