Capturing the Breadth of Our Activities [President's Message]

Last March, we celebrated the arrival of spring at another outstanding International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), this one in Dallas, ably organized by Scott Douglas and the ICASSP 2010 Organizing Committee. At that time, the inaugural IEEE Thematic Meetings on Signal Processing (THEMES) Conference, a joint initiative of the Society's Conference and Publications Boards, also got off to a flying start. An examination of the eclectic set of topics covered in this meeting that was devoted to social networks again highlights how significantly signal processing as a field has changed and continues to evolve, and why we remain challenged to describe all that we do as a technical and professional group even to many who are scientifically savvy.