Signal Processing - March 2016 - 3

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

New Season, New Look

n many cultures, spring is a symbol of
renewal. For the majority of our readers (who live in the Northern Hemisphere), it will be the start of spring
when you receive this issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. You will find
a different look to the magazine from
what you have become so familiar.
Indeed, we are welcoming the new season with a new magazine design.
The design that we are replacing has
served our members and readers for
more than a decade. I still remember
the refreshing look and feel of that
change led by the then Editor-in-Chief
K.J. Ray Liu-the font was updated,
the graphics options were expanded,
and, for the very first time, the magazine had a professional "perfect binding," which allowed the topic name and
volume number to be printed on the
magazine's spine for an easy at-aglance view while on a bookshelf.
About a year ago, the IEEE Magazines
Department brought to my attention that a
redesign frequency of every three to five
years is a common practice in the magazine world to keep the look and feel of a
magazine up to date and stimulating. We
were long overdue for a redesign by this
standard. Although personally I was happy
with many parts of the elegant design we
had, I saw the need for more flexible templates to support appealing and informative
visual content. Still, when Senior Art
Director Janet Dudar told me the redesign
would be a completely new design, including the cover's iconic magazine title, I was
a bit hesitatant at first about the change.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2512339
Date of publication: 7 March 2016

Like many of you, the magazine's title at
the top of the front cover had been imprinted in my mind as a symbol of our magazine. But in the professional world of
publishing, the decade-old font and design
had begun to show some "age," while other
magazines within and beyond the IEEE
have embraced more modern font families
and designs. Even the Google logo had
undergone various redesigns, with the latest update as recent as last fall. So came the
journey for our magazine to explore different design options and critique and iterate
the designs to reach a new balance.
Thanks to our hardworking Area Editors Gwenaël Doërr and Kenneth Lam and
associate editors, we have also experimented with new columns to complement the
existing ones. For example, the traditional
platform for the magazine to highlight new
books is to invite volunteers who have a
strong expertise in related areas to read
through a whole book and write a thoughtful review, which can be a relatively slow
process. Given the magazine's large readership with diverse interests, we piloted
out a complementary "lightweight" version to the "Book Review" column to
inform readers of more recently published
books in a timely fashion. This new "Book
Digest" column is intended to provide a
visually appealing summary of the books
that have been selected by a group of
senior editors based on such criteria as
timeliness of the topic, track record of the
authors, training material for students, signal processing focus, and other considerations beneficial to readers. You may have
seen the first "Book Digest" column in the
January 2016 issue of the magazine.
Another example is a new column
called "Perspectives." Several influential
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

March 2016

magazines from sister Societies routinely
publish commentary sections that present
analysis by technical experts or policy
gurus on issues of interest to the readers.
These commentaries complement the
existing editorials by offering readers
valuable perspectives on a broader range
of issues. Inspired by the values of commentaries, we initiated this new column to
highlight an area of recent exciting
research and project its potential technological impact to our everyday life. You
will find the first "Perspectives" column
article on the prospects of time reversal
techniques in the 5G wireless communications in this issue.
I would like to take this opportunity
to thank the IEEE Magazines Department staff for their efforts during this
redesign. Special appreciation is given to
Senior Art Director Janet Dudar, Associate Art Director Gail A. Schnitzer,
Managing Editor Jessica Barragué, and
Senior Managing Editor Geri KrolinTaylor-the redesign could not be completed so efficiently without their
thoughtful insights!
As professionals advancing technologies, we constantly benefit from going out
of the status quo and trying out different
things or in different ways with an open
mind. Innovations often start from that
moment of willingness to try something
different. We hope you feel refreshed from
this new design of the magazine, and perhaps venture out from your comfort zone
to explore something different in this new
season. Happy reading!

SP
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - March 2016