From the Editor

We opened the year with the theme of “embracing interdisciplinarity,” emphasizing the fact that signal processing naturally builds bridges across different domains and disciplines. The front cover image of an organic bridge across mature trees giving birth to a sapling helped convey our message. After two special issues (two parts of one special issue), we come back to you with an issue comprised of feature articles and columns, which all reinforce the message in our first issue of 2024.

In the first issue of 2024, we introduced the new lead editorial team of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ), composed of our four area editors. Their terms started with mine this January, and they oversee the Society e-newsletter and the three main components of our magazine: feature articles, special issues, and columns and forum articles.

For reasons beyond our control, the issues of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine arrive to you with delays this year. As you receive the current March issue, we are back from another edition of our flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), which took place in Seoul, Korea, 14–19 April 2024.

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.

My three years of service as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ) are now coming to a close. During the past three years, many of us were deeply affected by serious political, social, and environmental events such as the war in Ukraine; protests for freedom in Iran; coups d’état in Africa; the COVID-19 pandemic; seisms in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco; huge floods in Libya and India; gigantic fires in North America and Southern Europe; and an avalanche of stones in the Alps, to name a few. In such a context, I believe that the IEEE slogan, “Advancing Technology for Humanity,” is incredibly relevant and timely.

The objectives of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ) are to propose, for any IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) member and beyond, a wide range of tutorial articles on both methods and applications in signal and image processing. The articles are divided into different categories: feature articles, column and forum articles, and articles in special issues, the specificities of which are detailed on the SPM webpage “Information for Authors - SPM”.

The ICASSP 2023 conference in Rhodes, Greece, was remarkable from multiple perspectives. Notably, this was the first fully in-person ICASSP after three consecutive virtual conferences, which were necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Attendees fully embraced the opportunity to engage in live interactions and reestablish their networks.

The 75th anniversary of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is an ideal time to look at the rapid advances in our field and the many ways that these increasingly powerful technologies have transformed our professions and the world. This is not just a time to celebrate past achievements and pat ourselves on the back, but also to educate young students and innovators about the history of our profession, the challenges we have overcome, and the breakthroughs that have led to the incredible growth of Signal Processing (SP).

Ethics in science is essential for various reasons and is a duty for scientists. The full sense of the word ethics may differ according to languages and countries. For instance, in France, we typically make a distinction between ethics and scientific integrity, while scientific integrity is a part of ethics in the United States.

As humans, we cannot be indifferent to the increasing number of dramatic events taking place in the world: fires, tornadoes, floods, and - recently - the collapse of a huge block of the Marmolada glacier in the Italian Alps. All are clear evidence to the global warming of the Earth.