Advance Your Signal Processing Education

There is a great need for information technologies for developing and delivering quality, up-to-date educational materials that convey to all learners that knowledge is a dynamic continuum that stretches across disciplines. To address this need, an experimental, open-source/open-content initiative, called the Connexions Project, was initiated. The Connexions Project offers an alternative to the way textbooks and other learning materials are created, maintained, and used. By design, Connexions greatly impacts current modes of teaching and learning, and the development and sharing of knowledge. In combination with powerful software tools which consist of an XML language, Connexions gives learner free access to educational materials that can be readily manipulated to suit their individual learning styles as they explore links among concepts. The free software tools also foster the development, manipulation, and continuous refinement of educational material by diverse communities of authors and instructor. An overview of the philosophy and progress of the project is presented, with a particular emphasis on its application to the area of signal processing.

Typical wireless communication and signal processing education involves, initially mastering theory and then transitioning to studying specific protocols and applications. We present a physical cognitive radio network testbed, developed at Virginia Tech that has interfaces that enable it to be an educational resource using open source software and a simple component-based modeling structure. This testbed advances the educational opportunities available to the cognitive radio wireless communication and signal processing communities by providing a real-world platform where students can develop and test cognitive radio protocols and applications and observe how they react in a real wireless environment. Using simple interfaces, students will be able to rapidly develop algorithms and deploy them in a real wireless environment saving time in developing component evaluation and simulation techniques, yet providing them with valid feedback about how their components interactedwith the environment.

Java-DSP (J-DSP) is a free online Java applet that has been extensively used in signal processing education and research. We present the functionalities of J-DSP Earth Systems Edition (J-DSP/ESE) that uses the basic architecture of J-DSP, but has functions tailor-made for Earth systems signals. No text-based programming is required, so that users can focus on understanding signal processing concepts. Here, we describe the functionalities in the current version of J-DSP/ESE. A coherency analysis of Earth time series is presented. In order to overcome the inherent limitations of J-DSP/ESE in terms of memory and computations, a standalone Java application is proposed. This will greatly enhance the functionalities of the existing J-DSP/ESE applet. The standalone application will be platform independent and available for free. These additional functionalities of the application make it suitable for use in research as well as education.

Presents the President's message for this issue of the publication.

Digital signal processing (DSP) education has traditionally employed more demanding mathematics than most topics found among courses in electrical/electronic/computer engineering. In some cases, the technical challenges posed by some courses have made it difficult for students to complete those courses successfully. Here, we advocate for creativity to be nurtured in the first place, after which the science will flow naturally. To foster creativity, our pedagogical approach includes a variety of solutions incorporating exploratory exercises, open-ended multidisciplinary coursework, blended lecture-laboratory sessions, and a colorful working environment. We firmly believe that creativity is the way forward. Student feedback supports our approach.

Active filter circuits are a crucial topic in electrical, electronics and signal processing education, but their complexity often poses significant challenges to traditional classroom teaching. Virtual labs provide an immersive and interactive learning experience without the need for costly equipment and materials, offering a solution to these challenges. In this research paper, the approach to designing and implementing a virtual laboratory of active filter circuits using JavaScript is presented. The lab includes a breadboard, function generator, multi-meter, and uses a simulation engine to calculate voltage and frequency values in circuits. The virtual lab was evaluated through user research with engineering and science students, and it was found to be highly effective in teaching active filter circuits. Virtual labs are an essential tool in engineering education, providing increased flexibility and reduced costs.

Ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) has been widely used in quality assessment and failure analysis for critical structures. The NDE system is commonly designed on microcontrollers and digital signal processors, which fall short of meeting the demands of high speed and requirements of adaptability. This requires reconfigurable computing devices to implement the system. This study aims to build a prototype real-time ultrasonic signal processing platform using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The platform acquires ultrasound data at the speed of 100 MSPS. The embedded system running on an FPGA is reprogrammable to evaluate signal processing algorithms and NDE methods. To demonstrate the system, a split spectrum processing algorithm is implemented and the result is displayed on a touch screen LCD. Thanks to the flexibility of FPGA, the platform is not limited to ultrasound NDE application. It may have a broader impact on future project development for signal processing research and education.

