-
Dartmouth
Engineering Cycle Book
A fantastic introduction to using engineering problem
solving in science and math problems by the Dartmouth Engineering
school.
-
Evaluation Tools
for Engineering and other subjects @ FLAGuide.org
Field-tested and ready to use, this web site maintains lots of
rubrics and helps on pinpointing what students do and do not
know.
-
Project
Ideas: CS 599 Intelligent Embedded Systems - HOMEPAGE
A USC graduate level course in using sensors and
computers to make "smart" systems. What our students
might do in a few years. See the "Student Projects"
link to get an idea.
-
Sensor
Webs Home
Leave it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop some
great DSP and wireless sensor technologies. These Martian pods
may find their biggest use here on Earth.
-
What
Is Engineering- John Hopkins
These engineering projects are classics (towers, bridges).
However, this virtual course has many direct connections to
math topics (matrices and vectors) and how to implement the
process. You'll need Adobe Acrobat to open the .PDF files.
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Engineering
Your Future - Percolate Site
The American Society for Engineering Education lays out
how students can get on track for engineering at college. A
very well-done site.
-
Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers
The largest professional organization in the world. A meeting
point for electrical engineers from all branches of the field.
-
The Scholastic Assessment
Test
A great opportunity for building a base for a great career in
engineering or pother fields. Contact your teacher and school
academic counselor for details on this examination. A college
education is as essential as a good primary education for an
engineer. For more sites and information, check out the search
for "SAT" on Google.
-
The
Electrical Engineer
A site explaining the basics to become an electrical engineer.
Engineering is not only for the nerds, it can be very exciting
as well!
-
The College Board
A list of colleges offering undergraduate programs in engineering
and technology.
-
ABET Home
The Accreditation Board for Engineering & Technology
is the gate-keeper for the accreditation of some 2400 universities
in the US.
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Music and Computers at Dartmouth
The Electro-Acoustic College at Dartmouth has a course on
Digital Audio. This is their table of contents with some nice
applets and illustrations of some of the ways music can be made
by computers. Additive Synthesis is discussed in some detail.
-
Princeton Sound Lab
Home of some of the pioneering work on speech synthesis and
physical modeling of sound, there are some great projects going
on here.
-
Fourier
Synthesis
A fantastic Java Applet that quickly allows you
to see how varying amplitudes and phases of sines and cosines can be combined to form a variety of complex signals. It behaves much like sketch wave in VAB and allows you to here what you've just created. The quantization button allows you to watch digitization in action.
-
Mathematics
Archives - Fourier Analysis & Wavelet Demonstrations.
This extensive page has over 20 links to various
applets and information on this basic function of signal processing.
-
JFK
Assassination Dallas Police Tapes
History in real time. These tapes are still being analyzed
with DSP's to attempt to tease out new information.
-
MTEC-111
Introduction to Music Technology Sample Questions
An on-line self-test that includes some of the terms from
Chapters 2 & 3.
-
Alexander
Graham Bell, Ph.D.: "On the Production and Reproduction
of Sound by Light"
An overview of the optical encoding of sound in October
1880 as written by the great inventor himself. We had to wait
till 1929 to finally hear movies however.
-
Nyquist Sampling theorem
A fundamental concept in signal processing is determining how
much bandwidth you need to accurately reproduce a signal, like
the human voice. It turns out that you need at least twice the
maximum frequency of a signal with an upper and lower set of
limits.
-
Phasor Phactory
This superb java applet from John Hopkins allows you to
create sinusoids, square, triangle, sawtooth, and many other
basic waveforms using a clean interface.
-
Additive Synthesis
in polyphonic cell phones
Nokia, Samsung, and other 3-G cell phone manufacturers are
using near MP3 quality sound features as marketing tools to
get the cutting-edge adopters (read "you") to purchase a new
phone and stay online. These profitable online ventures
include gaming, music downloads, and other features not
possible before. How waveform synthesis tricks are used to
create a symphony of ringtones can be explored at:
>
16 tone polyphonic details in the Samsung SGH-N620
(Flash app) under "16 Poly". Here you can listen to 1, 4, 8,
and 16 polyphonic samples.
