Signal Processing - November 2017 - 14

COMMUNITY VOICES
Andres Kwasinski and Min Wu

What Is the Future of Signal Processing?
Views across our community

T

he goal of the "Community Voices"
column in IEEE Signal Processing
Magazine (SPM) is to encourage and
share reflections from diverse members
of our community on questions that are
of interest to many of us. In this article,
we posed the following question to our
readers: "After half a century of development, some say signal processing is
already matured in terms of theories and
techniques, and perhaps would not have a
new research breakthrough. Others have
observed the problem of signal processing
inside (a term that was coined by SPM's
then editor-in-chief, Prof. K.J. Ray Liu,
in his editorial in the September 2004
issue). What are your thoughts on the
future of signal processing?"
As we were shaping the question,
we were inspired by discussions with
Prof. Alan Oppenheim of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and
Dr. Thomas A. Baran, who was chairing
the organizing committee of MIT's The
Future of Signal Processing Symposium
that honored Prof. Oppenheim's career.
We hope that you enjoy reading the responses from our community members
around the world. These responses were
selected from the online responses we
received and have been edited for
style, length, and clarity. Please let us
know your ideas for future discussion
topics by sending your e-mail to Andres
Kwasinski (axkeec@rit.edu), area editor
for social media and outreach.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2743841
Date of publication: 13 November 2017

14

Ahmed I. Humayun

Guoru Ding

According to the
World Health Organization, health is
defined as "a state of
complete physical,
mental, and social
well-being, and not
merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Applications of signal processing
have brought revolutionary progress in
both the physical and mental healthcare domain. But social well-being
still remains a lesser-defined term. We
live in an era of luxury, where social
connectivity has turned more digital
than analog; it has discredited the sensory influence of touch, something that
could be considered a challenge for
digital social platforms in the future.
Social interactions confined within
quadrilateral screens are not always
wholesome. Signal processing needs to
confront the problems related to social
health, both in the digital domain and
physical realm, i.e., in workplaces.
With an overload of data and channels
all around us, we need a balanced diet
of information that would properly
address the social health crisis.
Ahmed I. Humayun (ahmed.imtiaz
.prio@gmail.com) is studying for his
bachelor's degree in electrical and elec-
tronic engineering at the Bangladesh
University of Engineering and Tech-
nology (BUET). He was on the BUET
team that received an honorable
mention in the IEEE SP Cup 2017
competition.

Signal processing
has played an important role over the past
decades and will
continue to contribute to the development of human life.
The fundamental theories of advanced
signal processing are key in the future.
The cross-disciplinary research between
signal processing and other disciplines
such as machine learning, data mining,
and so on, is a trend, among many trends.
Guoru Ding (dr.guoru.ding@ieee
.org) is an assistant professor at
Southeast University, Nanjing, China.

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

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November 2017

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Simona Lohan
What we could actually say about any
research field on
Earth-except maybe
medicine and the
fields related to the
human mind-that
they are mature enough and no huge
new research breakthroughs are likely,
this can be misleading, or a question of
how we define a "breakthrough." We
are on the verge of a new digital revolution, the one in which many tasks, jobs,
and even human relationships will be
replaced by robots, drones, and other
automated devices. Signal processing is
and will continue to be the core of all
such future devices, and it is likely that
this robotization and automation will
trigger unforeseen challenges that need
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - November 2017
