Sign onto Technical Committees [President's Message]

hen someone is new to the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and asks how to get involved with the community, a seasoned member will readily suggest that one starts out by joining a technical committee (TC). True, a TC is the home of a technical community, and it is essential for community building. Let's turn the clock back about 40 years, to when the first IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) was held. Back then in 1976, there were five TCs supporting one journal, the one that is now called IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. The TCs were digital signal processing, digital measurement of noise, electroacoustic transducers, speech processing , and underwater acoustics. You cannot recognize some of them now, right? Neither can I! Yes, time flies. What used to be popular or important may not seem relevant now. Now let's move ten years forward to around 1987, at which time I was still a graduate student. There were seven TCs then: audio and electroacoustics, digital signal processing, multidimentional signal processing, spectral estimation and modeling, speech processing, underwater acoustics, and VLSI for signal processing. At the same time, SPS still had one transaction and one three-year-old magazine. Let's fast-forward to the present. Now we have 12 TCs. None of them has the exact same name as those mentioned above. All have evolved to where they are today, plus many new disciplines have been added to the SPS family. As it stands now, all 12 TCs support seven Society-owned journals with many cosponsored journals, and two flagship conferences (there will be three by the end of this year) with many workshops and cospon-sored conferences. Our Society has grown a lot over the past few decades to become a multifac-eted, international community encompassing various activities. We went from a TC-centric structure to one with major boards on awards, membership, conference , publications, and technical directions. But one thing that has not changed over time but continues to get stronger is the TC as the home of a technical community. Those who work in the same technical areas will join the same TCs to share/exchange their findings and develop a network of community. But how many people can join a TC? The normal size of a TC in SPS has about 30–40 members. I asked a volunteer leader in this area what the size of the speech community within …