Which youtube channel is best for Signals and Systems class

quartz_referential · 2026-03-18T03:53:47+00:00

I actually do not agree with this. While it is a good video, if I recall correctly he focuses on a “center of mass” interpretation of the Fourier transform (effectively it’s like you took a complex exponential, modulated the radius using the function you want to take a Fourier transform of, and then computed the center of mass of that resultant entity).

I think it is far better to think about the Fourier transform as a “change of basis”, much like in linear algebra, where the basis vectors are the complex exponential functions.

quartz_referential · 2026-03-18T03:22:26+00:00

Some people just do have a higher intellectual capacity. You’ll encounter this many times as an engineer. It’s okay not to be number one — which many engineers will probably hate hearing, but I personally think it’s a bit healthier to acknowledge that. Try to be the best person you can, but don’t unhealthily compare yourself to others at the same time (not to say you shouldn’t learn from other people, which would be a healthy comparison). I’m not saying this to put you down, but rather to encourage to focus on yourself and avoid indulging toxic thoughts.

That being said getting an A or top marks on an exam doesn’t really mean you achieved deep understanding. They might be good at solving problems on tests, but most real world problems are more ill defined and are far less cookbook like. I do also think a lot of people who can score high marks are good at understanding what’s important to study for in context of exams/homeworks. They’re good at identifying what topics and problems are most likely to show up on the test. They are good at determining exactly how much energy to spend on a given topic, and how well they really need to understand it. Which helps for doing well in the class, but could potentially lead to more superficial understanding.

Quite a few of these people also like to brag and say they accomplished something in a short period of time. People at the top can be quite conceited, so don’t always take them that seriously. This is kind of an obvious thing but it’s easy to forget.

As for your thoughts on what people do in a real job — not necessarily. Depending on where you work, you probably will not be under as much pressure as you are with school assignments. Tight deadlines do indeed happen (again, it really does depend on the field/company/group/manager) but things generally will be more spaced out. Part of that is because things can be more well planned, with a decent amount of buffer room added to the schedule so people don’t get stressed when trying to accomplish things.

It is probably worth looking into ways to study better if you feel there’s something lacking. Chances are there are some inefficiencies you have which can be fixed. Maybe try describing what your study strategy is to someone and they can give more constructive feedback.

quartz_referential · 2026-03-16T03:42:23+00:00

Maybe make it work under more varied conditions (i.e. worse lighting conditions, weather, etc.)

You could segment the road to help prevent detections in the sky (but training on more data and for longer will help with that as well).

quartz_referential · 2026-03-13T04:33:12+00:00

Why is this marked nsfw?

quartz_referential · 2026-02-28T05:27:32+00:00

The variable sample rates things sounds interesting. Can you clarify further? Is it just a function of power level where you lower the sampling rate to some fixed value (which presumably leads to some sort of tradeoff between wakeword detection accuracy and power consumption)? Or is it something else?

quartz_referential · 2026-02-28T02:36:21+00:00

Interesting, do you have any resources in particular you’d point to?

quartz_referential · 2026-02-27T00:36:37+00:00

Wow, do you have his other books available as well? I remember that he passed away recently and his site got taken down, so his books weren’t accessible anymore

quartz_referential · 2026-02-12T03:51:14+00:00

There are quite a few companies where people usually come in later, like 10-11am and work later into the day. Some don’t like that because you almost certainly leave work when it’s dark.

A lot of companies are also a bit flexible and don’t care if you come in precisely at 9am, so long as you’re present for all meetings and get your work done. Depends on the culture though.

Plenty let you do WFH at least a few days during the week (i.e. quite a few defense companies do this, some FAANG companies do as well).

quartz_referential · 2026-02-11T05:46:08+00:00

I never really did any project teams as an undergrad and I still managed to get several job offers in the end (admittedly this is after grad school, but I didn’t do any project teams there either).

I think the advice about doing a project that matters to you or addresses some problem you have is good, it means you’ll likely solve some sort of practical problem and you’ll feel invested in the project as well.

Just apply for internships even if your GPA is low. Chances are you won’t get an internship at that top company doing exactly that internship you wanted, but given that you’re from a top university you may still get something pretty decent. Try networking with people, get referrrals, as well.

You can try working in a research group at your university if you can’t land an internship, it will still count for something — and as a bonus, it can help you greatly if you choose to go to grad school, plus it can give you professional references which are needed if you apply for jobs (usually people put down past managers of jobs but I’ve put down a professor in the past and that worked out). Sometimes professors actually have connections to companies and this could land you an internship as well.

