Celebrating a Half Century of Signal Processing The Signal Processing

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE MARCH 1999 This article celebrates and highlights 50 years of signal processing technology as it has been applied to communications systems. It also looks forward to some of the numerous opportunities this exciting area opens up for signal processing research and development. This comes at a time when we witness a dramatic upswing in modern telecommunications worldwide. Over the past 50 years, the SP community has contributed to the communications evolution a plethora of analytical tools (for compression, transform coding, filtering, noise cancellation, detection, estimation, and performance evaluation), implementation tools (for VLSI, systolic arrays, and FPGAs), and technological milestones in speech and video coders, modems, equalizers, and antenna arrays, just to name a few. Semiconductor advances, integration of computing and communicating devices, the widespread internet access through the World Wide Web, proliferation of wireless links, and an increasing demand for mobile cellular services at the consumer-end, have all prompted the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) to join focused efforts and contribute enthusiastically to realizing the dream of “communicating with anyone, anywhere, anytime.” In addition to celebrating our society’s 50th anniversary, this past year marked the genesis of the Signal Processing for Communications (SPCOM) Technical Committee (TC). This comes in response to our members’ increasing interest in SPCOM subjects, evidenced by the growing number of SPCOM-related publications in our transactions, international conferences, and workshops. Such an interest reflects a corresponding need to disseminate information, and streamline, review, facilitate, and support SP research and development in telecommunications—a view also shared by educational institutions, government, and industrial agencies. With these long-term objectives, the SPCOM TC was formed during ICASSP’98 in Seattle, WA. On par with other TCs of our society, the SPCOM TC carries the responsibilities of running and (co-)sponsoring workshops; recommending editors, papers, and society awards; and reviewing submissions to ICASSPand SPCOM-related meetings. SPCOM TC sponsors the workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Celebrating a Half Century of Signal Processing The Signal Processing for Communications Technical Committee Edited by Georgios B. Giannakis