Review of graduate student summer internships

This week, we’ll hear belated summaries from three graduate students about their internships over the summer. Each presenter will speak for about 15 minutes.

John Brady — NASA Langley Research Center. John worked on testing and modifying a communications protocol for use in the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) satellite.

Gautam Dasarathy — Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL). Gautam spent the summer thinking about “Shortest Path” algorithms on large graphs, i.e., algorithms that compute the best route to get from Point A to Point B on a given weighted graph. In this talk Gautam will introduce a few algorithms he came across and talk about why they work so well.

Matt Malloy — Optametra. Matt spent the summer at one of Madison’s only communication companies working on various signal processing algorithms. Ideal coherent optical communication systems consist of four orthogonal signals (In-phase and quadrature, both vertically an horizontally polarized). In a real system, these signals aren’t so orthogonal. Matt will discuss how to equalize these effects using FIR filters — a problem equivalent to MIMO channel equalization.