The November 2017 special issue of SPM on deep learning for visual understanding surveyed deep-learning solutions under reinforcement; weakly supervised and multimodal settings, investigated their robustness; and presented overviews of their applications in domain adaptation, hashing, semantic segmentation, metric learning, inverse problems in imaging, image-to-text generation, and picture-quality assessment.

With the rapid development of multimedia technologies and the popularization of social networks, social multimedia content is being delivered to more and more users with a high quality of experience (QoE). However, as a huge amount of social users have ever-increasing demands to share and exchange multimedia content with each other, the current social multimedia analytics and delivery need to deal with various attacks perpetrated by malicious users or through spam content.

Speech and Language processing (SLP) is essentially a series of sequence-to-sequence learning problems. Conventional SLP systems map input to output sequences through module-based architectures where each module is independently trained. 

Neurotechnology is one of the hottest areas of engineering, and the technological achievements sound miraculous: Paralyzed people have controlled robotic limbs with their brains, while blind people are receiving implants that send signals to their visual centers.

Engineering safety and computer security have traditionally been viewed as separate fields: safety concentrates on the avoidance of physical harm; security protects information and privacy. When computers and physical plants did not interoperate, separation of safety and security was both reasonable and prudent. Given the advent of CPSs, we can no longer consider these problems as separate.

Recently, leveraging technological advances and using Big Data approaches for information management and processing in extreme events (e.g., Natural Disasters, Extreme Weather, Emergency Events, Diseases and etc.) have attracted much research attention. Multimedia is increasingly becoming the most important and valuable source for insights and information in extreme events.

Cyber security is an increasing worry on many fronts, but typical discussions and headlines focus on very different types of threats than those experienced by aviation and space systems. Cyber security vulnerabilities compromise the control, traffic, navigation, and integrity of these systems. Countermeasures involve not only specialized systems and architectures, but often international cooperation, as the need for awareness extends well beyond the boundaries of a single aircraft. 

Neural networks are a set of biologically inspired algorithms that can be used to recognize patterns. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are neural networks that have much more layers in depth than traditional neural networks.

In the past decade, there has been a transformative and permanent revolution in computer vision cultivated by the reinvigorated adoption of deep learning for visual understanding tasks. 

The IEEE Signal Processing Society has appointed five new Editors-in-Chief who will start their terms on 1 January 2018.  The details are as follows...