I just got back from the 2018 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. One of the highlights for me as editor-in-chief (EIC) of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) is SPM’s editorial board meeting. During this meeting, we discuss the current state of the magazine including both challenges and opportunities. In this editorial, I will summarize what we discussed and write about the actions we are taking to improve SPM’s internal workings.
After all of the attendees introduced themselves, I presented an update on my current EIC initiatives. The main initiative has been to build up a set of internal documents to describe the expectations for all the area editors, associate editors, and senior editorial board members. Andres Kwasinski, our area editor for special initiatives, has been spearheading this initiative in conjunction with the other area editors, starting with columns and forum. These documents will allow us to function better as a team and also reduce the overhead when transitioning new team members. I expect this to improve everyone’s efficiency and will hopefully keep me from micromanaging the area editors.
Area Editor Namrata Vaswani presented an overview on the state of special issues. We talked extensively about feature clusters, which is something that lies somewhat in between a feature article and a special issue article (more on that later). We also talked about our most urgent task, which is to get more special issue proposals. If you are in a position to put together a special issue, please contact us for more instructions on how to assemble the proposal. If you are just a curious reader, please contact us anyway with suggestions. Given a topic, we may be able to find suitable volunteers. Over the next several months, we plan additional efforts to encourage submissions of more special issue proposals and hope to fill the pipeline in preparation for issues in the later part of 2019. Please think about potential special issue topics and consider putting a proposal together.
