The advanced course "Telecommunications" is intended to give a broad overview of the current research in this field. The course will complement the basic lecture "Telecommunications" that runs in parallel: specific topics are discussed in more detail, beginning with signal processing applications to allow the basic lecture to be ahead with the fundamentals. The advanced course comprises 4 hours per week.
In the lectures a wide range of topics is covered including properties of multimedia source signals (speech in particular) as well as processing, coding and transmission which includes error-correction coding and the special properties of wireless multiuser systems. Moreover, speech, as a particularly important practical source signal, is covered in detail by the lectures of Dr. Kommenda, which even includes speech and language processing at a symbolic level.
The goal of the lectures is to demonstrate the rather broad range of practical applications which are heavily based on concepts from Telecommunications. On the other hand insight will be given into the methods of advanced research in the Telecommunications field.
The lectures with a total of 4 hours per week are split into several modules of different size which are presented in equal parts by Prof. Görtz und Dr. Kommenda.
1. Speech Processing (Kommenda): Starting from the process of human speech production and the properties of speech signals, the efficient storage and the reproduction of speech signals are discussed. Apart from processing at the physical signal level, processing at the symbolic level is a prerequisite for producing artificial speech. The transfer of symbols (such as letters in a conventional text) is a major application scenario of the lecture. The "way back", i.e. the transformation of speech signals into symbols (speech recognition, speaker recognition) forms a second focus of the lecture. The required methods draw on conceps from pattern recognition, statistics and classification.
The lecture takes place (irregularly) on Fridays, starting 2:00 pm - 5:15 pm in lecture hall EI6. First lecture is on March 7, 2014 starting 2:00 pm!
2. Speech Signal Processing and Source Coding (Goertz): Representation of discrete-time signals by a limited number of levels so that signal transmission with a limited number of bits becomes possible. In the lectures basic concepts as well as popular practical quantisers are discussed, including uniform quantisation, non-linear predistortion (log PCM), optimal quantisation but also vector quantisation)
3. Digital Communications (Goertz): discrete-time channel modelling of communication systems, simple channel models, how to measure and quantify "information", channel capacity, channel coding: basic concepts, soft- and hard-decision decoding, families of channel codes
4. Multiuser systems (Goertz): widened problem setting compared to classical point-to-point links, multiuser diversity gain, differences between "wireless" and "wired", throughput, fairness, quality of service.
The lectures with the topics 2,3,4, take place on Tuesday in room EI1, with the first lecture on topic 2 (Quantisation) on 4 March 2014 at 2 pm. Three lectures will be held on each of 9 afternoons from 2pm.
There will be printed handouts of the lecture slides.