>
Nokia's polyphonic music page
> SMAF
multimedia polyphonic music file format for cell
phones uses less space than MIDI (!) and allows sync with
video and images. This is Yamaha's homepage for
developers. Learn how to create auditory sculptures that can
soothe the savage beast or disrupt an entire auditorium in a
moment :-).
-
Spectrogram usages: bird identification in the wild
This Adobe Acrobat .PDF file gives a biologist's intro
to spectrum analysis. A different approach to audio processing!
-
Underwater
Recordings - Cetacean Research Technology
MP3's of Orca whales off the Washington coast. The
home page lists specialized spectral analysis tools for marine
biologists.
-
Wildlife Sounds Page
Doug Von Gausig has compiled all sorts of .wav files you can
analyze in VAB's spectrogram tool.
-
Anabat Analysis
Tool for Bat Sounds
This spectrum analyzer is used to record ultrasonic bat signals
and later process them with the
Anabat software created in
Queensland, Australia. This tool is rapidly becoming a
standard
inventory tool for wildlife biologists interested in
monitoring bat populations.
-
Bat Detectors Homepage at Leeds University
A general overview of how EE's have helped create specialized
tools for bat echolocation analysis. Heterodyning, Frequency
Division, and Time-expansion techniques are all discussed.
Various ultrasonic transducers and commercial systems are
compared. Places to get parts in order to build your own
ultrasonic transducer are included.
-
Spectrogram Shareware from Richard Horne
If you want to change spectrogram axis settings, color
intensity, or tweak anything you wish, this great shareware
program will do it for you. Limited to a ten minute run-time
before your register, this spectrogram is by far the most robust
and easy-to-use of the spectrogram program's we've used in
class. Know you can really figure out what is hidden in the "pumpkin.wav"
sound file!
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Kodak Digital Imaging
Tutorial
A comprehensive coverage of all the topics we cover in the
Infinity curriculum by Kodak. It even has multiple choice
questions at the end of each module. -
Cornell
University Tutorial
A slightly higher level tutorial.
-
Matrix
Multiplication Demonstration
If this topic is too hard to understand then just watch
these matrices reshuffle and do the math in real-time animations.
-
Matrix
and Quaternion FAQ
Basic introduction to the math of matrices used to describe
images.
-
Matrix operations primer
An introduction to Python language programming shows how images
can be rotated, sheared, and otherwise transformed.
-
Matrices for game developers
This pdf file is a brief tutorial outline of how to use
transformation matrices can be used to allow games to be
developed. -
Interactive
Illustrations of Color Perception
A Brown University research project aimed at designing better
interfaces for computing. Take the survey of how you perceive
the color patterns. -
Art & science: how the brain processes
imagery
>
Impressionism and visual processing- Harvard's Focus
News
>
da Vinci to Monet- artist's take advantage of the
brain's visual processing system. -
Color
theory explained
Handprint.com does a very thorough job explaining color and the
nature of the visual system. A very easy to follow tutorial. -
YUV color format
RGB isn't the only way to describe an image. Other codes
have been adopted to serve different needs- like television
transmission. The "YUV" format is used in Europe (YIQ is used in
U.S. TV broadcasts.) "The Y component of YUV is not "yellow"
but luminance. Only the Y component of a color TV signal is
shown on black-and-white TVs. The chromaticity information is
encoded in the U and V components. Instead of storing an image
as 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green and 8 bits of blue per pixel,
an RGB color image can be reduced to 16 bits per pixel by
conversion to luminance and color differences." -
Squant
color spoof
A little humor for those web designers who have to worry
about RGB color outputs. Have you had your monitor squant-corrected
yet? -
Ohio
State Tutorial
An introductory course in digital image processing. A good revision
for the students.
