Smaragdis has been active in academic and industry public service. From 2009 to the present, he has been a steering committee member for the International Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation. In 2013 and 2014, Smaragdis was the chair of the IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee. From 2012 to 2015, he chaired the steering committee for the International Conference on Latent Variable Analysis. In 2018 he joined the board of directors of the
IEEE Signal Processing Society. And in 2019 and 2020, he was the chair of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. In 2017, with Professor Heinrich Taube, Smaragdis founded the University of Illinois' CS+Music undergraduate degree program, designed to foster interdisciplinary scholars in the core principles of both disciplines. == Awards and honors ==