Uncertain summer months: An opportunity for all of us

July and August usually represent months of relaxation and vacations. These are the months that typically would not see too many exciting things going on in the signal processing community. Occasional cool papers here and there would be the only exciting things happening in July and August. However, this year will be exceptional on many fronts, and the signal processing community will not be any different.  

The current pandemic does not seem to be slowing down in many countries across the globe. Most of us will continue to work remotely, and attend conference and workshops remotely throughout the summer, especially as many of our travel/vacation plans have been postponed indefinitely. Nevertheless, there are certain opportunities for the signal processing community that we should all think about:

1. Reproducibility of published results: Reproducibility of published results has been a long-standing topic of many discussion in our community. Given all resources available to us nowadays, there is no more reason not to disclose codes to reproduce figures/results. We, as the signal processing society, should demand it from our journals.
    
2. Signal processing applications: It is the time for us to understand that the greatest signal processing contributions to the entire society are the actual signal processing applications in real-life settings, from healthcare to automobiles. Our publications should reflect our greatest contributions and move from the current theoretical-heavy papers. While theoretical papers are certainly important and necessary, our journals should not be driven by theory-heavy papers, but rather real-application oriented signal processing results. This is extremely important especially if we would like to our journals to be recognized for their importance.
    
3. Future conferences/workshops: We need to re-think our future meetings (e.g., conferences, workshops). The current format where we try to present an endless number of papers is not really serving us anymore. Even during pre-pandemic meetings, we are not able to go through that many papers published at a large conference such as ICASSP. This year’s ICASSP, while unusual, demonstrated that we cannot sit through hours and hours of presentations that present mostly incremental results. I do not have an answer what is a good format for scientific meetings, but maybe we can transform our meetings to be more educational (e.g., 2-3 days of in-depth tutorials) accompanied by several networking sessions, which can a combination of in-person networking events and poster presentations. Conference papers, especially in the signal processing community, are less impactful than in the past 20-30 years. We need to change the format of our scientific meetings.

These are some of my thoughts, and I would encourage you all to share your thoughts and views by directly mailing them to me. I am happy to share them with the entire community via the enewsletter.

Stay safe and healthy!

Ervin Sejdic