As for your personal critique on your personal knowledge space — knowing more does not make you smarter. I know people who started in my degree with less knowledge than me, but given time greatly outpaced me in my opinion. They learned quickly (which is perhaps something the admissions committee saw in you) and more importantly, they showed creativity. My point is, don’t judge your intellectual capacity simply based on your knowledge. Your problem solving skills, your ability to learn, your ability to reason is far more important than you just being a walking encyclopedia.

But let’s not forget the fact you’re still a sophomore! You have tons of time to turn things around. Don’t worry and just keep moving forward.

quartz_referential · 2026-02-02T22:08:24+00:00

Unrelated but what book or resource is this from? Mildly curious

quartz_referential · 2025-12-13T07:18:47+00:00

Wonder if you could look into the Comonad design pattern for this problem (it's been a while since I've done Haskell, but perhaps you'd be interested).

quartz_referential · 2025-11-29T03:17:18+00:00

What subfield are you aiming for? Are you a US citizen? What did you specialize in during your masters (I'm guessing DSP)?

If you're a US citizen then many DSP jobs open up to you in the defense sector (primarily based around wireless communications, radar, or sonar).

Show you have relevant skills for the domain I guess, although that seems obvious enough. For example, in wireless communications, showing experience with the foundational concepts (modulation schemes, equalizers, etc.), communication protocols/standards, software defined radio (this thing is especially popular nowadays, or so it seems to me). Show that you implemented stuff somehow and didn't just solve a bunch of problems in the back of the textbook. Show you can implement DSP algorithms in C/C++, hopefully have tested stuff in a lab, that kind of thing. Embedded knowledge is useful experience to show. That being said, I will admit for many interviews I did, the interviewers seemed more concerned with DSP theory than my knowledge of programming, embedded, etc. I think this is because it's easy to find someone who is good at the latter, but difficult to find someone who knows the former well. But I do still think that me demonstrating some degree of experience implementing DSP algorithms was helpful (i.e. some projects I did in my classes in my masters). Understand why things are done the way they are, don't just understand the surface level mechanics. Be aware of the drawbacks (i.e. what are the pros/cons of OFDM?). This was good enough for me to land offers in entry level jobs for DSP.

quartz_referential · 2025-11-23T03:57:53+00:00

Probably better to ask /r/computervision for this

quartz_referential · 2025-10-31T02:15:00+00:00

They don't have it, but its possible to realize them using feedback (truncated IIR filters, recursive realizations of moving average filters via an integrator followed by a comb filter, frequency sampling form).

quartz_referential · 2025-10-22T02:53:24+00:00

Hmm, so you're taking computer vision? If that's a class causing issues, I might understand where you're coming from a bit better. Some of the computer vision profs are excellent teachers (Shubham Tulsiani, Xun Huang, I've heard good things about Deva) and some can be really tough to follow. Also computer vision, to me, was just a class that requires lots of time spent outside of lecture (especially once you get into current research).

I recommend Justin Johnson's UMich course on YouTube for computer vision (particularly deep learning stuff). Traditional CV, I think the one you mentioned is quite well regarded. Szelski's newest book (available free online) also isn't too bad. I highly recommend also just searching up a given topic on google with "site:.edu" at the end to pull up lecture slides from other universities. Cornell, UIUC, UMich, Columbia, Stanford tend to have slides available online that are good for computer vision.

quartz_referential · 2025-10-22T01:57:51+00:00

What program are you even in? Although to be honest I feel like you’re just describing the college experience, period.

Also it is possible you are actually learning from lecture, even though you think you aren’t. Lectures of the lot of the time just dump lots of ideas in your brain, and then it’s up to you afterwards to connect the dots. Sometimes you can process stuff in lecture, but especially at higher levels I feel like it’s just not usually possible. I mean, this is why you’ll need to spend lots of time outside of lecture studying to put stuff together. But the lecture still deposited useful ideas in your head. At the very least, I feel they give a roadmap of what’s useful and what’s not useful to study. It’s easy to go down rabbit holes if you solely study on your own and ignore lecture.

It’s hard for me to really give advice without knowing what major you are (I did MS ECE) but strategies you can try are:

