New Hampshire Public Television made a nice promo video for their datacasting and digital emergency alert system that mentions Project54 and CATLab as being a pivotal player. Watch the streaming video here.

- Benjamin McMahon

While studying for the second exam in my ECE 874 course, I was reviewing the matrix calculus tables and I happened to notice several patterns in the equations.  From basic calculus, we know that there are simple shortcuts one may use to jump directly to an accurate answer, and I eventually found this to be no different.  First of all, I noticed that typically when the particular matrix targeted was not being transposed, the results were simply the transposed matrices on each side of that matrix.  Similarly, when that matrix targeted was being transposed, the results were simply all the original matrices (less the targeted matrix) switched.  Later trials on more complex examples were made quite simplified.  For example:

I have been working on my thesis proposal and i am using Reference Manager 11 to keep track of my references. Ian Cassias posted a Power Point tutorial on how to get started with Reference Manager. However, for anyone who upgraded to Word 2007 , here is the link to add Reference Manager as Add-in on Words toolbar. It pretty straight forward, all you need to do is copy two files RM11Cwyw.dot and RM11Cwyw.wll to Words start up directory. Go to link for detailed instructions.

~Jon Oppelaar

During the week of December 3, 2007 students in the ECE 774/874 course gave 10-minute presentations on a neural networks-related topic of their choice. This is the third time I’m teaching this course, but only the first time I’ve asked students to give presentations to wrap the course up. I have to say that I was pleased with the results.

Ten students presented their work over three class periods. First up on Monday was Dan Reynolds who talked about using perceptrons for character recognition (see picture below). He ran a Matlab script and discussed the results. Great work Dan!

Next, Charlie Brickham discussed neural nets for image processing. After Charlie, we heard Jon Oppelaar talk about the Elman neural architecture which allows the recognition of time sequences. Finally, the last presentation on Monday was given by Andras Fekete who discussed using neural nets to train the coefficients for a PID controller.

On Tuesday, the first presentation was by Jonathan Carrier who talked about a Matlab script that he created to explore the Kohonen self organizing map. This was a fun presentation with nice visualizations of the Kohonen SOM (see picture below) and a Matlab demo. Nice work Jon!

Next up was Matt Minuti, who implemented a growing SOM neural network to compress sound files. Matt played examples of sound files in wav and mp3 form as well as compressed with his neural network. The result of compression with his network was not perfect, but this was a fun project. Nice work Matt! Here is a picture of Matt during his presentation:

As the last presentation on Tuesday, Oszkar Palinko introduced a speaker verification system he created in his undergraduate days.

On Wednesday Ivan Elhart gave the first presentation and discussed a paper by Italian researchers who used neural networks to classify honey. Nemanja Memarovic discussed the Matlab neural network toolbox and he showed demos available with the toolbox. The last presentation was given by Mike Farrar who proposed a neural network design for steerable sound projection.

As I said, I was very pleased with all of the presentations. However, I did want to mention three students who I thought did exceptionally well: Dan Reynolds, Jon Carrier and Matt Minuti. Dan, Jon and Matt not only had well-designed presentations, they also showed us live demos that really helped get their points accross. Congratulations guys on a job well done.

I also wanted to thank Jonathan Carrier, Jonathan Oppelaar and Oskar Palinko for scheduling and moderating the presentations, and making sure we had a laptop to use. Thanks also to Dan Reynolds and Jon Carrier for taking pictures, more of which you can see here.

Andrew Kun