Electrical Engineering in Context : Smart Devices, Robots and Communications

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING IN CONTEXT: SMART DEVICES, ROBOTS & COMMUNICATIONS by bestselling author Roman Kuc describes the basic components and technologies that make today's computer-assisted systems operate and cooperate, inviting the reader to understand by participating in the design process. Directed at the undergraduate electrical engineering student, this book starts with the basics and requires a working knowledge of algebra. Rather than simple plug-and-chug exercises, the book teaches sophisticated problem-solving and design tools. Students will learn through designing digital displays, extracting information from signals, and optimizing system performance through parameter value selection and observing graphical data displays. Animations showing dynamic system behavior and relating to the book figures are available through the book's companion site. At the completion of the course, students will have an understanding of the capabilities of current digital devices and ideas for possible new applications. This will benefit students in other courses requiring quantitative skills and in their profession. To help accomplish this tall order, the book is written in a graduated intensity that can be adapted to the specific needs and talents of each student: Basic commands and graphs are used in first-level problems that illustrate device performance while varying parameter values and in designs that are open-ended, driven by student curiosity. Some problems can be solved using software packages, but many exercises are for paper and pencil solution. MATLAB based examples and problems are also included for users comfortable with computer programming.

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.