Signal Processing - March 2017 - 3

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

a conversation about Signal Processing at Elementary School

W

hen you receive this issue of
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
(SPM), a number of readers will
be heading to New Orleans, Louisiana,
for the 42nd International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
(ICASSP 2017). New Orleans is well
known for its cross-cultural heritage
embodied by its distinctive architecture,
cuisine, and music. I look forward to
this annual gathering and flagship conference of members of the IEEE Signal
Processing Society (SPS), and I hope
to see our magazine team and many
readers there. A number of SPS boards
and committees will meet at ICASSP.
Among them, several are related to education and outreach for which the SPS
has been making significant efforts to
improve the understanding and appreciation of our field by outside communities.
Speaking of education, the public
school system where I live has a tradition of encouraging parents' participation
in their children's learning. One of the
weekly activities that my son's elementary school invites parents to sign up for
is called "Mystery Reader." This is a fun
way for parents to spend some time reading a book or other appropriate material
of their choice to the class. Adding to the
mystery is the surprise factor: a parent
does not share with his/her child that he/
she is the mystery reader and instead provides a clue to the teacher who will then
share the clue with the class and ask them
to guess whose parent is coming to read.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2650179
Date of publication: 3 March 2017

When I did this last year, I picked a
book from the "Who Was/Is?" series of
biographies published by Random House
tailored to elementary school readers. I
read to students excerpts of Who Was Dr.
Seuss? (by Janet Pascal and illustrated by
Nancy Harrison). As some of our readers may know, Dr. Seuss is the pen name
of Theodor Seuss Geisel, an American
writer, cartoonist, and artist who authored
some of the most popular children's books,
many of which have been used in American elementary classrooms today. One of
his most beloved books, Green Eggs and
Ham, consists of just 50 different words
from a simple vocabulary for beginning
readers. With bouncy rhymes, an imaginary storyline, and fun visual characters,
Dr. Seuss revolutionized children's reading material from the quite limited and
boring collection of the past.
This time, I was inspired after seeing my son's class "publish" a book
nearly every year, whereby students developed every page with a drawing and a
few lines of writing. I thought it would
be fun to bring something that I wrote
during my studies to share with the
class, such as Multimedia Data Hiding
(Springer, 2003, with Prof. Bede Liu), a
book extended from my doctoral thesis
work; I also picked two issues of SPM,
to serve as more recent examples.
As I entered the classroom, over two
dozen third graders sat around a rocking chair with curiosity and eagerness
on their faces. I started by showing them
the book's cover, explaining in as simple
language as I could about this research of
putting invisible data in pictures. I then
IEEE SIgnal ProcESSIng MagazInE

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March 2017

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took a highly sparse "sampling" of a few
pages in the book. I showed them a cartoonish block diagram outlining the data
embedding process, a pictorial example
to visualize the before and after of data
embedding and extraction, and a page
containing an illustration of groupings of
colored balls drawn randomly from a bag
and many equations modeling this game.
These examples showed the students that
grown-up researchers try various ways to
explain their work to readers, and their
skills are built on top of what they learned
in elementary school.
Moving to the second half of my reading, I took out the two issues of SPM.
When I explained the name of the magazine, which is also the field of our study, I
asked the students whether they had heard
of signal processing and any examples
they knew. A girl sitting in the front raised
her hand high: "It is about radar and the
signals it has ..." Thanks to a number of
R&D labs and companies in the Greater
Washington, D.C. area, some of our
young people have picked up an amazing
amount of technical terms. "Also the pictures! And music! And cell phones!" said
several students, eager to contribute. Their
minds are like a sponge-once stimulated, they are so absorptive that they had
already related to what we had discussed
a short while ago on the digital revolution
and the gadgets they have.
I showed them the cover of SPM's
September 2016 special issue on re searching new generations of cameras
and displays. I flipped to the the guest
editorial [1], a page containing a visual
summary of the articles included in the
3



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

Signal Processing - March 2017 - Cover1
Signal Processing - March 2017 - Cover2
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 1
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 2
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 3
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 4
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 5
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 6
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 7
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 8
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 9
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 10
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 11
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 12
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 13
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 14
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 15
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 16
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 17
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 18
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 19
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 20
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 21
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 22
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 23
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 24
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 25
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 26
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 27
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 28
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 29
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 30
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 31
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 32
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 33
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 34
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 35
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 36
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 37
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 38
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 39
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 40
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 41
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 42
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 43
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 44
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 45
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 46
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 47
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 48
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 49
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 50
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 51
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 52
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 53
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 54
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 55
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 56
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 57
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 58
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 59
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 60
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 61
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 62
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 63
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 64
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 65
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 66
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 67
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 68
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 69
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 70
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 71
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 72
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 73
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 74
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 75
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 76
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 77
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 78
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 79
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 80
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 81
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 82
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 83
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 84
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 85
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 86
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 87
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 88
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 89
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 90
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 91
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 92
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 93
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 94
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 95
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 96
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 97
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 98
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 99
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 100
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 101
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 102
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 103
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 104
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 105
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 106
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 107
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 108
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 109
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 110
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 111
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 112
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 113
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 114
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 115
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 116
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 117
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 118
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 119
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 120
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 121
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 122
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 123
Signal Processing - March 2017 - 124
Signal Processing - March 2017 - Cover3
Signal Processing - March 2017 - Cover4
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0713
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0513
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0313
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0113
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0111
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_1110
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0910
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0710
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0510
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0310
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0110
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/signalprocessing_0109
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