The Digital Information Age: An Introduction to Electrical Engineering

THE DIGITAL INFORMATION AGE SECOND EDITION by bestselling author Roman Kuc is designed for students considering electrical engineering as a major, and non-engineering majors interested in understanding digital communication systems. Communication between humans and smart devices takes place through sensors and actuators, with logic circuits manipulating binary data to implement useful tasks. The text then examines the basic problem of communicating audio and video data over a network connecting computers and smart devices. System operation is described from analog-to-digital conversion, signals that encode data, through the processing that extracts data from noise-corrupted signals and error correction techniques, to data packet transmission over wired and wireless networks. Basic topics from probability and digital signal processing are presented as needed and illustrated with relevant examples. Ideas are illustrated and extended by problems and projects completed in Excel, with sophistication that evolves along with the course, starting with spreadsheet formulas and graphs, through macros, to simple Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming that produces animations that simulate system operation. The accrued facility with Excel techniques is a course outcome valued by students in all majors.

Roman Kuc received his BSEE from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. At Bell Telephone Laboratories, he investigated efficient speech coding techniques. As a postdoctoral research associate at Columbia University, he applied digital signal processing to diagnostic ultrasound signals to characterize liver disease. He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale where as the Director of the Intelligent Sensors Laboratory he has been pursuing research in intelligent sensors to extract information from data for applications in robotics and bioengineering. Current projects investigate biosonar systems, such as bats and dolphins, and implement biomimetic sonars and neuromorphic spike processing. Professor Kuc is a past chairman of the Instrumentation Section of the New York Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the texts Introduction to Digital Signal Processing and Electrical Engineering in Context. He is an Honorary Academician of the Higher Education Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Fellow of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. He received Yale's Sheffield Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997.