Signal Processing in Our Digital Era

I am excited to start my service as the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) president. I should note that I am the first SPS president directly elected by the SPS membership, due to the SPS Board of Governors (BOG) urging a stronger member voice in elections. This is a big honor for me and I would like to express my thanks to SPS members for their trust. I write this article to introduce myself, acknowledge key volunteers and staff for their service, outline the activities I will lead over the next two years, and invite your comments and suggestions.

A few words about my personal journey

I was born and raised in Kalamata, Greece, graduated from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and then moved to the United States for a graduate degree at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. During my Ph.D. degree, I was introduced to the exciting area of signal processing (SP), and after attending various SPS events it became clear to me that SPS was the community with which I would like to be associated. I was drawn by SPS’s vibrant conferences and workshops, where I would get exposed to cutting-edge research and receive feedback on my work, the high quality of the publications, and the presence of researchers of the highest caliber, with whom I could meet at conferences and draw inspiration. For all of these reasons and for over 30 years now, SPS has been my professional home. Over the years, my research interests have spanned the areas of statistical SP, system identification, multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) systems, cooperative beamforming, physical layer security, MIMO radar, spectrum sharing between radar and communication systems, and biomedical SP. I had the opportunity and the honor to be involved in technical leadership activities; I was editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, general chair of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and SP (ICASSP), SPS vice president (VP) of conferences, and was twice elected by the SPS membership as BOG member-at-large and, of course, as SPS president-elect.