The year 2023 marked the 75th anniversary of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), which was founded in 1948 as the “Professional Group on Audio” of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), becoming the first IEEE Society. (The IRE, founded in 1912 with a focus on radio and then electronics, together with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, founded in 1884 with an emphasis on power and utilities, were united in 1963 to form IEEE.)

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.

The research landscape is evolving very dynamically. This column reflects on it from a conference viewpoint and focuses on the importance of creating a more sustainable culture for the conference portfolio that the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) offers. Among the different considerations, the role that virtual conferences can play is highlighted.

Bayes’ rule, as one of the fundamental concepts of statistical signal processing, provides a way to update our belief about an event based on the arrival of new pieces of evidence. Uncertainty is traditionally modeled by a probability distribution. Prior belief is thus expressed by a prior probability distribution, while the update involves the likelihood function, a probabilistic expression of how likely it is to observe the evidence.

Joseph Fourier’s methods (and their variants) are omnipresent in audio signal processing. However, it turns out that the underlying ideas took some time to penetrate the field of sound analysis and that different paths were first followed in the period immediately following Fourier’s pioneering work, with or without reference to him. This illustrates the interplay between mathematics and physics as well as the key role played by instrumentation, with notable inventions by outsiders to academia, such as Rudolph Koenig and Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.