Signal Processing - July 2017 - 3

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

Innovations Powered by Signal Processing

T

o many people around the world,
Abraham Lincoln was a highly regarded president of the United States
whose pursuit of social justice paved the
way to end the slavery in this country.
Fewer people, however, know his distinction as an engineering innovator and
that he was the first and only U.S. president thus far to hold a patent. President
Lincoln received the U.S. Patent 6469 in
May 1849 titled "Buoying Vessels over
Shoals," which was inspired by his experience navigating boats on the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers. When commenting on
the role of the patent system that offers the
inventor the exclusive use of his/her invention for a limited time, President Lincoln noted that the patent system "added
the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in
the discovery and production of new and
useful things."
From about a century after Lincoln's
invention and throughout the next several decades, signal processing has contributed significantly to technology
innovations and changed how we work
and live. Smartphones, digital photography, the global positioning system, and
medical diagnosis are tangible examples around us, and our magazine has
touched on them through special issues
and column articles. What many of us
take for granted and wouldn't pause to
think about are numerous examples that
we don't see, such as when we store our
data on hard drives. This is one of the best

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2705258
Date of publication: 11 July 2017

examples that recently comes to mind to
showcase the profound impact of signal
processing research.
Aleksandar Kavcic and José Moura's
academic research at Carnegie Mellon
University in the 1990s studied the effect when data would become densely
packed in magnetic disk drives, and they
proposed signal processing algorithms
to enable the accurate detection of data
stored in high-density disks-which
became the norm a decade later in billions of computers. Their pioneering
research also made front-page news
when a US$750  million settlement was
announced concerning the infringement of their corresponding patents, the
second-largest payment over any technology patents to date. You can read more
about the Kavcic-Moura detector for
high-density magnetic recording on the
IEEE Signal Processing Society's online
blog: http://signalprocessingsociety.org/
publications-resources/ blog/whysignal-processing-pioneer-takes-roadless-traveled.
Innovations have continuously come
from both industry and universities,
often in complementary ways, although
there may be stereotypical views on the
roles that each side plays. Every once in a
while, I have friends working in industry
questioning the practical values of university research beyond writing papers and
training students. Indeed, many publications may not see widespread real-world
use. More often, we see academic publications as well as industrial products
making incremental improvements over
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July 2017

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the prior art as opposed to making revolutionary advances, and it is common that
exploratory research has been carried out
well before the market ecosystem or the
supporting technologies to become ready.
The immediacy of deployment is
perhaps one of the differentiating factors between product development and
exploratory research, but as history
reveals, it is not the primary indicator of
the impact of innovations. Kavcic and
Moura showed to the world the impact
of their innovations from what started
out as exploratory research in signal processing. One attribute that enables their
impact (as opposed to a purely intellectual exercise or a bean-counting effort
to add to one's publication list) is the
educated anticipation of the technological trends (in their case, the increasing
density of the data being packed in storage drives) and the willingness to tackle
challenges beyond making epsilon-delta improvement.
To qualify my words here, incremental improvements have their important
roles in technological advances, and
many progresses made-big or small-
are standing on the shoulders of giants;
we continuously build on the efforts of
our technical community in direct and
indirect ways. But the willingness to go
beyond, to nurture out-of-the-box thinking, and to encourage taking higher risks
opens up opportunities for bigger leaps in
innovation, even if we may not succeed at
most attempts.
(continued on page 9)
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - July 2017
