Inaugural Editorial: Riding the Tidal Wave of Human-Centric Information Processing - Innovate, Outreach, Collaborate, Connect, Expand, and Win

This editorial marks the start of my three-year term as Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING (T-ASL), right after the completion of my three-year term as EiC of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM). To begin, I would like to thank Helen Meng for passing me a very strong T-ASL after three years of her outstanding work. I also thank Helen for the valuable help during the EiC transition over the past few months. In the past three years, working as EiC of SPM I had a unique and exciting journey to the heart of our Signal Processing Society (SPS). I also had an opportunity to make the progress in our ASL technology widely informed to the broader SP community (e.g., [1], [2]). With waves of innovation introduced, SPM clinches the prestigious recognition as the most cited publication in the most recent consecutive years among all 247 journals in the field worldwide, including all 147 IEEE publications. Some of the innovations, such as translations for global reach and multimedia content access via Tag, are equally applicable to our T-ASL, which we can readily implement after major obstacles have been cleared by the effort during the past two years. Yet with new waves of innovation for our T-ASL under planning in coming years, we are in a position to broaden the intellectual influence and technical scope of our field in an unprecedented way, which I will briefly outline below. One special advantage of our ASL field is its intimate connection , more than any other technical fields within our SP Society , to human-centric information processing and to " artificial intelligence " which is coming of age. Indeed, the tidal wave of human-centric computing is upon us in various forms, including natural user interface between human and machines/de-vices, and there is a strong need to improve related fundamental technologies in all aspects. Together with the new technological trends in mobility and in social computing, closely tied to audio, speech, and human language processing, we have a unique opportunity to make our publication the best among the best. Luckily, this opportunity has been offered in the expanded field of interest in our society [3], [4] a few years ago in anticipation of the human-centric computing tidal wave which is arriving. Our new innovation will focus on forging close alliance with related research fields and communities to …