IEEE Signal Processing Society Blog

If you’ve ever been to the emergency room due to an injury, chances are you’ve had a routine encounter with what is in fact a wonder of the modern age: Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI. Advancements in medical imaging allow us to study parts of the body, including the brain, to an extent unprecedented in the history of medical science.

Alan Bovik has a storied career. An American engineer, vision scientist and Primetime Emmy Award winner, Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Endowed Regents Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering for more than three decades.

Speech recognition technology allows computers to take spoken audio, interpret it and generate text from it. But how do computers understand human speech? The short answer is…the wonder of signal processing. 

The choice of television programs (and arguably their quality) has exponentially expanded since the first TV was introduced. But the basic concept of watching TV hasn’t changed much. We see video images, whether live or recorded, in two dimensions. 

When deciding on a career path, you’re likely to have different considerations in mind. You want to have a skillset for which there is a wide demand in growing industries. You also need to be certain your expertise will remain relevant in the technologically uncertain years to come, when AI and automation will change many of our jobs as we know it.

Will there be a cure for cancer in our lifetime? Opinions surrounding this question vary, but many people are inclined to think there will be. The unfortunate reality is all types of cancer are fatal if left untreated. 

This past Star Wars Day (May the Fourth), fans had reason to celebrate. The new prequel, Solo: A Star Wars Story, was less than a week away from release, and more broadly, the entire franchise is undergoing a renaissance with new films more faithful in style and storyline to the beloved original trilogy. But beyond the actors and writers, Star Wars fans should be thanking the technology that makes such films possible: signal processing.

Technologies that at first seem like magic soon become so commonplace that we no longer even think about how amazing they are – or wonder how they operate. Our digital home assistants – Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and their emerging rivals – have been with us long enough that we take for granted they can understand our unique voices, commands and questions, even with other noise occurring around them.

Will autonomous vehicles kill people? The answer is almost certainly yes. But, human drivers kill people too. In 2016 the U.S. had 37,461 deaths in 34,436 human-operated motor vehicle crashes, a staggering average of 102 per day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. An additional 2,350,000 are injured or disabled. These figures are alarming, but there’s a solution on the horizon.

So much of our daily lives are powered by signal processing technologies. They go unnoticed mostly because that’s the purpose – to help our lives run more seamlessly, with little to no impact. For example, you’re probably reading this blog on your computer. Guess what? Signal processing is responsible for your computer’s ability to store data and run smoothly.