CS: Becoming Mainstream.

Muthu Muthukrishnan just wrote the following blog entry entitled: What is NOT Compressed Sensing?

Will someone ... explain to the world what is NOT compressed sensing. It is NOT

• Any sparse representation with small number of nonzeros.
• Any dimensionality reduction by random projections.
• Any operation that replaces L_0 optimization by L_1.
• Any heavy hitters algorithm.
  

I do not want to listen to so many machine learning, signal processing, data mining, statistics, image processing researchers tell me that they do compressed sensing. Or may be I should throw up my hands and let the world embrace Compressed Sensing, after all they are sensing something, and it is compressed.

One of the anonymous commenter wrote:

You should explain why it matters that things are mislabeled. Do Compressed Sensing techniques apply to the things you consider *not* to be Compressed Sensing? If so, what is the harm in mislabeling? Is the harm that techniques are incorrectly applied?

I don't think this is a question of applying techniques incorrectly. I was about to write a longer post but then went ahead and discussed the subject with one of you on how s/he and I interpreted what CS was and what was not CS. After a fruitful discussion, we agreed to disagree that there was no easy definition except that CS had provided a mathematically strong framework for totally new approaches to sampling and to other fields. It doesn't really mean that everything goes, rather that everybody has a different appreciation of where this is leading and what is the most important problem is.

In a different field, I am sure that Haar wavelets were not considered real wavelets by the leaders of the field. but they have nonetheless allowed specialists from several fields to speak the same language and normalized their approaches.

The effect of a field becoming popular has happened before. By serendipity I found, the following 1956 paper by Claude Shannon himself bemoaning the use of the term Information Theory.

A study of the use of the word "Information Theory" on Google timeline since 1956 seems to show that the best policy is to probably "throw up one's hands and let the world embrace the subject.":-)