Signing Off as Editor-in-Chief

Three years have gone by quickly. I started as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) in January 2018. It coincided with other changes in my personal life that made the transition steeper than I had expected. Looking back, it is how I imagine the New Year’s polar bear plunge might be. Of course, three years of service is a tad bit longer than a few minutes of swimming in ridiculously cold water. In this editorial, I would like to share my thanks and list the next steps for the magazine. I do not mean this to sound like a clichéd Oscars “thank you” speech.

Credit needs to be given to the editorial board. SPM’s area editors took ownership of their respective areas to keep them successful: Matthew McKay, feature articles; Namrata Vaswani, special issues; Rodrigo Capobianco Guido and Roberto Togneri, columns and forums; Ervin Sejdic, the e-Newsletter; Tiago Henrique Falk, social media and outreach; and our special initiatives editors, Andres Kwasinski (who spearheaded documentation) and Nuria González-Prelcic (who created several nice cartoons).

The editorial board was a phenomenal help. It was common for us to get 10 reviews of special issues and feature article proposals in fewer than two weeks. With extreme grace, the senior editors also took on the change in responsibilities, including liaising with the special issue. The associate editors for columns and forums, the e-Newsletter, and social media/outreach were great. Each has a unique role with the magazine in that many are in charge of developing content, not handling reviews. I want to thank everyone for their contributions.

Compelling content is the biggest attraction of the magazine. When I became SPM’s EIC, I imagined that there would be a huge river of content that my team could access and that our role was to be downriver in selecting the most compelling materials. I didn’t realize that the challenge was actually upriver in that we needed to divert the water into the river. It took much more effort than I realized to encourage submissions that maintain the high quality of articles that has been the foundation of SPM.