Signal Processing - January 2017 - 116

in the spotlight
Wade Trappe

Data Treasure Hunters: Science Expanding to New Frontiers

Editor's NotE
In June 2016, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) launched an SPS blog
website, which provides a nontechnical supplement to highly technical signal processing topics. There are seven SPS blogs so far, and these blogs help students
and the general public to become more aware of signal processing. We selected
the first SPS blog in the web series, written by Wade Trappe, for this issue's "In
the Spotlight" column. We hope you enjoy reading it. You can find more SPS
blogs by visiting http://signalprocessingsociety.org/publications-resources/blog.
Should you have any suggestions regarding the SPS blogs, please do not hesitate to contact IEEE Signal Processing Magazine's Area Editor, Columns and
Forums Kenneth Lam (enkmlam@polyu.edu.hk) and SPS Membership and Content
Administrator Jessica Perry (jessica.perry@ieee.org).

cience and engineering are rapidly
heading toward a major culture
change-a change in how we think
about data.
This change is already happening,
and it will be dramatic and exciting! It
will completely change how most of us
think about data and how we tackle science and engineering problems. With it
will come a flood of new discoveries-
advances in the sciences and in new technologies-that were never before
possible. What is this revolution? How
did we get here? Where is it going, and
how is signal processing involved?
The short answer is that we are entering an era of treasure hunting. Rather
than digging through dirt like archaeologists looking for ancient artifacts, the
future will involve digging through data.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2619918
Date of publication: 11 January 2017

116

We are experiencing an explosion in
the amount of data available for scientists and engineers to do their jobs. The
world around us is becoming increasingly "connected" as communication
technologies have proliferated and the
costs of digital data storage have plummeted. Seemingly mundane items and
devices that never before had a bit or
byte associated with them are now
streaming a constant flow of data to
data warehouses located in the cloud.
Advancements in medical devices are
leading to the emergence of miniaturized, nonintrusive medical sensors that
will be integrated with communication
technologies to report real-time glucose
levels, monitor respiratory conditions,
track immune responses, and allow for
the analysis of a wide array of other
data associated with the human condition. Meanwhile, scientific equipment
is being aimed both out into space as
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

January 2017

well as deep into the Earth and across
its ecosystems. Matching this explosion
in data is a commensurate advance in
computing: computing resources are
now sophisticated enough to be able to
perform immense amounts of computation on this data.
This is the emergence of the new
field of big data and data analytics.
Data scientists are the postmodern treasure hunters. They will reach into their
toolboxes of algorithms and dig into
data looking for hidden correlations,
trying to find never-before-seen patterns
with the hope of advancing the frontier
of knowledge and supporting the development of new products.
The frank truth, though, is that data
science isn't really new. Many technical
fields have been performing analysis on
large amounts of data before the term
big data was ever coined. The signal
processing community has been analyzing data since its inception. After all,
what is the Fourier transform but a tool
to find periodic phenomena in data? Or
take a quick survey of papers over the
past 25 years (or more), and you will find
signal processing is involved in everything from analyzing geological data for
oil discovery, to face recognition for
domestic security, to processing genomic
data and looking for patterns that indicate
the onset of cancer. Signal processing
was fundamental to advancements in
multimedia processing and storage, and
(continued on page 114)
1053-5888/17©2017IEEE

http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications-resources/blog

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - January 2017