Signal Processing - January 2017 - 29

Cup 2015 against tough competitors from Bangladesh UniverInterculturality
sity of Engineering and Technology and Soongsil University in
Special emphasis should be given to integrating students from
South Korea," says Schäck. Figure 15 shows the members of
other cultures. In [17], Prof. Zoubir describes challenges in
the team at the ceremony in Brisbane. The competition topic
having intercultural groups in research. For example, indepenand results have been published in [14].
dence in research has a high priority at TU Darmstadt, but
"After a slow start, we managed to sit together as a team
some researchers are not used to such kinds of freedom. Thus,
and were able to formulate subproblems, which were assigned
misunderstandings can occur among the team members. Simamong the team members. We discussed several approaches
ilarly, in engineering design projects, students often work in
and often ideas that seemed right in the
intercultural teams in which not everyone
beginning were dismissed or modified
shares the same work attitudes or values.
integrating students into
to produce even better results," reports
Here, honest and direct communication is
social activities of the
team member Maximilian Huettenrauch.
very important.
"I think the SP Cup can be very helpful
research group helps to
in the sense that one can work on closeGender equality
recruit good students.
to-real-world problems. The problem was
Gender equality is always a central topic
not as contrived as university tasks often
for the success of our design projects.
are, and the data was collected from real experiments. It also
Thankfully, we are supported by gender equality representashowed that, often, it is not the most complex and sophistitives who act on behalf of all female students and staff memcated concepts that lead to good results, but rather starting
bers in the department in all matters relating to research or
out with a basic idea and adding bits and pieces to this initeaching and also provide other services. Currently, at the
tial idea," Huettenrauch continues. Additional feedback from
SPG, more than half of our RAs are female, which helps
participating students and supervisors have been published
attract female undergraduate students to signal processing
in [15]. The main part of our prize-winning algorithm [16]
hands-on projects.
was published at EUSIPCO 2015 in Nice, France, by the two
supervisors and one of the undergraduate students, who also
Social activities
continued working on heart rate estimation in his master's
Integrating students into social activities of the research group
thesis project.
helps to recruit good students. These activities may include
events such as an end-of-year party and visits to collaboration
partners in research or industry. During such visits, underPractical remarks for successful design projects
graduate students see signal processing in action and often the
We conclude this article by briefly sharing our experience on
participants ask for hands-on topics and wish to perform
some fundamental aspects that we have found to be important
research projects within our group.
for the success of signal processing design projects.

FigUre 15. Members of Signal Processing Crew Darmstadt at the final presentation at ICASSP 2015 in Brisbane, Australia.
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

January 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - January 2017