IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They’re responsible for developing a number of standards, such as the 802.11g wireless standard which you may have seen before. There are a number of different societies within the IEEE, most of which publish at least a couple monthlies or quarterlies with titles like ‘IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology’. Having read some of these publications over the last 1.5 years, I’ve been struck by the surprisingly straightforward nature of many of the topics written about. This is not to say that electrical engineering is undeserving of its reputation as being difficult. To be sure, I understand at most a mere 25% of what these articles are talking about. But it’s this most basic 25% that comes across as being akin to things one might encounter in elementary school or younger. There’s nothing profound about the most fundamental concepts that take center stage in these articles. I’ve sampled some below to illustrate:

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OFDM is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the multitude of abbreviations, but soon you discover they have a knack for inventive algorithm naming. This image compares two methods of reconstituting a signal after transmission…I think. Basically just add up the entries in each column and the result should be the same. It’s how you get to that result which differs, and in the article they’ve argued that OFDM has advantages over TDM. It just seems like something a teacher might ask a class of 5 year olds. “We want to end up with the same signal that we started with. How can we do it?” Right, onto the next one.

Here’s a picture of a signal traveling from a transmitter to a receiver or vice-versa. AoD = angle of departure, AoA = angle of arrival, and AS is the angular spread. These parameters are important in modeling/simulating signals propagating through multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. “MIMO is used to increase dramatically throughput over single antenna systems.” How profound!

So I guess damascene metallization is a process for fabricating integrated circuits (ICs). It reminds me of playing with wooden blocks in preschool.

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This one shows the types of damage an IC wafer can sustain during processing. It makes intuitive sense based on the amount of physics knowledge a person acquires just by being alive for about 10 years.

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This one compares 3 different processes for IC fabrication. Developing efficient IC fabrication techniques is big business.

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The abstract from this article states “The transmission reach of signals in optical transmission systems is limited. To go beyond these transparent reach limits, signal regeneration is necessary to re-amplify, reshape, and retime the optical signals.” So here’s an illustration of a little network. The numbered circles are nodes, I’m not sure what that means. I believe the bold lines represent physical connections. In (b) node 1 is “opaque” as an indication that it can now regenerate the original signal. This means that nodes 0 and 3 are connected through node 1 and nodes 2 and 3 are similarly connected, hence the dotted lines. One-hop transparent reach is assumed, which means, beginning at a given node, the signal can’t go through more than one node when considering which nodes the starting node is connected to. When node 2 is opaque as well, each node is “connected” to all the others. HNF = hub node first and is an efficiency algorithm which determines the minimum number and required placement of opaque nodes in order to ensure connectivity between nodes. Great.

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These last two are from an article about segmentation and classification of images. They scan thousands of images onto a computer and run software to categorize them.

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LDA is linear discriminant method. I don’t know where the A comes from. LDA is a training and classification method. “LDA attempts to find directions w that maximize variance among the means of different classes (between-class scatter) and at the same time minimize the variance within each class (within-class scatter).” This results in images classified as being within the class ‘water’ looking very similar to each other and very different from images classified as being within the class ‘mountain’.

It doesn’t bother me that when I read these articles I’m reminded of being a child full of wonder about the world. At first it surprised me. Now I think it’s cool.