Beginning a Special Year for Our Society

First, I would like to wish you and your loved ones a nice new year filled with health and happiness. The last few years have been challenging for various reasons: the COVID-19 pandemic, climatic events, and the war in Ukraine, to name a few. It seems impossible to be able to stop the megalomania and madness of some human beings. It also seems difficult to reverse climate changes brought on by habits that we would have to radically change and industrial lobbying focused solely on profits at whatever cost. I fear that based on all of the disasters we have been experiencing, no one sound person can challenge the climate changes taking place around the world.

I believe that each of us is convinced of the need for urgency and action so as to slow down this trend. I believe that each of us can contribute by changing behaviors in our everyday lives when using transportation, phones, and computers and also by eliminating fashionable but completely useless gadgets. I also believe that, as scientists, and I have already had the opportunity to talk about this in previous editorials, we must contribute more and design our research to be compatible with the future of our planet, as suggested in [1]. And I am happy that this point of view is shared by more and more scientists, and especially, by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and its president [2].

It is already the beginning of my third year as the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) editor-in-chief (EIC). It is a great honor and always a pleasure to read in advance the articles that will be published in each issue and to prepare an editorial. The editorial is a way to send a message, and very frequently, I share it before publication with some friends in the hopes of gaining their feedback. Many thanks to Athina Petropulu, Tulay Adali, Pierre Comon, Olivier Michel, Jocelyn Chanussot, and Séverine Louvel. As you can imagine, the EIC alone cannot create the magazine; the main task is to encourage scientists to submit high-quality proposals or feature articles, special issues, columns, and forum pages and to select the best proposals for full submission. This task is a daily background task for all of the members of the editorial board (EB), which is possible since the EB, like the magazine, covers all of the SPS domains, including both methods and applications.