The Digital Information Age: An Introduction to Electrical Engineering

Captivate your students - and entice new students to the electrical engineering major - with Roman Kuc's illuminating look at how commonplace information systems, like infra-red auto-focus cameras, compact disc systems, bar codes, credit and smart cards work, and how clever engineering solutions are used to solve technical problems. Designed for readers with no science background, the book introduces them to the thought processes used by electrical engineers to think quantitatively and then design useful systems. As a result, readers not only learn the facts behind information and transmission, coding and storage, but how these systems came to be developed in response to a shift of information to a digital medium. Unlike traditional science texts that begin with theory and then illustrate that theory with applications, this book starts with practical, real-world systems and then presents the physical theory and mathematical analysis required to understand their operation.

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.