-
ABCNEWS.com:
VinylVideo Puts Images on LPs
How to use the analog technology of vinyl to store images?
A reinvention of the audio "wheel" that is so retro
it's on the cutting edge.
- Face
scanning software
Faces at the super bowl were scanned with image processing
software to try and ID felons in the crowd. An invasion of privacy
or a new tool in the fight against crime? We'll need to decide
soon.
-
Improving image transmission by adding analog noise
Researchers have devised a way to encode and transmit image
information directly as analog optical signals into optical fibers.
They can make this signal more resistant to degradation or
becoming hopelessly confused with other signals by doing what may
seem counter-intuitive: adding more noise to the signal!
-
Jamming hand-held camcorders in movie theatres
Now that you know about sampling rates and aliasing in signals,
how might you be able to use the difference in sampling rates of
the human retina and a silicon retina (the camcorder) to prevent
movie piracy? Take a look at this system being evaluated for
keeping the first-run movies off the net days after they hit
theatres.
> Imaging
Hardware Tutorials for Chapter 18
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You will need the Macromedia
Flash player for most of these media
rich sites.
-
BitStreams
The Whitney Museum's Flash-intensive site that explores
the nature of digital art. A fascinating experience.
-
Vertex
Blending for Lifelike Poses
Ever wonder how digital joints have gotten to appear so seamless
when different parts that have to be connected together and
move in the same worldspace? ATI's Hardware Technical web site
gives some details on how gamers can literally keep their shirts
on in first-person games.
-
Pixar Animation Studios
A true pioneer in computer graphics and animation! See trailers
of brand new animation movies. The How
We Do It section describes the
14 stages a movie moves through from start to finish.
- Synthetic
Actors Guild
This LA Times article discusses something that Hollywood
will be facing soon enough- how do you make completely digital
actors and what sort of perks do they get on the set?
-
Industrial Light and Magic
A studio that came out of the Star Wars movie. These were the
guys who developed the animation for T2! The Toolbox
has some updates on the latest from their bag of tricks.
You'll need to register to view their latest short movies.
-
The Matrix
Enter the construct! The Matrix was a revolution
in movie making. An excellent example of technology taking a
giant leap forward. Take the red pill- the geek in you will
love this site. The
Bullet time walk-through page describes
how this SFX was created.
-
Geometry
algorithms
How to use these vector processing tools to describe and
manipulate 3-D space
-
Final
Fantasy: The Technology Within
This multi-part interview describes the polygon meshes,
lighting, and hair modeling required
for this epic CG movie.
-
WETA Digital
The folks of WETA put together the Academy Award�
winning special effects for the movie trilogy "The Lord of the
Rings". Flash is required. -
Giant
Studios Image Capture
How do you digitize real life actors and 3-D objects in order to
create thousand-orc armies on the screen? The state-of-the art
laser scanning stuff is all here. Will we all have digital
copies or avatars in the future? Flash required. -
MASSIVE AI software overview.
So now you have your thousand-orc army. How do you get them to
fight, move, and interact without modeling every creature
individually at 30 frames per second? Give them intelligence of
a sort by using Artificial Intelligence algorithms to automate
the process. WETA developed the MASSIVE software program to help
create the spectacular fight scenes in the L.O.R. movies II and
III. Intelligent agents such as these will steadily become more
and more a part of the daily fabric of life in the 21st century.
This Popular Science web article describes how it's done.
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Digital Image Morphing
A cool demo of digital morphing. Achtung! Site takes a while
to load completely.
-
Noise
in Images
See the effect of noise addition in images.
-
Iterative
Noise Removal
An advanced iterative technique to remove structured noise in
images.
-
Image Smoothing
A technique for impulse noise removal. Shows a sequence of noisy
images as they are cleaned up. -
Image Processing Bench
How to achieve lots of cool image processing tricks by using
computer programming. Some free downloads will allow you to
achieve these same effects within a simple interface. -
Image Segmentation
UC Santa Barbara's Imaging Processing and Vision Research lab
has some nice segmentation illustrations shown here. A necessary
step towards machine identification of an object.
