Signal Processing - September 2016 - 153

committee reviewed this element in all
entries and awarded special recognition to
two teams for excellence in this task:
Team UpatrasECE from Greece and
Team The ENForcers from Serbia.
As shown in Figure 4, Team "UpatrasECE" thoughtfully included a glass
fuse for the safety of the circuit operation. After the transformer and voltage
divider that creates a reference voltage of
3 V, they included a high-pass filter to
block the dc component of the measured
signal and thus focused on the variation
patterns and an antialiasing filter to limit
the bandwidth to 500 Hz and pass on to a
recording device through a 3.5-mm jack.
Team "UpatrasECE" was also given an
honorable mention for the overall excellence of their project.
The circuit of Team The ENForcers
shown in Figure 5, included a transformer,
a low-pass filter, a voltage divider, an
amplifier for voltage adjustment, and an
analog-to-digital (A/D) converter provided
by an Arduino Uno board. An INA122P
instrumentation amplifier was used in conjunction with other components for voltage adjustments so as to make the voltage
compatible with the Arduino A/D converter. The sampled digital signal can be sent
to a PC using Arduino's built-in serial connection for storage and analysis.

competition in each of the three SP Cup
competitions.
To facilitate interaction and questionsand-answer sessions with participants, the
organizing team used Piazza, a popular
course interaction platform, as an online
bulletin board to post resources and data
sets as well as to address questions and
engage participants. About 200 participants
"enrolled" in SP Cup 2016 on Piazza and
made approximately 250 contributions; in
total, they have accumulated about 2,300
days of access and over 4,000 views of
posts. Interested readers may access the
archived Piazza site at https://piazza.com/
ieee_sps/other/sp1601/home.
Since its inception, the SP Cup has
received generous support from MathWorks, Inc., the maker of the popular
MATLAB and Simulink platforms.
MathWorks also provided funding support to the SP Cup and contributed their
expertise. Each student team that registered for the SP Cup was provided
complimentary software access to
MATLAB and related toolboxes. The
IEEE SPS welcomes continued engagement and support from industry in
future SP Cup competitions. Interested
supporters may contact Dr. Patrizio
Campisi, director for student services, at
patrizio.campisi@uniroma3.it.

FigurE 5. The sensing circuits by Team The
ENForcers.

SP Cup 2016 statistics
SP Cup 2016 engaged participants from
nearly 30 countries, covering every
habitable continent. Three hundred thirty-four students from 23 countries and
forming 52 teams registered for the
competition, as shown in Figure 6.
Among them, more than 200 students
on 33 teams turned in the required submissions by the open competition deadline in January 2016. Based on team
photos and other information submitted,
about one quarter of the participating
students were female, with many teams
populated by women at a 50% or higher
rate. Similar to SP Cup 2015, we once
again saw strong participation from students in Asia-Pacific regions. At least
two teams from Asia were in the final

Norway
Canada

Ukraine
France
Spain

United States

Kazakhstan
Serbia Romania
Greece
Egypt

Ten Teams
Seven Teams
Four Teams
Three Teams
Two Teams
One Team

China
(Mainland)

Lebanon
India
Pakistan

South
Korea
Taiwan

Bangladesh

Sri Lanka

Cameroon
Brazil

Indonesia
Australia

FigurE 6. A map illustrating the number of registered teams from each participating country around the world.
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

September 2016

153

https://www.piazza.com/

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