Putting Digital Comms to work
“I love the UK academic way! Here the supervisors and teachers encourage you to discuss and debate things. Of course, when I first came, my English was not very good and I felt a bit shy about talking in classes. But now I love having the chance to discuss both what we are learning about and also my ideas with academics and fellow students who are really interested in the same things as me. This way we all learn together.”
Miao Yu came to Loughborough from Shandong Province in 2007 with a first degree in Electronic and Information Engineering, keen to experience first hand the UK education he had heard so much about. He successfully applied to do Digital Communication Systems and soon adapted to English education ways to become an outstanding student, scooping both the Best Student Award and the Best Project Award in his year group.
“I want to thank my supervisor - he inspired me and the experience of doing my individual project taught me so much about how to approach research; so much, that I wanted to stay and do more!”
Miao’s MSc project was related to multi-modal blind-source separation. This is a technique for distinguishing between different types of audio signal when they are mixed together and separating them, for example picking out different voices at a meeting in a noisy environment where several people are speaking at the same time. (We have all been to meetings like that!)
The Department was so impressed with his work that Miao was awarded a scholarship to stay and join the Advanced Signal Processing Group where his research aims to contribute to the fields of pattern recognition and image processing.
He is currently working on combining audio and video information in a smart room environment which can be used to detect unusual or unexpected movement, specifically people falling. He hopes the practical application of his work will lead to safety and health improvements in the care of the elderly or infirm.