Introducing the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multiscale Communications

I would like to introduce the new IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multiscale Communications (TMBMC) to the Signal Processing Society community. As a result of recent advances in MEMS/NEMS and systems biology, as well as the emergence of synthetic bacteria and lab/process-on-a-chip techniques, it is now possible to design chemical “circuits”, custom organisms, micro/nanoscale swarms of devices, and a host of other new systems at small length scales, and across multiple scales (e.g., micro to macro). This success opens up a new frontier for interdisciplinary signaling techniques using chemistry, biology, novel electron transfer, and other principles not previously examined. This journal is devoted to the principles, design, and analysis of signaling and information systems for these novel applications. Thus molecular communication as well as chemical and biological (and biologically-inspired) techniques; and new signaling methods at different scales are of interest.
As the boundaries between communication, sensing and control are blurred in these novel signaling systems, research contributions in a variety of areas are invited. In particular, theoretical results grounded in sensing, signal processing and large scale data analysis are of high interest. Data-starved or data-rich statistical analyses of biological systems are relevant. Experimental results on information processes, signaling mechanisms, or networks in biology are also within our scope.
The new journal was seeded by special issues within the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Communications. The second special issue will serve as the inaugural issue of the journal with publication Fall 2015. In particular, I highlight two papers from the first special issue (December 2014) and forthcoming papers that suggest models and investigate parameter estimation and sensing for biological systems:, ``Channel and Noise Models for Nonlinear Molecular Communication Systems,’’ by Nariman Farsad, Na-Rae Kim, Andrew Eckford and Chan-Byoung Chae, and "A Stochastic Model for Electron Transfer in Bacterial Cables" by Nicolo Michelusi, Sahand Pirbadian, Urbashi Mitra and Mohamed El-Naggar; and future papers, Joint Channel Parameter Estimation via Diffusive Molecular Communication,” by Adam Noel, Karen C Cheung abd Robert Schober and "Asynchronous Threshold-based Detection for Quantity-Type-Modulated Molecular Communication Systems” by Yang-Kai Lin, Wei-An Lin, Chia-Han Lee, and Ping-Cheng Yeh.

I believe that statistical signal processing, modeling, theory and methods have much to offer in terms of fundamental analysis of biological and molecular communication systems. I invite, and look forward to, the contributions from signal processing colleagues to this new journal technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Please submit your original work to TMBMC at:
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmbmc
More information about the journal can be found at: http://www.comsoc.org/tmbmc
Urbashi Mitra
Editor-in-Chief
IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-scale Communications