The Vitality of Signal Processing [President's Message]

Many of us are lucky to have a second chance to enjoy one of our two flagship conferences in Hong Kong later this month. You may recall the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the SARS epidemic that required the cancellation of the 2003 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in that city. Undaunted, ICASSP 2003 General Chair Prof. Wan-Chi Siu and his colleagues volunteered to host this year's International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). Needless to say, two consecutive ICIPs with venues in Cairo and Hong Kong highlight the global scale of the vitality of signal processing as a core discipline and technology of the information age. Further, a return visit to Asia a short time after ICASSP 2009 in Taipei emphasizes the IEEE Signal Processing Society's (SPS) recognition of the activities in, and tremendous contributions to, the field in the region.