Signal Processing - November 2017 - 4

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

Signals and Signal Processing: The Invisibles and the Everlastings

hen you receive this issue of IEEE
Signal Processing Magazine, a symposium, "The Future of Signal Processing," was just held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The
symposium honored the career of Prof.
Alan Oppenheim as one of the pioneers in
signal processing research and education.
Attendees from various organizations
around the world discussed and shared
insights of the profound roles that signal
processing have played and envisioned
the future trends of signal processing.
I delivered a talk with the same title
as this editorial at the MIT symposium.
The term invisibles has a dual meaning
to me. A central theme of my research
has been dealing with "micro signals"
that are small in strength or scale by
at least an order of magnitude and are
nearly invisible, yet developing the theory and techniques to extract and utilize
these invisible micro signals opens up
new opportunities in a broad range of
applications from security and forensics
to data analytics to entertainment. One
class of micro signals provides telltale
traces of evidence in determining the
origin and integrity of images, which is
an active research area investigated by
the Information Forensics and Security
Technical Committee (IFS TC) of the
IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)
and the subject of the ongoing SP Cup
2018 competition (see page 175) and
the latest outreach video "Multimedia
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2017.2750306
Date of publication: 13 November 2017

Forensics," available online at the SPS
Resource Center; please visit http://
rc.signalprocessingsociety.org/sps/
product/conference-videos-and-slides/
SPSVID00194. Meanwhile, the profound role and contributions of signal
processing are often invisible to the public, leading to the notion of "Signal Processing Inside." In this issue, the second
edition of the new "Community Voices"
column presents the thoughts on such a
topic by our magazine readers who are
at various career stages and come from
different regions and backgrounds.
Several other formal and informal gatherings have been held this year, celebrating
the careers of signal processing pioneers
and significant contributors: among them
are Prof. Sanjit Mitra, who had a broad
range of research interests over the years
and nurtured signal processing activities
in a number of underrepresented countries
and regions; Prof. Mos Kaveh, who played
a key role in developing statistical signal
processing and served as the IEEE SPS
president in 2010-2011; and Dr. John
Cozzens, who led the signal processing program at the U.S. National Science
Foundation for many years, just to name
a few. Thanks to the persistent contributions of them and many others over the past
decades, the field of signal processing has
grown and our community has expanded
both technically and geographically.
It has been a year and half since we
launched the redesign of the print version of the magazine. I hope you enjoy
the modern look and enhanced graphics
of the magazine and its correspondIEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

November 2017

ing electronic version. The second part
of the redesign effort is for the online
presence of our magazine. Although the
timetable of the magazine's web design
was deferred to give priority to the major
redesign of the SPS's website, I am happy
to report that the matching design for our
magazine's website is well underway.
The first phase has been completed and
launched this summer for the monthly
"Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter" that complements the print version
of the magazine. If you haven't already,
please check it out at http://signalprocess
ingsociety.org/newsletter/. My sincere
thanks to Christian Debes, the area editor for eNewsletter, and Ervin Sejdic,
who succeeded Christian in June 2017,
and SPS Web Administrator Rupal Bhatt
for their dedicated efforts.
The second phase of the website redesign is currently being implemented
with the goal of creating a modern landing page that can host timely updates
based on the magazine's bimonthly content and well-organized resources for
prospective authors.
This is the magazine's final issue
of 2017 and the last issue for which
I serve as editor-in-chief. Looking back,
this three-year journey has been a huge
undertaking, and it could not have been
possible without the hard work and support of many colleagues. A number
of unsung heroes, whom ordinary readers may not have seen or known, contributed to the success of our magazine.
(continued on page 7)

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