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As chair of the organizing committee I am delighted to welcome you to SSP 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. The biannual IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has a long history going back more than three decades.

This is the first time ever that SSP 2012 has been held in Michigan and the first time in five years that it has been held in the US. Located 40 miles west of Detroit MI, Ann Arbor is the home of the University of Michigan, a world-class research university established almost 200 years ago. Former students from the University of Michigan that will be familiar to you include: Claude Shannon (father of information theory), Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems), and Larry Page (co-founder of Google).

The workshop will be held on central campus of the university and, except for the Opening Reception, all events will be on the second floor of the Michigan League. I am looking forward to seeing you on Sunday evening at the Opening Reception, which will be held at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, at 525 South State Street, within easy walking distance of the Michigan League.

We are proud of our exciting technical program featuring six top flight plenary speakers and over 230 quality papers presented in contributed and invited poster sessions.

I would like to thank all the members of the organizing committee for their tireless work and inspiration in putting together this workshop for you. I give special thanks to Raj Rao Nadakuditi, Local Arrangements Chair, for his inspiration and close involvement with virtually every aspect of workshop planning. I also thank the reviewers who served on our Technical Program Committee. I thank the Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for sponsoring SSP 2012.

Finally, I thank all of the authors and attendees of SSP 2012 and look forward to seeing you in August.

Alfred Hero, General Chair