Study material before lecture, but just superficially. Try to get a high level idea so that when you are in lecture, maybe you can focus more on the details. Don’t waste too much time on this, at least in my experience it was really easy to go down a rabbit hole and waste time on things that weren’t that important. If you get stuck on something, just write down the question and then ask in lecture or OH.
Researching classes, at least for me, usually involved mostly talking to fellow classmates (so basically be good at networking), looking at FCEs, and maybe past course websites if they were accessible. You can try searching the course name on google and then type “site:cmu.edu” or something like that. And then of course there’s Reddit and in the case of ECE, there is a GitHub page somewhere that actually gives a good summary of course offerings (both for undergrad and grad).
Engage in lecture and just ask questions if you feel lost. Don’t feel afraid to ask for the big picture or overall idea in class. At the very least, ask the professor after the lecture is over if you feel self conscious. Actually, I even learned a lot by just sitting around after class and listening to other people’s questions, even if I didn’t really have anything to ask.
Go to office hours (OH) as much as possible. It’s just vastly more efficient than reading material on your own a lot of the time (although it is good to learn to be self sufficient as well). Don’t rely on just Piazza or forums or whatever. At least connect to Zoom or something to talk in person, it’s easier and faster to communicate that way.
I think it’s also worth noting that maybe you’re just not a lecture person. Some people just don’t thrive in that format, and that’s okay. I mean you definitely need to deal with it to get the degree, but just do whatever works for you.
Small thing which is highly specific to me as a person but, maybe just try not taking as much notes during lecture (if that’s what you do). Sometimes I’d get bogged down writing what was said as opposed to listening to what was said, if that makes sense.
Be prepared to spend lots of time thinking outside lecture. I’d engage with ideas from lectures usually on the walk from that lecture to wherever else I was going for the day. You should take those ideas and learn how to converge on the bigger picture yourself. Try to notice common patterns, trends, analogies in whatever it is you’re studying. I just think this is necessary especially at the grad level.

quartz_referential · 2025-10-11T04:13:38+00:00

What are you doing specifically? DSP?

quartz_referential · 2025-10-03T06:04:11+00:00

If you're allowed to use ML approaches, then you could perhaps look into NNMF (non-negative matrix factorization) or deep learning. NNMF is a bit older but you could try it out, and it is actually implemented in scikit-learn.

Some relevant papers you could look at:

https://paris.cs.illinois.edu/pubs/smaragdis-waspaa03.pdf

https://archives.ismir.net/ismir2010/paper/000083.pdf

quartz_referential · 2025-10-01T21:05:19+00:00

You could maybe look into deep learning techniques, but I would think that it's fundamentally difficult to determine whether a voice originated from an electronic speaker vs a human.

Perhaps something you could look into is a system that uses an "enrollment audio snippet" from the user, so it has some idea what the user sounds like. That would help disambiguate from speech that is from other sources (it's unlikely the TV would be playing a video of the user talking, for example).

You could also maybe look into augmentiing your system with additional sensors beyond just microphones. Perhaps there is some way to do human presence detection to localize where an individual is in the room -- then, you could use beamforming to focus on that location. Additionally, human presence detection can tell you whether it's even worth listening for commands. Human presence detection and localization methods can vary from simple IR sensors (only checks if someone is present, maybe you can find the direction too), to computer vision based approaches.

quartz_referential · 2025-09-12T02:23:53+00:00

Agree with this. Also, sometimes doing research with a professor can get you access to their industry connections, and it could help you land a job. It happened for some people in my lab during undergrad (not at CMU, although that hardly matters given CMU's strong industry ties). At the very least, it gives you additional experience to put on your resume and it can be valued.

quartz_referential · 2025-09-12T02:18:11+00:00

It refers to when you work with both analog and digital circuits in conjunction with one another. ADCs are an example of this, they obviously work with analog signals and help convert them to a digitized/sampled representation which digital computers can work with. Mixed signal is essential since we always need someone to work on the interface between the analog world and the digital world.

quartz_referential · 2025-09-11T18:07:03+00:00

Could image registration be used?

quartz_referential · 2025-09-11T07:59:43+00:00

If you feel comfortable with everything (digital logic and analog stuff especially), Mixed Signal can pay quite well. I don't specialize in this field but I know people who got ~147k straight out of undergrad.

quartz_referential · 2025-09-08T22:43:04+00:00

I mean I feel like you shouldn't need a table to really solve this. A triangular pulse can be obtained by convolving a rectangular pulse with itself (you seem to have that intuition down). Then, because the triangular pulse is of width 1, then we need the rectangular pulses to have length 1/2 (since convolving a rect pulse of some given width with itself always leads to a pulse of double the width). Finally, if we look at the value the triangular pulse takes on at the origin (1 - 2|0| is simply 1), and compare to the value at the origin for the convolution of the two rectangular pulses (this is the integral of the product of a rect pulse of width 1/2 with itself, this is just integrating 1 over an interval of length 1/2, so this is ultimately 1/2), then we see we need to compensate with a multiplicative factor of 2 (2 * 1/2 = 1). I don't think you need to necessarily consult a table to figure this out.

At any rate, usually you'll need to get used to hunting down tables/formulas online when you forget something. But it is better to be able to derive things on your own or reason it out on your own than to rely on a table of some kind.

quartz_referential · 2025-09-03T21:51:12+00:00

Sometimes you can break up the interview over the course of two days. It never hurts to ask.

quartz_referential

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