The Year 2017 in Review

Looking back at the end of 2017 brings back really a lot of great events that happend during the year. Please find a few of them as well as other "highlights" below:

  • Let's start with the largest conference that the DSS chair had organized so far: the DAGA. Even if this was really a lot of work, we organized really a great conference with a lot of "extras" that were new for this conference: a DAGA specific song that opened the conference and a sports programm that supports the scientic part to mention just two of the "extras".
  • In the second part of 2017 we founded the "Gesellschaft für angewandte Signalverarbeitung" (GAS), which can be seen as "friends' association" of the DSS chair. Meanwhile we have more than 30 members, including two companies that support our GAS club.

Beside these individual events, we were also rather "productive" in terms of "traditional" measures for university chairs:

  • In 2017 the largest number of PhD students received a doctor's degree since the start of the chair in 2010. Five new doctors delivered their theses: Anne, Kolja, Vasu, Jochen and Jens are now Dr. Theiß, Dr. Pikora, Dr. Kandade Rajan, Dr. Withopf, and Dr. Reermann.
  • Simultaneously many new doctoral candidates joined the DSS team in 2017. First Anton Namenas started in January, followed by Tobias Hübschen, who came over from Aachen University, in February. Anton and Tobias work on the evaluation of speech communication systems and on the quality assessment for speech communication systems, respectively. In June Alexej Namenas joined the DSS team. His research topic is the target detection and tracking for MIMO sonar systems. Next in line was Rasool Al-mafrachi in October. He focuses on in-car-communication systems. The last two newcomers of the year were Owe Wisch and Christin Bald in November. Owe has joined the underwater team to focus on underwater communications, while Christin is now part of our medical team to work on signal processing for magnetoelectric sensor systems.
  • 2017 was also a rather successfull year in terms of publications: the chair was involved in two book chapters and 20 conference and journal publications. Additonally, one book (de Guyter) and one special issue of the IEEE signal processing magazine was (co-) edited by our group.
  • Another record was the number of bachelor and master theses that our chair supervised in 2017. 21 theses started in 2017: eight bachelor theses and 13 master theses.

Finally some further highlights of the year 2017:

  • Last year the SONAR team in our group has tripled. Alexej and Owe joint Thorben to broaden the research fields. While Thorben is still working on the general MIMO idea, its application to SONAR and in accordance the development of orthogonal signals, Alexej is working on novel detection and tracking algorithms for MIMO SONAR systems. Owe accessed the interesting field of underwater communication. On the one hand this includes the analog/digital communication between two submarines. On the other hand communication techniques between multistatic SONAR systems should be investigated. Apart from our first measurement trail with WTD71 in November we also got our first own boat, the "DSS MISSy" which will get improvements in the next few months.
  • Another highlight, especially for the team of the projects B2 and B6 of the CRC 1261, was the magnetic measurement of nerve signals with a 304 SQUID vector magnetometer at the PTB in Berlin. For further development and also for optimization of novel uncooled magnetoelectric (ME) sensors, a better understanding of spectral power distribution and signal strength of nerve signals is of particular interest. Since the electromagnetic field of human nerve pulses is quite low, only signal amplitudes in the fT range from the deep nerve are measurable. Our "magneto PhDs" intensively prepared for these measurements, since an earlier attempt at measuring the signals had completely failed. Finally, Christin Bald and Eric Elzenheimer succeeded in measuring nerve signals magnetically, which also fits to the current electrical gold standard (electroneurography). Signal amplitudes were subject-dependent and ranged from 17 fT to 60 fT in a frequency range from 100 Hz to 1 kHz. The required averaging time was in the range of minutes, while for current ME sensors significantly longer averaging times are expected to be necessary.

 

Some Pictures from 2017

 
Our retreat in Sylt ...   Our magnetic measurements at the UKSH ...
     
 
Bye, bye, S class ...   A special song for a special conference ...
     
 
Advertising our talk at the "Kieler Woche" ...   Our snorkling masks that allow to communicate ...