Keeping Up the Momentum of Innovations

About three years ago, I wrote the inaugural editorial “Riding the Tidal Wave of Human-Centric Information Processing” as the incoming Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING (T-ASL) [1], and about the same time, the farewell editorial “The Golden Era of Signal Processing” as the retiring EiC of IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [2]. Now, while writing this (another) farewell editorial, I am thrilled to see and reflect on waves of innovations in our field in recent years. Information processing that encompasses audio, speech, and language forms the core of our field, and the pioneering work with huge industrial-scale successes driving the innovations and elevating the prior state-of-the-art in the field [3], [4] has been published in our T-ASL (e.g., [5]–[11]).