i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 10 May 2010

Previous Newsletters

Final Year Project Presentation Prize

The Finalist Project Presentation was held on 11 May and the Best Project Presentation Prize of £100 was awarded to Katrine Molden (BEng Audio Engineering), for her presentation on Simulated Microphone Arrays in Virtual Acoustic Space. The abstract is included at the end of this article.

The Final Year Project Open Day is held once a year to give the final year engineering degree students the opportunity to showcase their final year project. Each student is allocated a place to demonstrate their software/hardware and to discuss their work through a poster they have prepared.  A panel of judges selected four projects to go forward for the chance to win the Best Project Presentation Prize.

The finalists were Katrine Molden on Simulated Microphone Arrays in Virtual Acoustic Space, Carl Scrivener on Guitar Effects Processor using DSP, Michael Rosevear  on Roboyacht; A Truly Zero Carbon Vehicle and Xing Zhao Yan on Computer Aided design & Development of Wavelength – Tunable Telecommunication Lasers.

Katrine Molden, Simulated Microphone Arrays in Virtual Acoustic Space

Abstract - Microphone arrays consists of two or more microphones positioned in a particular pattern such that when combined with appropriate processing it can be used to:  

a)      Improve recordings by discriminating between sounds based on direction

b)      Localising spatial position of sound source  

This project concerns beamforming techniques which aim to improve audio recordings. The directional response of microphones and hence microphone arrays are inherently frequency dependant. This is not a problem in narrow band applications such as radars.   However, speech is a broadband signal and frequency dependency is therefore highly undesirable. A technique which avoids this is discussed, and the effect simulated in Matlab by the use of simulation material from two virtual acoustic spaces, produced by the use of the software CATT-Acoustic.  Discussion on real world implementation is also included.

Final Year Group Photo available to order

The Final Year Group Photo is now available to order from the General Office. The cost is £4 for a 10 x 8 print in a presentation folder.

You must pay for the photo at the time of placing the order and with the correct money as the General Office does not carry change.

The deadline for ordering the prints is Friday 21 May at 4.30pm. The prints are expected to be ready to collect a week after that, Friday 28 May.

Summer Placement Opportunity  

If you are a second-year student with strong Web application skills, then please watch this space. One of our industrial links, JobServe at Tiptree, will be offering summer placements for some enthusiastic students. Details to follow. For informal enquiries, please contact Simon Lucas or Udo Kruschwitz via email.

REO Enterprise Drop in Session

The REO Enterprise Team would like to invite you to an informal “drop in” session on Wednesday 19 May 2010, from 10am-1pm.  Tea, coffee and cakes will be provided and you will have the opportunity to talk to the Enterprise Team about any ideas or questions you may have relating to Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, Consultancy, Intellectual Property protection, Patenting, Licensing, etc.

If you have a specific area or idea you would like to discuss, please let us know what time you will be attending so that we can ensure the right person is available to help. You can arrange this by contacting Linette Edonya, on extension 2925 or ledonya@essex.ac.uk  

If you can’t commit to a specific time, or would just like to find out more about Knowledge Transfer in general, please do drop by at any stage during the session.  We’ll be here on Wednesday 19 May between 10am-1pm, in the REO Board Room (room 5.609) in the Rab Butler Building on Square 2.

We aim to make this event an informative, enjoyable and regular occurrence and we look forward to seeing you.

Staff News

Professor Huosheng Hu and Professor Simon Lucas

Professor Huosheng Hu and Professor Simon Lucas have been invited to serve once again on the EPSRC Peer Review College. Professor Hu has been a member of the College since 2000.

Professor Simon Lucas will give an invited tutorial at Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) 2010 in Krakow, Poland, in September. PPSN is one of the leading conferences on evolutionary computation.

The title the tutorial is "Learning to Play Games". For more details see here.

Paper Published

M. R. Al-Mulla, F. Sepulveda (2010), Novel Feature modelling the Prediction and detection Of sEMG Muscle Fatigue towards Autonomous wearable system, Sensors, 10(5):4838-4854, doi:10.3390/s100504838. 

Abstract - Surface Electromyography (sEMG) activity of the biceps muscle was recorded from ten subjects performing isometric contraction until fatigue. A novel feature (1D spectro_std) was used to extract the feature that modeled three classes of fatigue, which enabled the prediction and detection of fatigue. Initial results of class separation were encouraging, discriminating between the three classes of fatigue, a longitudinal classification on Non-Fatigue and Transition-to-Fatigue shows 81.58% correct classification with accuracy 0.74 of correct predictions while the longitudinal classification on Transition-to-Fatigue and Fatigue showed lower average correct classification of 66.51% with a positive classification accuracy 0.73 of correct prediction. Comparison of the 1D spectro_std with other sEMG fatigue features on the same dataset show a significant improvement in classification, where results show a significant 20.58% (p < 0.01) improvement when using the 1D spectro_std to classify Non-Fatigue and Transition-to-Fatigue. In classifying Transition-to-Fatigue and Fatigue results also show a significant improvement over the other features giving 8.14% (p < 0.05) on average of all compared features.