Signal Processing - May 2017 - 3

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

Content Ecosystem
Serving diverse interests in our community

I

am writing this editorial just days
after coming back from New Orleans,
Louisiana, where the 42nd International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and
Signal Processing (ICASSP) was successfully held. It was an action-packed week,
filled with technical presentations and exchanges as well as a broad range of discussions on our Society and community
developments. About 50 committees and
boards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) met at ICASSP, engaging hundreds of volunteers from around the world.
My discussions with a number of colleagues during the conference were about
our IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
(SPM), either to explore ideas for potential articles as inspired by technical talks
and panels or to brainstorm how the magazine can help support the initiatives or
activities of the IEEE Signal Processing
Society (SPS). For this latter role, a notion
of "content ecosystem" was coined in my
meeting with chief editors of the SigPort
Repository, Dr. Yan Lindsay Sun, and of
the Resource Center (formerly SigView),
Dr. John McAllister, respectively, and the
SPS staff members on public outreach
and publications.
We have been seeing an increase in
the diverse needs from our members, and
SPS and IEEE have been developing multiple products and tools to address these
needs. For example, SigPort offers an
increasingly popular platform to archive
slides and posters from the latest confer-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2678380
Date of publication: 26 April 2017

ences as well as student theses and reports
viewable by anyone free of charge, while
the Resource Center hosts keynote videos
and tutorial webinars from curated sources, such as ICASSP plenary talks, as an
SPS member benefit and may be available
for a fee for nonmembers (see page 109
for more information about the Resource
Center). As the Resource Center expands
its content, where could a constant stream
of candidates come from systematically?
Our magazine's tutorial articles provide a pool of candidates for the Resource
Center-authors can be approached
and encouraged to create a multimedia
companion to their article, which allows
content to reach a bigger audience. In the
meantime, the slides and posters provided
by SigPort users include download statistics that shine a light on the community's
interests toward more recent technical
work and grassroots educational material. SigPort thus can offer an additional set
of candidates for the Resource Center to
explore. If a healthy mechanism is developed and coordinated well, the contents
on all three platforms can work hand in
hand as an ecosystem.
Another example of coordinating
multiple platforms and developing a content ecosystem was piloted in 2016 when
we solicited input on student hands-on
projects, and this is currently being expanded in collaboration with the SPS Education Committee. More specifically,
SigPort provides a handy platform for
students to archive their project reports,
which is perhaps the only worldwide
repository for such grassroots material.
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

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May 2017

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Editors from SPM and the Education
Committee can evaluate these archived
documents on a rolling basis and periodically create a curated summary and
a set of highlights to share with the community, for example, through the magazine's Inside Signal Processing e-Newsletter and/or through a column in SPM.
Some of the selected projects may also
feed into the content pool for the Resource
Center. These recognitions and visibilities
provide positive feedback and encourage
the students to engage in interesting projects and share the projects with the community at large.
For researchers and frequent authors
of original research publications, a repository to host and broadly share their preprints is attractive. In addition to SigPort,
quite some signal processing authors are
archiving their preprints on arXiv.org,
which traces its roots to the science community. For various historical reasons,
arXiv does not have an electrical engineering topic branch; topics such as information theory and control theory are put
either as part of computer science or applied mathematics, and there was no explicit topic category of signal processing.
The SPS Board of Governors had a
long discussion on this issue last fall on
approaching the arXiv leadership to create a signal processing topic category.
Although it is perhaps easier to create a
signal processing category under the
existing computer science or applied
math categories, several board members,
(continued on page 13)
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http://www.arXiv.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - May 2017
