New Focus, New Challenge [From the Editor]

Rapid advancement of our information society necessitates prompt update and expansion of the technical scope and focus of interest of our IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). Compared with just some years ago, the current focus of signal processing as an enabling technology has been significantly broadened. Now it encompasses theories, architectures, algorithms, implementations, and applications for the transformation of information contained in many different physical, symbolic, or abstract formats that we broadly designate as "signals." Methodology wise, signal processing uses mathematical, statistical, computational, heuristic, and/ or linguistic representations, formalisms, and techniques for sensing, acquisition, extraction, representation, modeling, analysis, synthesis, compression, detection, recovery, decomposition, enhancement, rendering, display, learning, recognition, un derstanding, securing, authenticating, and communicating of information and signals. Such diverse "processing" tasks are accomplished by either digital or analog devices or algorithms, and in the form of either software, hardware, or firmware.