FIND Technologies Inc. (a Canadian company that focuses on detecting signatures emitted by organic and inorganic materials) is offering a $50,000.00 prize for the development of a signal analysis algorithm that can identify and categorize 1,500 data sets into 3 categories at an accuracy of +95%.

Full details can be found here: The Challenge

Back in March, when I traveled to ICASSP 2010, I was fortunate to assist to Ronald Schafer’s plenary talk. Since then, I have been trying to get a copy of it but I was told to wait for it to be posted on IEEE TV. It took a little longer than what I expected but finally it appeared a few weeks ago:

I think the presentation is excellent. It not only draws from Ron Schafer’s huge experience (see his bio at HP Labs and Wikipedia) and his renown teaching ability, but it also manages to cover a well-balanced presentation of the history of DSP (my favorite part), his view of the future and the technological importance of DSP.

As a small trivia, at around the 15 minutes mark, there is a mention in the video to an early publication describing the discrete-time convolution (is this the first time discrete-time convolution was published?). I was surprised to see in the list of editors (and also contributing authors) for the book the name of Ralph Phillips. This is because he is my great-great-great academic grandfather (I’m interested in my academic genealogy and had been able to trace it way back to the 14th century thanks to the help of the Math Genealogy Project).

Earlier this summer I gave a talk at RIT’s Summer Math Institute. This is a venue for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) University and High School faculty to interact. One of the goals is to show to High School teachers how the concepts they teach are used in many of today’s technologies. So, my presentation was about explaining how most of what we do in DSP revolves around the simple operation of accumulating the multiplication of two sequences of numbers (plus complex numbers and trigonometry):

I think it is a nice way of introducing the basics of Digital Signal Processing to a general audience.