Perspectives on special issues [From the Editor]

The special issues of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) provide a forum wherein a collection of tutorials, concentrated on a specific topic, span the entire field and expose a wide-ranging segment of readers in the signal processing community to a thorough overview of the topic. The presentation of complementary tutorials, focused on a particular area in signal processing and aimed at a broad technical audience, is a unique feature of this publication. The wide exposure of selected topics to a large audience makes the special issues in SPM a top venue to educate and raise the prominence of important disciplines in signal processing.     

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).     

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?     

The importance of conferences [From the Editor?s Bench]

Until I started helping edit the I&M magazine, I was not one to attend a conference unless it was either fairly local or located near someone with whom I was trying to collaborate. Because of the need to meet with my colleagues, I went to last year's I²MTC. While there, I gave a tutorial, presented a paper, worked with the then editor-in-chief of this magazine, Kim Fowler, to prepare for the changeover, and went to meetings of various committees connected to the magazine and the I&M society. As someone with a fulltime job from which I was "playing hooky," I was also busily working on projects connected to my job. As a parent who was missing his middle child's birthday, I was feeling guilty.