A warm greeting to the signal processing community as I start my term as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ). I hope to be worthy of the confidence invested in me and to be able to follow successfully in Christian Jutten’s footsteps.

The research landscape is evolving very dynamically. This column reflects on it from a conference viewpoint and focuses on the importance of creating a more sustainable culture for the conference portfolio that the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) offers. Among the different considerations, the role that virtual conferences can play is highlighted.

Encoding-decoding convolutional neural networks (CNNs) play a central role in data-driven noise reduction and can be found within numerous deep learning algorithms. However, the development of these CNN architectures is often done in an ad hoc fashion and theoretical underpinnings for important design choices are generally lacking. Up to now, there have been different existing relevant works that have striven to explain the internal operation of these CNNs. Still, these ideas are either scattered and/or may require significant expertise to be accessible for a bigger audience.

My three years of service as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ) are now coming to a close. During the past three years, many of us were deeply affected by serious political, social, and environmental events such as the war in Ukraine; protests for freedom in Iran; coups d’état in Africa; the COVID-19 pandemic; seisms in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco; huge floods in Libya and India; gigantic fires in North America and Southern Europe; and an avalanche of stones in the Alps, to name a few. In such a context, I believe that the IEEE slogan, “Advancing Technology for Humanity,” is incredibly relevant and timely.

Joseph Fourier’s methods (and their variants) are omnipresent in audio signal processing. However, it turns out that the underlying ideas took some time to penetrate the field of sound analysis and that different paths were first followed in the period immediately following Fourier’s pioneering work, with or without reference to him. This illustrates the interplay between mathematics and physics as well as the key role played by instrumentation, with notable inventions by outsiders to academia, such as Rudolph Koenig and Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.