Zoom out Search Issue

ManualsBrandsContents Manualsaudio & home theatreZoom in

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [4] MARCH 2015

[

from the

EDITOR

]

Min Wu

Editor-in-Chief

minwu@umd.edu

am writing this editorial for the March

issue of IEEE Signal Processing Mag-

azine (SPM) as 2014 comes to a close.

My son’s elementary school class just

learned about the Jewish holiday of

Hanukkah, the Muslim holiday of Rama-

dan, and the African-American celebration

of Kwanzaa. This was in addition to the

Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays that

students are already keenly aware of. The

school encourages parents to share any

major holidays that their families celebrate

as part of a cultural education for global

citizenship. I volunteered to teach my son’s

class about the Lunar New Year celebrated

by Chinese and several other Asian ethnic

groups. Indeed, wherever we are and what-

ever ethnic roots we have, we are all proud

of our cultural heritage. Through celebra-

tions, not only do we enjoy this important

time with our families and friends, but

more importantly, we pass the cultural

assets onto the next generation and share

our cultures with the world.

This pride and desire to share are also

common in our professional lives. Many

professional groups, including the IEEE,

have public outreach efforts to raise aware-

ness of their (respective) professions and to

attract more young people to join. One

recent high-profile effort is CODE.org,

which aims at expanding participation in

computer science by making it available in

elementary, middle, and high schools

(known as K–12). With hands-on participa-

tion by celebrities and even U.S. President

Barack Obama, this nonprofit organization

developed accessible means to demystify

computer programming. Within just a

year from its launch, CODE.org reportedly

prepared 3,000 new teachers in K–12

schools, brought an introductory course to

4 million students in 90,000 classrooms,

and had tens of millions of people try an

hour of programming. Even my son in ele-

mentary school proudly brought home a

certificate that declared he completed an

hour of coding!

This is one of many successful efforts by

the computer science community in bring-

ing excitement and the “cool factor” to the

public as well as in attracting funding

agencies’ support. What can we learn from

their efforts to advocate our field, i.e., to

explain what signal processing is and to

share the far-reaching contributions of sig-

nal processing with the world?

The leadership of the IEEE Signal Pro-

cessing Society (SPS) has been working on

this for a number of years. The most recent

effort is an outreach video series led by SPS

President-Elect Rabab Ward. The first video

is now available on YouTube and shows the

ubiquitous contributions of signal process-

ing in our everyday life [1]. This 2-minute

video uses multimedia to visualize “Signal

Processing Inside,” a notion coined in the

September 2004 editorial by SPS Past Pres-

ident K.J. Ray Liu (who was editor-in-chief

of SPM at the time). Check it out, and

please share this cool video with your

schools, colleagues, friends, and families.

Now comes the harder part: how can

we go further to explain in accessible

terms and engaging styles what signals

and signal processing are? Published over

a decade ago, the book Engineering Our

Digital Future: The Infinity Project by

Orsak et al. offered a unique curriculum

for high school students and college fresh-

men to learn about digital technologies.

Authored by active volunteers in the SPS

community, it covered the creation, stor-

age, and communications of various

modalities of signals. Since then, digital

cameras, broadband communications, and

online platforms have become affordable

and ubiquitous to everyone including kids

and senior citizens. These advances have

lowered the entry point for the general

public to relate and appreciate signal pro-

cessing technologies, but perhaps not

through a systematic curriculum and hun-

dreds of textbook pages.

Could and should SPM—known for its

fine tutorials—fill in this gap to bring short

stand-alone tutorials accessible to a broad-

er audience (in addition to serving its tradi-

tional readership)? Such articles may sup-

plement overview videos to raise awareness

and the visibility of signal processing; they

might serve as a bridge to invite interested

students, teachers, and professionals to

explore in-depth articles in the magazine

(as well as the SigView online tutorials

highlighted by SPS President Alex Acero in

the January 2015 issue of SPM).

To quote Nobel Laureate Richard Feyn-

man, the author of The Feynman Lectures

on Physics, “If you can’t explain something

to a six-year-old, you really don’t under-

stand it yourself.” Perhaps six-year-old

readers are on the other extreme from the

expert audience to which many of our

authors are accustomed. As a compromise,

how about explaining signal processing to

a sixth grader? I invite you, our readers, to

join our editorial team for this exercise, as

we explore new opportunities to share sig-

nal processing with the world.

REFERENCES

[1] IEEE SPS. “What is signal processing?” [On-

line]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

EErkgr1MWw0

[2] G. C. Orsak, S. L. Wood, S. C. Douglas, D. C.

Muson, J. R. Treichler, R. A. Athale, and M. W. Yoder,

Engineering Our Digital Future: The Infinity Project.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.

[SP ]

Sharing Signal Processing with the World

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2014.2378014

Date of publication: 12 February 2015

THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND

THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND

____________

_______

________________