At the time I was a postdoc at The University of Maryland, my mentor, Prof. K. J. Ray Liu, was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. As such, he wrote a number of very good columns. One of the best ones is “Signal Processing Inside”

The main point of the article is to highlight how Signal Processing as a technology does not get the recognition it deserves from society, simply because it is a “phantom technology”, working from behind the scenes to make most of modern day advances work. The article highlights how other industries and companies (e.g. Intel) face the same problems. But, unlike these industries and companies, the Signal Processing community per-se has not the resources to mount very expensive advertising campaigns. So, as the article says, it’s up to us, the Signal Processing community, to help ourselves and work for this technology to be broadly known.

In my case, this column has made a big influence in many of the ventures I do. One example is this blog, because when I thought about it, I wanted to be a tool to promote the impact that DSP has on our world. Ironically, it has influenced other activities I have been doing that had prevented me for posting more often.

In any case, I believe that “Signal Processing Inside” is a must read for anybody in the DSP community. If you like it, you should also read “Volunteers“.

This post is not exclusively related to DSP but I have come across an interesting site that could be useful to anybody doing research. The site is citeulike and,  as the name says, is a site dedicated to managing bibliographical references. The idea of citeulike  is similar to other web 2.0 sites dedicated to managing bookmarks. In this case, it is possible to create groups based on a topic of interest which can then be used to organize a list of papers (each with its corresponding link to thedocument itself) that can be shared by a research group. Groups also have available discussion forums  and blogs that could be very helpful when organizing research within a group.The citations for each paper can be directly imported from many popular research sites, and they can later be exported to BibTex format.

It has been a while since the last post and many things had happened to keep me away from posting. Luckily, things are calming down and I’m looking forward to resuming posting.

Posted by mobile phone:
Since wireless technology owes so much to DSP, I thought that it was just fiting to create a mobile version of this blog. So, from now on, and thanks to the WordPress Mobile Plugin it will be possible to follow the Digital Signal Processing Blog from any web capable mobile phone. Enjoy it!

It has been a very long time since my last post, let’s just say that the time demands of modern life have not been very kind to me lately… In any case, good news is that the Holidays are giving me that extra time to catch up with this blog.

Some weeks ago I intended to write about an interesting technology to store information that is heavily based on DSP technologies. The idea behind the technology is quite interesting and a nice example of outside-the-box thinking. In a nutshell, the idea is to store information on a piece of paper by using color coding. More interestingly, since I read the first article about this, there have been more discussions about the validity and practicality of this idea.

From my point of view, the discussion is itself interesting because it brings up a lot of issues related to several DSP technologies. From the creative standpoint, I believe that although there are many challenges with this technology in its current form, who knows where it can end and where the related DSP problems may take us to? I guess, it’s about the journey, not the destination.