[president’s MESSAGE]
Alfred Hero, SPS President
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Taking Advantage of Unexpected Opportunities
I
n my last column I spoke of the open access movement and described ways in which the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is friendly to open access. In this column I will announce a new exciting initiative that the Society is launching in the area of electronic open access education. Before discussing this initiative, I will relate an experience that illustrates my belief that one should not be timid when unexpected opportunities are in the offing. Like many of you, over my professional career I have focused on attending technical conferences that are close to my academic interests; in my case these are conferences in the areas of signal processing, biomedical science, information theory, or statistics. Only in a few cases have I found farflung conferences outside my interest worth the time or effort. However, earlier this year, I took a plunge and accepted an invitation to present my work at a summer conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, organized by Bulgarian mathematicians. I am not a mathematician, I do not speak Bulgarian, and I had never heard of the organizers. When I arrived with my traveling companion at the conference site I recognized no one. My expectations were modest but there was a special circumstance that justified the trip. My traveling companion was my mother who was also invited to present her work. My mother is not a mathematician either. She is an artist and inventor. This was the first time we had appeared together in a conference program. My mother gave the ultimate multimedia presentation, combining Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2007.907826
mathematics, art, music, invention (an electronic musical instrument of her design), and audience participation. A year ago I would never have thought that coincidental invitations to a mathematics conference in Bulgaria would bend a boundary between my family life and professional life. My mother and I now share lasting memories of the
CONNEXIONS (CNX.ORG) WAS FOUNDED TO MANAGE AND PROMOTE THE CREATION, INTERCONNECTION, AND DISSEMINATION OF THE REPOSITORY OF COURSE MODULES.
beautiful city of Plovdiv, the extraordinary Bulgarian people, and a worthwhile expansion of our mathematical horizons. I hope that my readers will have similar opportunities to intertwine their professional and family lives. This past summer an unexpected opportunity arose for the SPS to partner with a leading provider of open access education, Connexions. First, let’s review some relevant history. Motivated by the tremendous potential of Webbased dissemination of course ware, in the late 1990s a small group of leading signal processing educators decided to re-engineer their course notes into a collection of interconnected Web-based open access course modules. In 1999 Connexions (cnx.org) was founded to manage and promote the creation, interconnection, and dissemination of the repository of course modules. Other educators entered the fray and contributed additional courses and
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [4] NOVEMBER 2007
associated modules to the repository. Connexions is not-for-profit and operates on the principle that knowledge should be accessible to all and that ideas are often linked in unusual and surprising ways. It makes high-quality educational content available via the Internet to anyone anywhere, at any time, for free (or at very low cost in print). Today, Connexions is one of the most-used open-education resources on the Web, employed in traditional college and K–12 settings, in distance learning, and by lifelong learners around the globe. Demand is surging; currently the Connexions servers handle over 21 million hits per month representing over 600,000 visitors from over 200 countries. While Connexions welcomes contributions from anyone, anywhere, the infrastructure supports a filtering layer on top of the repository (called a lens) that supports peer review and certification of selected material. The SPS has long been interested in fulfilling its educational mission and expanding its visibility and outreach, especially to students and instructors, practitioners in industry, and the global developing world. An SPS and Connexions partnership would thus seem to be ideal and mutually beneficial. At the June 2007 IEEE Board Series, the IEEE Executive Committee resolved to promote IEEE’s open-access-friendly policy and to conduct a series of experiments in the open access arena. To my way of thinking, this offered a great opportunity for the SPS to partner with Connexions on such an experiment. Such an experiment was proposed in late summer and was approved by the Society’s Board of Governors in September. Phase one of the experiment will create an SPS
lens into Connexions and the plan is to deploy it by the end of 2007. Visitors to our new Society Web pages will see a linked list of SPS-certified Connexions materials. An SPS Certification Committee has been established to oversee the certification process. I am inviting anyone interested in signal processing education to participate in this project in any number of ways. If you are an educator, you can consider contributing new content to the collection of SPS-certified Connexions modules. If you already have (noncopyrighted) materials in a different form from Connexions’ .xml format, there will soon be translation tools, e.g., LaTeX to .xml. If you are a practitioner in industry you can submit module versions of your favorite (non-
cessing, and biomedical signal processing. Please contact me or Connexions if you are interested in getting involved. Psychological boundaries often make us feel comfortable and sometimes require considerable effort to break. They separate what is certain from what is uncertain or what is worth our attention from what is mere distraction. It is probably human nature to get nervous when crossing into domains of the unknown or unfamiliar. However, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” I think that the SPS can go farther down the open access road at [SP] minimal risk.
copyrighted) technical notes or tips and tricks. If you are a student or other user you can help evaluate existing modules by e-mailing comments to Connexions or by participating in the discussion forum included with each module. Modules and collections with many positive evaluations may be put on a fast track for consideration by the Certification Committee. We are also looking for volunteers to translate modules into different languages, e.g., English to Chinese or Spanish and viceversa. Finally, you can help by spreading the word that Connexions and SPS are seeking new modules and seeking to certify existing modules. All areas are of interest but new modules are especially welcomed in the areas of speech and language processing, image pro-
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