SPM Article

The Internet of Things (IoT ) refers to the wireless connection of ordinary objects, such as vehicles, cash machines, door locks, cameras, industrial controls, and municipal traffic systems, to the Internet. Research firm BI Intelligence predicts that 22.5 billion devices will be connected to the IoT in 2021, compared to 6.6 billion in 2016.

I started drafting this editorial on July 4th while sitting in my hotel room in Versailles, France. Both the date and location have great significance in our modern history, which motivated my choice for the theme of the article.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most widely used dimension reduction techniques. A related easier problem is termed subspace learning or subspace estimation. Given relatively clean data, both are easily solved via singular value decomposition (SVD). The problem of subspace learning or PCA in the presence of outliers is called robust subspace learning (RSL) or robust PCA (RPCA).

Low-rank modeling plays a pivotal role in signal processing and machine learning, with applications ranging from collaborative filtering, video surveillance, and medical imaging to dimensionality reduction and adaptive filtering. Many modern high-dimensional data and interactions thereof can be modeled as lying approximately in a low-dimensional subspace or manifold, possibly with additional structures, and its proper exploitations lead to significant cost reduction in sensing, computation, and storage.

Individual feature articles and special issues are two major mechanisms of full-length tutorial surveys of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM). Since the May 2016 feature article cluster by Jane Wang et al. on brain signal analytics, SPM’s current and past editors-in-chief and their teams have been exploring a different way to complement this existing structure - a feature article cluster (or mini special issue) that allows for a set of three to five solicited articles on a current topic, instead of just one (feature article) or ten to 11 (a special issue).

I love the last scene from the movie Planet of the Apes (1968), which revealed how the human race destroyed its beautiful planet only to be overtaken by intelligent apes. In that movie, humans were the victims of their own intelligence.
 

I just got back from the 2018 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. One of the highlights for me as editor-in-chief (EIC) of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM) is SPM’s editorial board meeting.

By bringing research into the curriculum, this article explores new opportunities to refresh some classic signal processing courses. Since 2015, we in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) Department of Imperial College London, United Kingdom, have explored the extent to which the level of student engagement and learning can be enhanced by inviting the students to perform signal processing exercises on their own physiological data.