Signal Processing - May 2017 - 4

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Rabab Ward | SPS President | rababw@ece.ubc.ca

Diversity Through adversity

he IEEE Signal Processing Society
(SPS) aims to serve a global community of signal processors and
stimulate collaboration among a diverse
mix of scientists, academics, inventors,
and industries. Our work thrives based
on the diversity of our members-students, professors, engineers, researchers,
and more in terms of cultural background,
religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, profession, and age-whatever
our defining characteristics, one common feature among signal processors is
that we are problem solvers. We thrive on
challenges, and those challenges include
overcoming cultural and personal adversities. Recent news seems to have increased
those challenges.
Engineers and scientists are not
always notable activists, and we are certainly not immune to personal and cultural bias, which can adversely impact
the development of technological breakthroughs. For many centuries, the greatest minds in science, including Galileo
and Newton, were confounded by the
problem of finding an accurate measurement for latitude, which left sailors lost at sea and curbed exploration.
While scientists looked for the answer
in the skies, through astronomy, an
English carpenter named John Harrison
set his mind to developing a seaworthy
clock, spending decades refining his
successful invention, while facing ridicule from stargazing scientists. Imagine
how many shipwrecks might have been

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2678381
Date of publication: 26 April 2017

prevented if the scientists had partnered
with the carpenter?
Perhaps the greatest modern example
of a fruitful partnership that crossed
virtually every cultural divide was that
between Cambridge University don, Prof.
Hardy, and the young, self-taught Indian
mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Ramanujan's work was dismissed by British scientists, but fortunately Hardy recognized his genius. Their collaboration
inspired the 2016 movie The Man Who
Knew Infinity and the 2007 play, A Disappearing Number, which elegantly depicted the ways that diverging and converging
series in mathematics become a metaphor
for the struggles of nonconforming diasporas. Hardy was an atheist and a disciple
of scientific rigor, while Ramanujan was
driven by intuition and, as a devout Hindu,
equated the meaning of equations to the
hand of God.
Their complex relationship beautifully
illustrates that our personal, political, religious, geographic, and cultural differences can stimulate and propel science. The
task of problem solving has no single language, nationality, color, gender, faith, or
personality type. Consider the most basic
equation in our electrical engineering
discipline: voltage = current × resistance,
which is a product of scientists from different countries. Voltage is named after
Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist and
chemist. Current is measured in amperes,
named after the Frenchman André Marie
Ampère, an early innovator in experimental physics. Resistance was named after
the German physicist George Ohm, who
for many years faced resistance by acaIEEE SIgnal ProcESSIng MagazInE

May 2017

demics in the field. Taking this equation
one step further, if you multiply voltage by
current, you will get power, measured in
watts, after the self-taught Scot instrument
maker James Watt, whose early attempts
to commercialize his inventions were
often stymied by financial hardship and
academic barriers. Tolerance, acceptance,
and open communication are imperative
for successful science. Closing channels
for the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and
information is not only scientifically disadvantageous but an affront to forwardthinking, solutions-based progress of the
engineering field.
Let's also remember that the values of these quantities are expressed in
Arabic numerals, and these include the
number zero, which was developed in
India in the third century and spread to
the Middle East within 200 years. But it
was absent from Western mathematics
until the 1600s, in part due to political
and racial bias.
Sometimes, we have to literally dig
through history to find the proof of a
breakthrough's origins and set the scientific record straight. Until recently, 14th
century European scholars were believed
to have cracked the code for predicting
the movement of objects in space-time.
However, a German astro-archeologist
who has devoted many years attempting
to decipher (Iraq's) Babylonian cuneiform tablets, has recently found a missing
piece in the puzzle, receiving photographs from a Viennese astrophysicist
of uncatalogued tablets from the British
Museum in London. It turned out that
ancient Babylonians had already mapped

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