SPM March 2023

The underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is an issue that has been studied extensively [1] . Yet women still face many challenges, even though the demand for many STEM occupations has exploded. Many factors contribute to the low number of women in the STEM field. From an early age, girls are exposed to many cultural cues that dissuade them from participating in STEM fields. This gender bias is enforced by implicit or explicit messages from multiple sources.

A computational experiment is deemed reproducible if the same data and methods are available to replicate quantitative results by any independent researcher, anywhere and at any time, granted that they have the required computing power. Such computational reproducibility is a growing challenge that has been extensively studied among computational researchers as well as within the signal processing and machine learning research community.

Visualizing information inside objects is an everlasting need to bridge the world from physics, chemistry, and biology to computation. Among all tomographic techniques, terahertz (THz) computational imaging has demonstrated its unique sensing features to digitalize multidimensional object information in a nondestructive, nonionizing, and noninvasive way.

Electromagnetic (EM) imaging is widely applied in sensing for security, biomedicine, geophysics, and various industries. It is an ill-posed inverse problem whose solution is usually computationally expensive. Machine learning (ML) techniques and especially deep learning (DL) show potential in fast and accurate imaging. However, the high performance of purely data-driven approaches relies on constructing a training set that is statistically consistent with practical scenarios, which is often not possible in EM-imaging tasks. Consequently, generalizability becomes a major concern.

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.

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.