This paper presents the Tiered Learning Framework (TLF) for course and assessment design in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) education. TLF divides the learning curve within a course into five levels, encourages students to reflect on which level they are currently at in their learning, and guides them on what they need to do to progress to the next level. Within this framework, students have more control and choice over how much they want to learn and how deeply they engage with the material. A key driver of student adherence to the framework and a mechanism for appropriate feedback is the use of suitable tiered assessments. The TLF was specifically trialled in class settings of various sizes over the past three years, for DSP courses and design projects. Feedback from students indicated that the TLF-based assessment inspired and motivated them to self-assess their understanding of the topic or course they studied and guided their improvement to the next level.

A synthetic aperture radar scale model has been developed to improve signal processing teaching. Based on low frequency ultrasound transmission, it is a low cost demonstration kit. The overall software is directly running on Matlab® and allows easy and realtime modifications. This educational tool can be used to test different waveforms and show the effects of a real scene on the final image. It can also be used in a more advanced way to test different signal processing in order to improve image focusing or to reduce computation burden.

The utilization of open and free-environment programming has increased drastically in education and research fields in the current pandemic situation. SCILAB programming originated from a laboratory INRIA in France and it is the overall open and free-environment reference in mathematical calculation programming. It is an alternative open-source with an easy syntax to the licensed software MATLAB. This preliminary study paper describes about the design and simulation of the discrete-time signal processing laboratory concepts with the SCILAB open-source software. The transform techniques in signal processing like Fourier Transform of discrete signals, fast Fourier Transform, Fourier series for discrete-time periodic signals and digital filters are better understood with the simulation results obtained in SCILAB. The student feedback shows that the student attention has improved with SCILAB based signal processing teaching.

2015 IEEE Signal Processing and Signal Processing Education Workshop (SP/SPE)

Research in the field of VLSI digital signal processing (DSP) involves study of algorithms and architectures for VLSI implementation of signal and image processing algorithms, theory of architectures and design methodologies, and computer aided design of VLSI DSP systems which can meet the area-speed-power demands of applications using available technologies. The objective in design and implementation of VLSI DSP systems is to reduce the area and power while meeting the speed requirements of the real-time applications. Although about one and a half decades old, this field is still in its youth. The challenges in meeting the speed-power demands of new applications leads to innovations in theory of architectures. At the same time use of old techniques in new applications allows us to further generalize and extend known principles. Because of these continuing advances and because of lack of text books in this field, it remains difficult to educate practicing engineers and graduate students in this field. This paper presents can overview of two ten-week quarter courses offered at the University of Minnesota to train graduate students in this field. >

2011 Digital Signal Processing and Signal Processing Education Meeting (DSP/SPE)

The Stanford “Lab-In-A-Box” project comprises an open source hardware and software tool chain for teaching signal processing and analog electronics. It is intended to improve the teaching of these concepts by providing a platform that is more open and understandable and by lowering the economic barriers to students interested in the field. To do this, the Lab-In-A-Box brings a full powered Digital Signal Processor (DSP) core to the popular Arduino microcontroller environment and marries it with a simple to use analog front end (AFE). The software platform provided with the Lab-In-A-Box includes an Arduino-like development environment that facilitates learning and quick development of signal processing applications without abstracting away the intricacies of a practical implementation. This system has been used to create several teaching examples and has been tested in courses at Stanford University.

A typical path in learning digital signal processing begins at the theoretical end and progresses toward the practical constraints imposed by implementation in hardware or software. On this path, the student would learn how to convert mathematical theory into algorithms and then algorithms into efficient implementations. In this paper, we first summarize the electronic courseware we have already developed in Mathematica, MATLAB, and Ptolemy to teach DSP theory, algorithms, and implementation, respectively. Then, we discuss ways to integrate our efforts to help students discover the connections between these topics.