Readers Letter – “My name is Paula Aquilina, I am from Victoria, Gozo, and I have recently graduated with an MSc in Signal Processing and Communication Engineering which was partly funded by STEPS. As part of the contract, scholarship awardees are asked to submit a short article on their experience to the Maltese Media.

For the scholastic year 2012/2013 I have been reading a Master of Science degree in Signal Processing and Communication Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Communication engineering deals with the process of transferring information, while signal processing deals with the representation and enhancement of the information itself.

This master degree involved taught modules so as to provide a solid knowledge of the two areas that can be used to create feasible systems that can be used in practice. Modules in the course included amongst others an advanced study of statistical signal processing techniques, audio and image processing, communication theory, coding theory and communication networks.

In addition, students were also required to undertake an extended piece of research in an area of choice. My dissertation was titled “Interference Alignment Techniques with Delayed Channel State Information” and involved the study of techniques that use interference in a communication network in order to increase capacity even in the presence of delay.

The key idea of this dissertation is the fact that with the application of new methods the interference itself is useful, which is totally in contrast with the more traditional approach of always considering interference as a disadvantage. Following the successful completion of my studies and the dissertation I graduated with distinction in November 2013.

Signal processing and communications engineering are two strongly inter-related subjects areas. Together they are at the backbone of many technologies that have a significant social, cultural and economic impact on society as it is today. Areas where studies in signal processing and communication can be applied include telephony, broadcast and computer communication, robotic vision, audio and video recording, radar and sonar detection, biomedical signal processing, medical imaging and remote sensing.

It is advances in these areas that have allowed people everywhere to easily connect with each other globally and provided a huge improvement in everyone’s daily life ranging from better connectivity and distribution of information to improvements in healthcare services and much more.

The experience of studying at a leading international university has been highly challenging and exceedingly rewarding; on academic level it opened new opportunities for further studies, whilst also assisting in my own personal development.

This experience was made possible via the financial assistance provided by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (STEPS). The scholarship is part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life”.

I would like to thank the scholarship board for choosing me to benefit from these funds and also my family for their invaluable support throughout the whole experience.”

Paula Aquilina

Victoria,

Gozo.

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