Apollo 11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the Moon and return them safely. As part of NASA’s goal in assessing team and mission success, all voice communications within mission control, astronauts, and support staff were captured using a multichannel analog system, which until recently had never been made available. More than 400 personnel served as mission specialists/support who communicated across 30 audio loops, resulting in 9,000+ h of data. It is essential to identify each speaker’s role during Apollo and analyze group communication to achieve a common goal.

Linear regression models have a wide range of applications in statistics, signal processing, and machine learning. In this Lecture Notes column we will examine the performance of the least-squares (LS) estimator with a focus on the case when there are more parameters than training samples, which is often overlooked in textbooks on estimation.

Analyzing the magnitude response of a finite-length sequence is a ubiquitous task in signal processing. However, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) provides only discrete sampling points of the response characteristic. This work introduces bounds on the magnitude response, which can be efficiently computed without additional zero padding. The proposed bounds can be used for more informative visualization and inform whether additional frequency resolution or zero padding is required.

As I am writing this article, I am wrapping up a trip as IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) president to Doha, Qatar (9–11 January), to speak at the 2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) Workshop, and India (12–16 January), for technical talks and meetings with local signal processing researchers and SPS local Chapter chairs.

Thanks to the tremendous interest from the research community, the focus of the March issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine is on the second volume of the special issue on physics-driven machine learning for computational imaging, which brings together nine articles of the 19 accepted papers from the original 47 submissions.