Interview With the IEEE Signal Processing Cup Winners 2016

The final round of the 2016 Signal Processing Cup took part at ICASSP in Shanghai. This year's international undergraduate competition explored using a time-varying signature embedded in media recordings to determine the location-of-recording. We have interviewed the winners, the Team "Resonance" from the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh.

eNews: Dear Mohammad Ariful Haque, congratulations on supervising the best team of this year's Signal Processing Cup. You have managed to reach the SP Cup final three times in a row, and this year you've led students to win the SP Cups. What's your recipe for the achievement? Do your lab, department, and/or university have specific training environment/platform for such competitions?

Reply: I try to find a simple non-traditional solution that best fits the given problem. No, we do not have any specific training environment/platform for students’ competitions.

eNews: This strategy seems to work very well. In your eyes, is the SP Cup helpful for students during their learning in signal processing? If so, can you give specific examples?

Reply: The SP cup has profound impacts on our students. Through the competition, they get to know how fundamental signal processing algorithms are used to solve a real and complicated signal processing problem. They also need to explore many advanced signal processing areas outside their text books. They get familiar with signal processing journals and conference proceedings. We have also been able to attract some good and talented students to signal processing research through their participation in the SP cup.

eNews: Is the SP Cup helpful to your teaching in signal processing Courses? If so, can you give specific examples?

Reply: Each SP cup gave me the opportunity to work on a new signal processing application. So it increases my depth and breadth of knowledge that is really helpful for teaching signal processing courses.

eNews: Have you encountered difficulty in the supervision during the competition? How did you solve it?

Reply: This year, the project was relatively larger than the previous ones. So I needed to engage a bigger team. I assigned different tasks to different groups and the students showed good teamwork. The students had term final examination during the last days of the competition. However, we overcame all those difficulties.

eNews: Do you have any suggestions/comments on how to improve the SP Cup?

Reply: The recent SP cup was much better managed than the previous one. For example, the registration fee was waved for all the participants. I hope that such facilities will be continued. The SP cup could have a graduate category in addition to the current undergraduate level. The modality of the graduate category could be different than the undergraduate one. I believe this could further increase the number of participants.

eNews: Thank you for the interview.

We next interviewed a team member of "Resonance" from the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology, Bangladesh.

eNews: Hello Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Congratulations! Can you talk about your experience in attending the SP Cup? Did you encounter any difficulty and how did you (with your teammembers) solve it?

Reply: SP Cup was a great learning experience for us, indeed. Each year, it opened a new horizon and scope for us in the field of signal processing. This year, it was no different as we got to know and work with various machine learning algorithms. Since this time around, the task was on a broader scale and we had a team comprising of 10 students from different classes, it was tough to set schedule and coordinate at times. But then we split up our tasks and tried to have online meetings regularly in addition to the meetings with our supervisor.

eNews: Is the SP Cup helpful in your learning/understanding signal processing? If so, can you give specific examples?

Reply: Yes, absolutely. Normally we rarely get exposure to work with advanced SP techniques and their state-of-the art applications, but SP Cup is an eye-opener in this regard. For example, when we had a competition where we had to measure HR from PPG (in 2015), this attracted us towards wearable electronics biomedical SP research.

eNews: Is the SP Cup helpful in improving your ability in teamwork? If so, can you give specific examples?

Reply: Teamwork is most definitely a key to success on such large competitions and SP Cup has been a great experience for us. Like this year, we had both hardware and software tasks along with algorithm development. So, we were assigned specific jobs within a time-frame by our honorable teacher. Also, we got to learn how to gel with others to come up with a suitable solution.

eNews: Do you have any suggestions/comments on how to improve the SP Cup?

Reply: Perhaps it’s time we looked beyond just a presentation. If some teams come up with a really neat solution having good performance, we may continue the work in the form of a collaboration. Also, since SP Cup is held usually at ICASSP, if the works could be considered for publications in the conference during the year of the cup, that could be great as well.

eNews: Thanks for the interview.

More information can be found at:

http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/community/sp-cup/