-
Bio-image Informatics
If image processing can allow machine vision, why not apply
these techniques to image libraries of cell structures so the
identification process can be automated? UCSB and other
universities are sharing a grant to develop methods to mine data
from such image banks.
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Mojoworld:
Fractal
Planetary Modeler
- Pandromeda Home page
The source of the free download, Mojoworld Transporter, that will
literally open up new worlds of possibility for 3-D real-time
modeling.
- fractional
Brownian Motion (fBM)
The heart of many common fractal effects, this advanced
procedural texturing, this Intel tutorial discusses the NOISE
function used in Mojoworld. A little noise in an image can be
a good thing!
- Ken
Perlin's lecture on the above topic of NOISE!
How is noise like a little salt in the soup? How can you model
fur? This set of slides and commentary from the man who is now
working for ILM and George Lucas is a nice intro to creating pseudorandmoness
in fractals.
-
Animated Waves on Mojoworld
Swiss programmer Bernard Krummenacher has created some amazing
animations of wave motions using Mojoworld. A sample of what is
to come!
- Tutorial
for using the Mojoworld Generator software
A step-by-step guide to building your own planet using the various
procedural texture editors in the program.
-
The Hubble
Telescope
Digital techniques allowed crystal clear images from the Hubble
to be obtained by laboratories spread throughout the world.
Here are some beautiful images
captured by the Hubble.
-
Spy
Satellites
Images captured by spy satellites allow the US government to
keep a watchful eye on the rest of the world. Without CCD cameras
and digital transmission of images, real-time supervision would
be impossible. This BBC site outlines their uses in Afghanistan.
-
Satellite
Images
Have fun finding your house!
-
The
Search For Asteroids Procedure
A slightly more serious use of image processing to look
for the sorts of rocks that the movie Armageddon
was written about.
-
Chandra X-ray
Observatory
Digital images can be captured in the x-ray spectrum as well.
Most of the radiation from space lies in this band and hence
the Chandra x-ray observatory project gains so much significance.
Just check out the pictures on the site, simply breathtaking!
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CS 105 The Web: Technologies and Techniques
This Williams College Computer Science Course overlaps
with much of Infinity Chapters 7 & 8. The Digital Transmission
lecture notes are worth the visit.
-
Hobbes' Internet Timeline
A veritable mine of information listing places and people instrumental
in developing technology for the web. A true inspiration for the
budding engineer.
- PBS History
of the Internet
A concise overview of the major events.
-
Short History of the Internet by Bruce Sterling
Tired of the jargon engineers can become immersed in? Read this
very literate article about how the internet was developed.
-
Cisco
Do you know how actually this giant was born? It was in a small
apartment way back in 1984. Just two decades later it is a virtual
monopoly for routers, the backbone gatekeepers of the web. This
is their product documentation web site.
- How
do routers work?
Marshall Brain's How Stuff Work's examines this specialized computer
that is at the heart of the internet's ability to connect.
- Computer
Networks and Internets
Douglas Comer at Purdue has an excellent web site to accompany
his book. The animations
of networking protocols and multiplexing are worth the
visit.
- Call
routing in telephone networks
Another superb site illustrating math applications from
the PLUS web site in the UK. Algorithms to make efficient network
connections are illustrated.
- Video on "Warriors
of the .Net"
Great intro to the Internet. A large (73MB!) video
that you shouldn't try to downloaded under 56K conditions!
- Visually
tracing your data packets
Want to see how routers send your data packets from point A to
point B via the fiber-optic nervous system of the internet? Take
a look at this free demo (a java applet) from Visualware.com that
will map the geographic connections between routers on the internet.
Type in your school's web site and see where your data "hops".
The quickest route between two computers isn't always the shortest
one if there is congestion!
