In this issue, alongside a feature article on missing data that inspired the cover, we present several other timely contributions, including our first article in a series highlighting standards activities in our field. This two-part article [A1, A2] describes the technical leadership of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Synthetic Aperture Standards Committee (SPS-SASC) and its working groups in developing standards for the rapidly evolving field of computational imaging and sensing. This marks the first standards initiative led by the IEEE Signal Processing Society in partnership with the IEEE Standards Association. Thanks to the dedicated leadership of Peter Vouras and the commitment of many volunteers, SPS-SASC has grown into a vibrant standards committee with 14 working groups in less than five years, with the standard on sonar imaging now approaching publication.
It has been especially rewarding for me to watch this initiative flourish. As Vice President for Technical Directions (VP-TD), I introduced Technical Working Groups (TWGs) as a more focused complement to our technical committees and had the opportunity to establish the Society’s first TWG, Synthetic Apertures, working closely with Peter Vouras. Building on that foundation, we again worked together to launch the Society’s standards activity in 2021. Seeing those early efforts evolve into today’s thriving standards program has been particularly gratifying.
Introduction of “Industry Track” in our Conferences
A main motivation for launching the standards series in our magazine has been to broaden the range of content we offer and ensure that every issue includes material of interest to our diverse readership, particularly industry professionals. The same motivation has also led to the introduction of an industry track, now running alongside the main technical track at our flagship conferences, ICASSP and ICIP—a model that has become increasingly common at machine learning and AI conferences. Our volunteers do an outstanding job of organizing a rich and engaging industry program that operates largely in parallel with the technical program, with main attention being paid to avoiding overlaps for the keynotes in the two tracks.
This structure has clear advantages. It enables each track to better serve its intended audience while also easing scheduling challenges—an increasingly important consideration as our conferences, particularly ICASSP, continue to grow. At the same time, however, parallel tracks can have unintended consequences. By placing researchers and practitioners in different tracks for much of the conference, they reduce opportunities for the informal interactions through which collaborations often begin and ideas are cross-fertilized. They can also weaken the feedback loop between fundamental research and real-world practice, making it more difficult for industrial challenges to influence research agendas and for emerging research advances to find their way into practice.
Building Bridges
The opportunity lies not in eliminating separate tracks but in building stronger bridges between them. Conferences could feature more joint thematic sessions centered on emerging application areas, standards, or deployment challenges, where researchers and industry practitioners contribute complementary perspectives. Cross-track panels, shared keynote discussions, and sessions organized around common problems rather than community boundaries could further encourage dialogue and help align research with real-world needs.
Standards provide a particularly compelling example of such a bridge between discovery and deployment. The standards series introduced in this issue provides a concrete illustration of how our magazine can foster such cross-fertilization. Beyond reporting on an important Society activity, these two-part articles also explain why standards matter and why they deserve the attention of researchers as well as industry professionals.
Reading these lines reminded me of a point I made in an earlier editorial [1]. There, I argued that our technical publications should strive for fair, multidimensional comparisons that go beyond demonstrating the strengths of a proposed method and instead provide balanced guidance on when and why different approaches are most appropriate. Such evaluations should reflect real-world constraints, multiple performance criteria, and practical relevance, requiring active collaboration among experts with different methodological perspectives and, ideally, with practitioners.
In many ways, this type of balanced evaluation and community-driven assessment is at the heart of the standards process. Standards require stakeholders with diverse perspectives to come together, compare alternative approaches, identify relevant performance criteria, and reach consensus on requirements that are robust and practical. In this broader context, standards represent one of the ways in which we are working to connect discovery with deployment. Similar goals motivate our continued encouragement for authors to present balanced evaluations that better reflect practical realities and help readers understand the strengths and limitations of competing approaches. Our conferences contribute in complementary ways through activities such as Data Challenges, which encourage the community to benchmark methods on common datasets and problems, and competitions such as the Video and Image Processing Cup (VIP Cup), highlighted in this issue, which engages undergraduate students worldwide in solving real-world problems using state-of-the-art image processing techniques.
Toward A Shared Vision
A magazine such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has a distinctive role to play in sustaining these connections. Beyond publishing tutorial and overview articles, it can provide a forum where researchers, practitioners, industry, government and societal stakeholders learn from one another—through articles on standards, benchmarks, datasets, and open challenges, as well as case studies that examine both successful deployments and the practical obstacles that remain. At the recent ICASSP, for example, I found myself moving between the technical and industry tracks looking for presentations that would resonate with our broad readership. That experience reinforced the value of connecting these communities and is already shaping future issues, which will include highlights from selected industry-track activities, such as a panel on strengthening industry-academic partnerships for developing the next generation of the signal processing workforce.
These activities all serve a common purpose: to strengthen the connection between discovery and deployment. Ultimately, our goal is to help researchers better understand the constraints and opportunities of real-world deployment, help practitioners anticipate emerging ideas that may shape future products and services, and foster a shared conversation between discovery and practice that neither community could sustain on its own.
Appendix: Related Articles
- M. H. Conde, C. Nafornita, S.-M. Steele, B. Yonel, V. V. Chebrolu, H. B. Sequeira, et al., “The IEEE Signal Processing Society’s leading role in developing standards for computational imaging and sensing: Part I,” IEEE Signal Process. Mag., vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 36–52, Jul. 2026, doi: 10.1109/MSP.2026.3678870.
- A. Bathelt, B. J. B. Deutschmann, H. S. Rou, K. R. R. Ranasinghe, G. T. F. de Abreu, and P. Vouras, “The IEEE Signal Processing Society’s leading role in developing standards for computational imaging and sensing: Part II,” IEEE Signal Process. Mag., vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 52–68, Jul. 2026, doi: 10.1109/MSP.2026.3680073.
