President's Message

Imagine sitting in a room where every individual is able to read every other individual’s mind. Would you lose your mind? We are living in an age where many of us have already surrendered our personal privacy to online interfaces either knowingly or by deceptive means.

It is an amazing sign of the times when the youth across many nations are uniting in their will to raise awareness about the perils of global warming and the need for immediate action.

It is an amazing sign of the times when the youth across many nations are uniting in their will to raise awareness about the perils of global warming and the need for immediate action. 

During the Christmas break, I had a mundane problem to solve. Most PCs today no longer come with disk drives. This was problematic for me since, like for many of you, my family videos are stored on CDs and DVDs.

The title of this editorial is borrowed from a popular children’s lullaby from the 1800s, which reads “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!” It reminds me of the vast expanse of unexplored space (and science) that lie before us. 

I started drafting this editorial on July 4th while sitting in my hotel room in Versailles, France. Both the date and location have great significance in our modern history, which motivated my choice for the theme of the article.

I love the last scene from the movie Planet of the Apes (1968), which revealed how the human race destroyed its beautiful planet only to be overtaken by intelligent apes. In that movie, humans were the victims of their own intelligence.
 

Many ask me what signal processing should be doing in the age of big data. My answer is clear: signal processing should continue to generate big ideas. Big ideas for big data.

Our discipline has always advanced ingenious methods and theories, irrespective of the size of the data: small or big. Many of these ideas permeate disciplines far and wide, ranging from imaging to video; speech processing to coding and communications, forensics, security, and privacy; and also social media, machine learning, and data science.

These past two years have flown by, and I can hardly believe that my time as IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) president has come to a close. As I pass the torch into the good hands of our distinguished colleague Ali Sayed, I am confident that he will lead you to an even brighter future.