IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

Self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) methods aim to provide powerful, deep feature learning without the requirement of large annotated data sets, thus alleviating the annotation bottleneck-one of the main barriers to the practical deployment of deep learning today. These techniques have advanced rapidly in recent years, with their efficacy approaching and sometimes surpassing fully supervised pretraining alternatives across a variety of data modalities, including image, video, sound, text, and graphs.

The dramatic success of deep learning is largely due to the availability of data. Data samples are often acquired on edge devices, such as smartphones, vehicles, and sensors, and in some cases cannot be shared due to privacy considerations. Federated learning is an emerging machine learning paradigm for training models across multiple edge devices holding local data sets, without explicitly exchanging the data. Learning in a federated manner differs from conventional centralized machine learning and poses several core unique challenges and requirements, which are closely related to classical problems studied in the areas of signal processing and communications.

Fire and water, two of nature’s basic forces, are each capable of sustaining or destroying life and property. Research projects in California and Hawaii are, respectively, helping displaced families cope with devasting wildfires, and investigating a way to increase water supply availability on isolated islands. Both projects are relying on signal processing to help them meet their goals.

“Science without conscience is only ruin of the soul” said François Rabelais. This centuries-old quote still resonates, today maybe louder than ever. I began to write this editorial at the end of February when Russian tanks and soldiers invaded Ukraine and waves of bombers began dropping their bombs on Ukrainian cities, targeting civilian buildings, hospitals, and schools. This dramatic event was a shock to Europeans, since most of them have lived in relative peace for more than 70 years.

Robots are rapidly becoming an integral part of daily life. The mechanizing of routine tasks has been underway for decades, with development making particularly remarkable progress over the past several years. Now, with the development robots that can closely interact with humans, sensing users’ needs and often relieving people of dangerous tasks, robotic technology is entering a new phase of intimacy and practicality.

A window function is a mathematical function that is zero valued outside some chosen interval [1] , [2] . For applications like filtering, detection, and estimation, the window functions take the form of limited time functions, which are in general real and even functions [3] , [4] , while for applications like beamforming and image processing, they are limited spatial functions. A spatial window can be a complex function for optimizing the beams in magnitude as well as in phase, as in the case of certain antenna arrays, where the phasor currents in the array are complex numbers [5].

A window function is a mathematical function that is zero valued outside some chosen interval [1] , [2] . For applications like filtering, detection, and estimation, the window functions take the form of limited time functions, which are in general real and even functions [3] , [4] , while for applications like beamforming and image processing, they are limited spatial functions. A spatial window can be a complex function for optimizing the beams in magnitude as well as in phase, as in the case of certain antenna arrays, where the phasor currents in the array are complex numbers [5].

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is an international organization whose purpose is to advance and disseminate state-of-the-art scientific information and resources, educate the SP community, and provide a venue where people can interact and exchange ideas. To achieve its mission, the SPS relies heavily on volunteers working in the area of SP, governed by collaborative organizational practices in decision making that are transparent and fair. By bringing volunteers together, the SPS catalyzes advances in the field of SP in its pursuit of excellence.

For me and, probably, many readers, each issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ) is the opportunity and pleasure to learn something new in the area of signal and image processing. In addition to lecture notes, tips-and-tricks articles, special reports, and so on, which propose interesting and clever solutions to typical signal or image processing problems, the feature articles and special issue provide tutorial-like articles on various mature or fast-developing domains.

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.