Week 3

Hello everybody, we're back from another week of work. For the most part, I have just been expanding upon my knowledge of machine learning and signal processing so I can apply that knowledge later. For this post I will give you more information on what I am learning, and how I am learning it.

First of all, I mentioned briefly last week that I was auditing Dr. Berisha's class, Signals and Systems. Because I started off behind, I have spent a lot of time this week trying to catch up. I go the the class two times a week for about an hour where we cover concepts of signal processing. The unit/concept that we are currently learning about is Fourier transforms and series. I'll give a short explanation of those, but, like last week, it might be a little confusing.

Fourier series and transforms are both used to take a signal in the time domain and convert it to a signal in the frequency domain. You might be asking: 'Then what's the difference between series and transform?' Well series is only for periodic(repeating) signals, while transform is only for aperiodic (not repeating) signals. This is much more clear in the math, but I don't want to bore you with long equations, even though it is very interesting to see them work; I would rather tell you how it might be used in my project. In class all the signals we look at are pretty simple, however the concept of looking at a signal in different domains is still useful. Depending on what characteristic of speech you are looking at, it may be more useful to look at the speech with regards to time (likely useful for speaking rate) or with frequency (maybe for pitch).

Aside from the class, I am still learning about machine learning and deep neural networks, but this week had a little less focus on it. This week I learned about this more independently, where I would research myself and ask questions if I needed help. I was not able to look at more applications of neural networks on my project, however, because Prad was sick and couldn't come into the lab. Although unfortunate, this gave me an opportunity to catch up in the class, and start researching probability theory. I haven't learned enough of probability theory to try to tell you guys about it, but when I have I definitely will.

That is pretty much it for this week; I learned a lot, and plan to further my project with this knowledge in future weeks. But I do have one last thing to tell you about. In the lab, since the first week, there was a Go board game on the table that seemed a little out of place. For the first time on Thursday I saw it being played. Two of the students, Alan and someone I plan on meeting next week, decided to play on a whim. This actually led to a pretty interesting simulation of pieces, that I really couldn't explain to you, so I'll put a picture of it and tell you what it is called: Conway's Game of Life.

With that final, kinda unrelated, information comes the end of this post. I'll see you next week with hopefully more updates on the cough project.

Buh bye