Signal Processing at 75: More Dynamic and Pervasive Than Ever [Perspectives]

Abstract

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.) At ICASSP 2023, in Rhodes, Greece, I chaired a panel with Alex Acero of Apple, K. J. Ray Liu of Origin Wireless, Ali H. Sayed of EPFL, and Rabab K. Ward of the University of British Columbia that discussed the future of signal processing (SP) with a focus on the relations between artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and SP. Ours followed a panel chaired by Mos Kaveh, University of Minnesota, with Anthony Constantinides, Imperial College London, Alan Oppenheim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ron Schafer, Georgia Tech, as panelists who reminisced on the origins of SP.