A warm greeting to the signal processing community as I start my term as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ). I hope to be worthy of the confidence invested in me and to be able to follow successfully in Christian Jutten’s footsteps. He led our magazine for three years with dedication and brought timely topics like green signal processing, ethics, and reproducibility to the attention of our community. I certainly have big shoes to fill!

SPM is the flagship publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and as such, serves as a melting pot of multiple technical areas represented by the 12 SPS technical committees (TCs) and associated technical entities. There is natural overlap among the areas under the wings of these TCs, and our technical working groups and initiatives are two ways of cultivating these overlaps. In my first editorial, I would like to concentrate on these overlaps and building bridges across areas to foster cross fertilization. I will start my discussion with a focus on technical areas within the SPS and then move onto IEEE, where we have different areas represented through 39 technical Societies, and will conclude with a discussion on building bridges across disciplines, going beyond IEEE and its electrical and computer engineering umbrella. This also gives me a chance to tell a little bit about my background and my involvements within the SPS.