-
Internet
2 Project
Imagine a fiber optics backbone with a bandwidth so large as to
accommodate several million simultaneous users at fast speeds.
This Yahoo page has several links to this research project between
academia and high-tech companies.
-
The
Abilene Project
Named for the Kansas railhead connecting to the wide-open spaces
of the high prairie, this academic and company consortium is
creating and testing the widest fiber based "pipe" possible for
internet communications. Initially running at 2.4 Gigabits per
second, it will ramp up to near 10 Gbps using next generation
routers and protocols. What can you do with bandwidth like that?
The question is- what can't you do?
- Internet Protocol version 6
(IPv6)
When you view this web page you're using IPv4, which is nearly 20
year old. The number of IP addresses, much like phone numbers in
an area, are a finite resource that will eventually be consumed by
the ever burgeoning number of internet connected devices. The
answer to more needing more phone numbers for cell phones was to
add more area codes, even if you're calling your neighbor across
the street. IPv6 not only adds more "area codes" but also improves
how routers and other vital components communicate with each
other. The Internet 2 will use IPv6. The
specifics
of IPv6 can be found here.
-
Using the Internet 2 in a K-12 environment
What sort of "middle ware" will allow the students of the future
to communicate with the massive bandwidth of the Internet 2? This
initiative explores some of the issues that will need to be
addressed.
- Defense Science
Study Group -Future Network Threats
What sorts of threats might the information nervous system
of the US face in a connected world? The NIPC is proposed in this
study.
- U.S.'s
Defenseless Department
Why didn't the NIPC work well in it's first two years? Read
this Wired report about how turf wars, lack of leadership, and
other bureaucratic issues had crippled the NIPC.
- NIPC in a post 9-11
environment
Now a major component of Homeland Security, NIPC has the
impetus and funding necessary to watch over America's cybernetic
infrastructure.
-
Military to use packetized communications 4/03
Laser communications between military satellite constellations and
broadband communications for US forces will require a switch to
packetized instead of switched data. Think of it as a High
Frontier Internet or Broadband for the Battlefield.
- Reading
Email Headers
The Stopspam.org web site details how to tell where your
email originated and how it was transmitted over the Net.
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- Adam's
Multimedia Tutorial-compression
Though several years old, this WebMonkey overview of audio
and video codec's (compression + decompression
algorithms) used by Realplayer, Flash, and other streaming
technologies is clear.
-
Data
Compression
A web site devoted to the principles and practice of data compression.
Includes a discussion on data compression in speech
(with a good "demo"),
images,
and a Huffman
tutorial under " fundamental algorithms".
-
Compression Basics @ HowStuffWorks: Several pages going
through the basics of lossy and lossless compression.
-
Lossless Data
Compression
A site designed for an introduction to the various data compression
algorithms used today. Great hands-on demos!
-
JPEG
graphics compression format
This common web graphics format is based on the "Joint
Photographic Experts Group" specifications. Below are several
sites aimed at different audiences that explain how and what
this .jpg extension is about:
>
The JPEG File: A quick non-technical guide with various
image qualities shown
> JPEG
image compression FAQ: A thorough discussion of the
JPEG standard and when to use this in web design.
>
Myths and Facts about JPEG graphics: This about.com
page explores some of the misconceptions about .jpg's.
-
Compression
Pointers
Books and links at internz.com from A-Z. Very thorough list
of the people and topics in this field.
-
Dr.
Ross's Compression Crypt
A legend in the data compression field, Ross Williams has
a unique site that shows a sense of humor and love of old horror
movies.
-
Software to unzip identity of unknown composers
How can lossless compression utilities like
Winzip help identify the
composer of a musical score? By creating compression via
run-length coding, such software finds and groups similar coding
blocks into symbols requiring fewer bits. If composers, like
authors, have patterns to their scores that act as fingerprints,
then the compression tools can quickly find such bit patterns.
-
Webreview.com
- How Voice Processing Will Change the Web
An overview of how signal processing of speech will change
our interactions with not only the computer, but also our relationships
in a connected world.
