[This post should have appeared several months ago, but I didn’t have a link to the newsletter at the time, and I subsequently forgot about it until now.  -T.]

Last year, Emmanuel Candés and I were two of the recipients of the 2008 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, for our paper “Near-optimal signal recovery from random projections: universal encoding strategies?” published in IEEE Inf. Thy..  (The other recipient is David Donoho, for the closely related paper “Compressed sensing” in the same journal.)  These papers helped initiate the modern subject of compressed sensing, which I have talked about earlier on this blog, although of course they also built upon a number of important precursor results in signal recovery, high-dimensional geometry, Fourier analysis, linear programming, and probability.  As part of our response to this award, Emmanuel and I wrote a short piece commenting on these developments, entitled “Reflections on compressed sensing“, which appears in the Dec 2008 issue of the IEEE Information Theory newsletter.  In it we place our results in the context of these precursor results, and also mention some of the many active directions (theoretical, numerical, and applied) that compressed sensing is now developing in.