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The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) was recently awarded the IEEE Educational Activities Board’s Society/Council Professional Development Award "for innovative educational and professional development programs that engage professionals, students and the general public in signal processing.”

 PhD Student, Glasgow Caledonian University

Signal processing is exploited in daily industrial applications for analysis purposes, particularly in the power generation field. Consider the example of a high voltage power supply site – a plant that contains power generators and transformers.  Such systems are susceptible to Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI), produced during the operation of the system or due to fault occurrence.

R&D Electrical Engineer with System Test Equipment Engineering Group at Sandia National Laboratories
It’s not uncommon to find that engineers and scientists are reluctant to change. Unlike new features on your smart phone, new ideas in engineering and science can be received with a cold shoulder and large doses of skepticism. For anyone in the field, the statement “this is the way we have always been doing it” is heard numerous times during engineering design sessions. Most engineering teams would rather spend their time designing an automatic screwdriver than designing a new screw.

Declan O’Neill, Telecommunications Engineering undergraduate at the Dublin Institute of Technology

If you were asked the meaning of the term “signal processing,” how would you respond? I'm sure you could easily explain what processing means, but what's a signal? A signal is anything we can sense, be it a sight, a sound, the heat felt from a warm object or a draft felt rolling through a room. It could even be the shudder felt through the floor when a truck drives down your street. But when we talk about signal processing, what do we mean and where can we see it? Could we reasonably call it “the science behind our digital life?” The short answer is yes, but why?