-
MP3
audio format compression cycle: An overview of how
an MP3 is "ripped" from a CD audio file.
-
MP3
format and the Huffman coding inside it: This overview
discusses the psychoacoustic model of compression found
within an MP3.
-
CNN.com
- Technology - Meet the men behind the MP3 format
This May 2000 article is a brief summary of the MP3 tool.
-
Brief Wavelet Overview
If you can sort a song's frequency components using a
Fourier Transform and group and rank their relative
frequencies to produce the Huffman coding tree, why not do
something similar to an image? Wavelets (composed of many
small waves) are the latest and greatest compression
technique that is making a major impact on the imaging
applications you run into every day. An image can be
decomposed row by row and then column by column into many
different visual frequencies to create a much smaller small
data set. Catch the "motherwave"!
-
Beyond Discovery: "Wavelets: Seeing the Forest and the Trees"
The National Academies of Science creates feature articles for how
applications, such as compression. develop from basic research. This article tracks
wavelet analysis tools from their creation in the hunt for oil, to
basic mathematical research into their validity, and then on to
the applications in such movies as "A Bug's Life".
A wonderfully comprehensive web site!
- The
FBI Fingerprint Image Compression Standard: Chris Brown
outlines how the FBI solves the common issue with graphics files:
limited bandwidth and storage. Both JPEG and wavelet compressions
are examined.
-
JPEG2000 compression standard
Using lossy and lossless wavelet compression techniques, this new
image format will achieve 200 to 1 compression for the lossy
compression and 2 to 1 for the lossless techniques. The quality of
these smaller files (.jp2) far outstrips the current .jpg image
standard you see on the web all of the time. The .jp2 standard
allows for "regions of interest" to retain detail while the
background data has a lower quality.
- Satellite
imagery and mapping is a natural for wavelet compression
Mapping Science, Inc. is a Seattle-based software firm that has
created .jp2 plug-in's for use with geographical information
system (GIS) data.
-
The
Wavelet Tutorial Part I
Robi Polkar's introduction to a new algorithm that uses fractal-like
redundancies to do extreme compressions on signals.
-
Wavelet Java applets @ Rice
The DSP group at Rice has lots of MatLab code for wavelets and
some graphical applets for seeing this advanced technique at work
over time. Upper level undergraduate college material!
-
Microsoft
research paper on time-compression methods
Microsoft's research center has numerous on-line
publications about cutting-edge investigations into
human-computer interfaces. Written for the educated layman,
these word documents make great references for reports.
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- Bell
Labs Intro to Information Theory
The best introduction to this field and how it relates
to electronics and networks.
> An excellent site!
- Comms
pioneer Claude Shannon dead at 84
Obituary (2/01) of the man who established Information
Theory as a discipline in 1948. One of the founders of modern
computer science, he was also well known for unicycle riding
at the Bell Labs where he worked.
- RIP
Claude Shannon
This UK site has a brief tribute and some good links to
the pioneer who made modern digital communications possible.
-
Biography of Claude Shannon
As part of an award winning documentary, UCSD film makers have
place a fairly comprehensive overview of Shannon's life and
work on this site. The documentary is also available in
streaming video format.
-
As
We May Think- Vannevar Bush
This famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article was uncanny
in its predictions of where science and technology might lead
as America emerged from WWII. The conceptual underpinnings
for the Internet are laid out here.
-
Google's Information Theory Listings
The former Stanford folks who founded my favorite web search
engine have tipped their hats to this great discipline and
have collected the best links within this vital field. The
number of topics that Shannon's theories impact upon are found
throughout science, mathematics, and engineering.
-
Claude Shannon & Information theory: a 1999 sophomore paper
A nice overview of the key points in web format done for a
Stanford class project.
- Information
Theory Introduction
This Cambridge professor's lectures outlines the field
of Information Theory as of 1995. Written for college seniors
and grad students.
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