IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 1, NO. 1, JUNE 2007
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IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing Inaugural Issue: Editor-in-Chief’s Message
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EMBERS of the signal processing community often complain that, for a technology that is so ubiquitous, few outside our world really understand and hence appreciate what it is we do. After all, signal processing engineers don’t pump oil out of the ground, they don’t build cars or iPods, nor do they work in hospitals attending to the sick or disabled. No, instead, we are faced with the task of explaining to friends and family the virtues of the discrete cosine transform, fast transversal filters and space-time coding. I am reminded of BASF’s well-known advertising slogan: “We don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.” While we cannot claim to be the architects of the products or services that form the foundation of our modern lives, it is fair to say that signal processing is at the heart of the technology that differentiates today’s generations from those of the past. From oil exploration to EEG signal monitoring, anti-lock brakestoMP3encoding,fighter-jetradarstodigitalcameras,GPS positioning devices to IC wafer inspection systems, signal processing is indeed everywhere. Not surprisingly then, the IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING (J-STSP) will be unique among IEEE publications in the broad array of technical subjects that it will address. While the Signal Processing Magazine covers similar topical territory, it does so at a higher level, focusing on introductory explanations and tutorial descriptions. J-STSP digs deeper into these subjects, at the same technical level as articles in other Transactions within the IEEE Signal
Processing (SP) Society. To use a metaphor that will be familiar to our readers, each J-STSP issue represents a data point in the multidimensional space of all science and technology. It will take quite a number of issues over multiple years to fill out the subspace that is signal processing. And the subspace is growing! Part of the mission of J-STSP will be to emphasize these new, emerging directions. The idea for this journal has been brewing within the IEEE SP Society for some time. Special thanks are due to Ray Liu for his vision in organizing and launching the effort, and to Fred Mintzer and Mercy Kowalczyk for driving it through the IEEE approval process. I appreciate the commitment of our distinguished senior editorial board to the success of the journal and their willingness to serve despite busy schedules. I also want to particularly thank Arye Nehorai for organizing an outstanding inaugural special issue, and all of the other guest editors who are in the process of directing this and other upcoming issues. Those who have managed special issues know the long hours that have to be put in to make them a reality. Finally, a call to our readership: the journal can’t survive without you! We need your ideas and your energy to keep the publication pipeline full. Consider submitting a proposal for a J-STSP issue; help us highlight the extensive influence of signal processing in everything around us.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTSP.2007.897064
A. LEE SWINDLEHURST, Editor-in-Chief Vice-President, Research ArrayComm LLC San Jose, CA 95131 USA
[email protected]
A. Lee Swindlehurst (F’04) received the B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, UT, in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1991. Prior to joining BYU, he was employed at ESL, Inc., in Sunnyvale, CA, from 1986-1990. He joined BYU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1990, where he holds the position of Full Professor. Currently, he is also serving as Vice-President of Research for ArrayComm, LLC, of San Jose, CA. During 1996-1997, he held a joint appointment as a Visiting Professor at the at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. Dr. Swindlehurst is active in the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) Society, having served as Society Secretary from 2002 to 2004, Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING from 1994 to 1997, Technical Program Chair for the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in 2001 and 2008, and as a member of various technical committees within the society. He is also currently an Associate Editor for the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking. He received the Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award at BYU (2004), the 2000 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award (with P. Stoica) for "Maximum Likelihood Methods in Radar Array Processing" (PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, February 1998), and was co-author of "Spatial Signature Estimation for Uniform Linear Arrays with Unknown Receiver Gains and Phases," (IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, August 1999), which received the 2001 IEEE SP Society’s Young Author Best Paper Award (with D. Astely and B. Ottersten). 1932-4553/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
