Signal Processing - January 2017 - 3

FROM THE EDITOR
Min Wu | Editor-in-Chief | minwu@umd.edu

Signal Processing: The Expected and the Unexpected

t will be the start of another new year
when you receive this issue of IEEE
Signal Processing Magazine (SPM).
Happy 2017 to all our readers, editors, and
reviewers!
Not long before I began writing this
editorial, the 2016 edition of the IEEE
International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) was successfully held in
Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to the rich
and timely technical sessions that ICIP is
well known for, the ICIP 2016 team-led
by General Chair Prof. Lina Karam, who
is also serving on SPM's senior editorial board, and Industrial Program Chair
Dr. Haohong Wang-spearheaded the
first Visual Innovation Award. Going
over the finalists' roster, you may very
well find yourself having been a user of
some of these technologies: the YouTube
video streaming service, the Lytro lightfield camera, the Intel RealSense camera
technology, the CUDA high-performance
computing by NVIDIA, the Netflix movie
streaming service, the Oculus virtual reality technology, and the Microsoft Kinect.
For many signal processing professionals, including those who regularly
attend ICIP-a flagship conference of
the IEEE Signal Processing Society
(SPS)-it might almost have been taken
for granted that signal processing plays
a key role behind these visual innovations. Whether it is image formation,
sensing, compression, or communications, signal processing provides the
underlying technical foundation.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2632218
Date of publication: 11 January 2017

Right after ICIP, I briefly stopped in
the San Francisco Bay area, where I gave
a keynote speech at a North American
alumni forum of my college alma mater,
Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China.
Different from ICIP, I did not expect
this forum to be a venue to see so much
signal processing other than the talk on
microsignals for media security that I
would be giving. I did my undergraduate
study in the Department of Automation
at Tsinghua University. "Automation" as
an engineering major covers a combination of control and robotics, electronic
sensing and diagnosis, signal processing, and pattern recognition; within the
department, different specialty directions were rather compartmentalized
historically. Perhaps it was due to the
difficulty to find an exact matching
department in North American universities that college alumni from the
department went in different ways when
pursuing their graduate studies in North
America. Among them, you will find
experts on securing sensors and sensor
network, on supply chain management
behind some of the most wanted consumer products, on designing the nextgeneration mass spectrometry analyzer,
and on international finance and policy
making, just to name a few.
Yet through this stimulating day-long
event, I learned a great deal about many
broad applications of signal processing.
For example, a keynote speech given
before mine provided an overview on
designing and analyzing sensing signals
for fault-tolerant operations in such complex systems as the quality control and
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

January 2017

enhancement in steel manufacturing and
the signaling in China's high-speed train
systems. As it turned out, many challenging issues addressed by the keynote
speech have benefited from signal processing theories and techniques. Two
panel discussions on the recent hype of
artificial intelligence and the Internet of
Things also touched on such issues as
sensing, denoising, and statistical learning from signals and data. In addition,
several alumni who are successful in venture capital investment highlighted the
important roles of data and data analytics
that they saw in developing sustainable
new businesses.
Most speakers at the alumni forum
would not consider themselves to be professionals in signal processing, and not
many have read our magazine. It reminded me of "Signal Processing Inside," a
notion coined in SPM's September 2004
editorial by then Editor-in-Chief Prof.
K.J. Ray Liu, and the blurred boundaries
between disciplines discussed in my September 2016 editorial. Inspired by those
expected and unexpected venues where
signal processing shines, I am working
with our magazine editors to develop leads
on informative articles for our readers in
the coming months. We welcome your
suggestions on topics that you would like
to read about.
Best wishes to you all for a prosperous
new year ahead-another year filled with
exciting signal processing!

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