The fall 2009 conference of the Optical Society of America was held in San Jose, California, 11-15 October. The collocation of topical meetings on Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging (COSI), and Signal Recovery and Synthesis (SRS) with the Frontiers in Optics (FiO) Annual Meeting brought together a diverse group of scientists and engineers sharing a common interest in the processing of information carried by optical fields. The papers featured in this issue highlight several important trends. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America