A window to the SP community [From the Editor]

In October 1931, as the world grieved the passing of Thomas Edison, countless individuals, communities, and corporations dimmed their lights to honor this great inventor through one of his most significant technological contributions. Since then, science and technologies have evolved at an unprecedented pace. Numerous specializations have formed, including our field of signal processing. Technological advances have affected our everyday life so much that it is difficult to imagine how to get by without them. So what would a day without signal processing be like?     

Cross-pollination in signal processing technical areas [From the Editor]

Signal processing is multidisciplinary in nature. It provides mathematical analysis and computational operations on a wide range of signal or information types in diverse application fields that are typically classified as different technical areas. The idea of benefiting from research methodologies and techniques across disparate but related signal processing technical areas has been embraced by numerous signal processing researchers. This summer, I had the opportunity to co-organize the Banff Workshop on Multimedia, Mathematics, and Machine Learning with Prof. Rabab Ward, where a group of distinguished researchers and educators worldwide were invited. Many of the invitees were pursuing research that touched on not just one but multiple signal processing technical areas, and thus were able to discuss common underlying principles and methods for a wide range of media signal processing applications, and benefit from cross-pollination over these fields. Several talks focused on cross-fertilization between different signal processing areas and these led to many interesting discussions at the workshop. Such talks included Mobile Image Matching --- Recognition Meets Compression by B. Girod (Stanford University), Machine Hearing (vs. Machine Vision) by D. Lyon (Google Research), and Statistical Methods for Image, Speech, and Language Processing: Achievements and Open Problems by H. Ney (RWTH Aachen University).     

Quality matters, especially in sharing knowledge [From the Editor]

These days, all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse for a person to access massive amounts of information and data through Web pages, blogs, or social-centric Web sites. This easy-to-access and fast-to-find information is what makes the era we live in a special one. But with all this advancements comes the question of quality . Does the shared knowledge have high quality? What sources can one rely on to access quality knowledge? This is where publications such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) play an important role. Signal processing as indicated by our new editor-in-chief, Dr. Li Deng, is going through a transformation from focusing on low-level signals such as waveforms to dealing with semantic and human-centric signals. This signal processing transformation has to be accompanied by a metamorphosis in how the community exchanges high-quality knowledge and how the community members learn from each other.