Wednesday, April 29, 2015

New Areas and New Experiences

Last two months have brought me a lot of new knowledge and exposures on completely unexpected things. First of all, I received some opportunities to conduct some teaching in courses such as Wireless Sensor Networks, Computer Networks and Information Security. As teaching is something that fascinates me always, I never miss an opportunity to teach something to somebody. I think these little teaching experiences will pay me off one day to become a great teacher. In addition to teaching, I'm the guy who handles the lab practicals for Wireless Sensor Networks course. 

Above all these things, I got the chance to put my mind on some really great stuff in research. I have started to co-supervise two final year undergraduate projects together with Dr. Chamath. One work is related to a new kind of sensor network architecture which came into our mind after closely studying the recent trends in wireless sensor network world. The second project is a Radio Tomographic Imaging (RTI) work which is a completely new thing to me. It involves using small low cost radio transceivers and some mathematics. We are still in the early stage of these works but the things seems interesting so far. In addition to these two final year research projects, two postgraduate students of Dr. Chamath are involved in two interesting works which made me to involve in their work too and that is solely because of my personal interest. Their works involves software defined radios (SDRs) and some sophisticated mathematical analysis stuff. 

Because of the requirements of research works, I have started to follow Digital Signal Processing (DSP) subject. I had never learnt things on that area and therefore I had to start from the beginning. One great book suggested by Dr. Chamath regarding DSP subject is The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing By Steven W. Smith. This book is available online for free download from here. This book explains the subject matter in a very simple way minimizing the mathematical jargon which may discourage an armature reader of those topics. Additionally, I have started to learn GNU Radio which is a very powerful software defined radio tool used by everybody in the domain. These days we are waiting for some SDR hardware devices to arrive which we ordered. Once those stuff arrived, the knowledge of DSP and SDR will be highly necessary to proceed in our research work.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Extraterrestrial view of our island

This morning, I saw this picture taken about two weeks ago by a NASA astronaut called Terry Virts (@AstroTerry) who is in International Space Station (ISS) at the moment. I couldn't help myself from putting a little note about it. Looking at our planet from the space is an enlightening experience for humans which shows how insignificant our problems are in this small lifetime. That experience becomes much more fascinating when we see our small island in the vast planet surface. Last night I was working till late on my computer and made me to wake up late. However, after waking up in this morning, seeing this picture made my day in a great way.

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