Posted in March 2015

“Privacy and security are those things you give up when you show the world what makes you extraordinary.”
-Margaret Cho

Quarter 3 has been filled with courses that have assignments and projects. I have opted for five courses which are from diverse fields. Couple of them are from the signal processing field and couple of them are security related while the last one is Medical Imaging.

Estimation and Detection course is compulsory for students of Signals and Systems track. In this course the theoretical background for estimation was dealt in detail while we also had few lectures on detection. The theory is widely used in many present day applications such as radar, sonar, speech enhancement, communication systems, etc. This course is useful for students who are interested in taking Signal Processing for communication course in Q4. Distributed Signal processing course included few concepts in convex optimization as well as graphical models. Both these topics were dealt with keeping Distributed systems in mind.

Network Security and Hacking Lab are the most interesting courses for me this quarter. In Network Security course, vulnerabilities at each of the OSI layers was discussed along with possible countermeasures. The homeworks included implementation of known attacks at the Data Link and Network layer. Though the homeworks were time consuming, it helped in understanding the security requirements of the network stack better.

Medical Imaging course offered by EWI includes Computer Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Acoustic Imaging. The lectures included a brief overview of the concepts in of these topics. The course grade depends on different assignments for each of these topics. The assignments include a CT image simulation using Matlab, a review on a paper on MRI and a design project for Acoustic Imaging.

In February, Vox Delft screened the movie ‘My Dinner with Andre’. The movie is philosophical and involved two characters who are involved in an extended conversation about life. In addition, Vox Delft also had discussions on couple of interesting topics such as ‘What is there was no such thing as reality?’ and ‘What are the biggest dividing forces in the world?’ I volunteered for TedXDelft which was organized on February 27^th. I had the opportunity to have engaging conversations with speakers as well as guests.

Image Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_awareness#/media/File:Loose_Chips_Sink_Ships.jpg