IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

The opportunity to write this column as the president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) was far beyond my imagination when I first joined the SPS as a graduate student member in the 1990s. Career growth through the eyes of an SPS student member was a long journey filled with uncertainty. And at that time, SPS had few female or Asian leaders to model.

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.

Time reversal is a physical principle well known for its deterministic focusing effect. Recently discovered statistical effects show that the time reversal focusing spot is not a point but has a Bessel power distribution. This finding offers accurate and reliable speed estimation indoors, where multipaths are abundant, with mostly nonline-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, and enable various indoor applications, such as wireless sensing and tracking. No known techniques can thrive in such scenarios. In essence, time reversal is an effective tool that embraces multipaths as virtual sensors with hundreds of thousands of degrees of freedom for our utilization.

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.

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.)

My end of term as IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) president is fast approaching. It has been an incredible experience that has provided me with so many opportunities to engage with our members around the globe, forge relationships with other IEEE Societies, and meet a diverse range of people that I hope will become active members of our Society in the future. It has been a great privilege to be at the helm of a Society that garners such a high level of worldwide respect and recognition.

My three years of service as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of Signal Processing Magazine ( SPM ) are now coming to a close. During the past three years, many of us were deeply affected by serious political, social, and environmental events such as the war in Ukraine; protests for freedom in Iran; coups d’état in Africa; the COVID-19 pandemic; seisms in Turkey, Syria, and Morocco; huge floods in Libya and India; gigantic fires in North America and Southern Europe; and an avalanche of stones in the Alps, to name a few. In such a context, I believe that the IEEE slogan, “Advancing Technology for Humanity,” is incredibly relevant and timely.

Encoding-decoding convolutional neural networks (CNNs) play a central role in data-driven noise reduction and can be found within numerous deep learning algorithms. However, the development of these CNN architectures is often done in an ad hoc fashion and theoretical underpinnings for important design choices are generally lacking. Up to now, there have been different existing relevant works that have striven to explain the internal operation of these CNNs. Still, these ideas are either scattered and/or may require significant expertise to be accessible for a bigger audience.

Designing filters with perfect frequency responses (i.e., flat passbands, sharp transition bands, highly suppressed stopbands, and linear phase responses) is always the ultimate goal of any digital signal processing (DSP) practitioner. High-order finite impulse response (FIR) filters may meet these requirements when we put no constraint on implementation complexity. In contrast to FIR filters, infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, owing to their recursive structures, provide an efficient way for high-performance filtering at reduced complexity.

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.