Jianhang Liu

EE 494
2/23/2020
Cumulative reflection

I always believe that, learning knowledge at school and university is the

best investment in my life. From the short term of view, you may pay lots of
money on your tuition fee and receive nothing, however, the knowledge you
gained from the tuition may raise your working condition and salary to a
great extent in the future. In general, the money and effort you spend today
will be paid back in multiples. This year is my last year as an undergraduate
in Electrical Engineering at Iowa State University, and I learned lots of
knowledge in different fields from the courses taken.

The major knowledge that I learned is Signals & Systems, which is learned
from EE 224 and EE 324. These courses gave the introduction to the signal
processing and basic knowledge of signal systems, filter designs, and variety
kinds of signal transforms. In the lab of this course, we used Matlab, a tool
that can help us analyzing and processing the input signals, to solve the
given questions and projects. In EE 224, we are guided how to use Matlab,
and in EE 324, we use this tool to solve more difficult problems in depth,
such as digital and analog filter design. What I’ve learned in this course
will help me a lot in my future: trying to be an engineer in the company of
image processing, such as NVIDIA or AMD, which are famous graphic card maker
in the world. Image processing problems is a higher level of signal processing
problems as we solved in EE 324 lab, since we can treat an image as lots of
pixels, and we can process those pixels same as what we did on input signals.
So, learning and solving problems in this course is the projection of working
in a company in the future, we need to learn, analyze problems, and summarize
what we did in both learning and working conditions.

The second knowledge that I learned is integrated components and circuits

design, which is learned in EE 330 this semester, and I will learn more in
EE 465 in the following semester. In this course, we learned the basic
knowledge of integrated circuit components, layout, components properties,
and circuit design. In the lab of this course, we use Cadence, the tool used
to create the schematic and layout of integrate circuits, to solve the problem
of designing comprehensive digital circuits, such as the layout of complex
Boolean logic functions. In fact, EE324 signal processing and EE 330 IC
design courses are complementary with each other: signal processing focuses
on logic design in software, while IC design focuses more on hardware
implementation. Professional knowledges I gained in this course will improve
my comprehensive ability in the future, that is, being an engineer that
expertized in several professional fields.
Besides, same as most of senior engineering students, I take EE 491 this
semester. In this course, each group of students are assigned a project from
different clients. For my group of senior design, our topic is Machine
Learning of Pilot Biometrics. In this project, I’m worked as a data science
engineer, and mainly do the data pre-manipulation before putting them into
systems, which is the great place to demonstrate my ability learned in EE
324 Signals & Systems course. Besides, I and other 5 members worked as a team
in this project, which practices our communication ability: how to communicate
with other members in a professional and precise way, and how to ensure that
we have a timely and effective communication, etc. Communicating is also an
important ability in our future work in a company, since people cannot always
do the work and project by their own, so having a good communication with
other co-workers is essential in this case.

One thing that I intended to learn beyond class in the future is Python, a
coding language that is popular in building algorithm of machine learning
these years. From my point of view, learning Python is a potential method to
improve and strengthen my mainly focused area, signal processing, since
machine learning built by Python is a great way to improve the efficiency
and accuracy of signal processing: input signals will be automatically
analyzed and processed independently by the algorithm of machine learning,
never relying on human again. One of the famous examples is the automatic
driving, such as Tesla cars, which combined machine learning and signal
processing at a great point and releases human’s hands.

I also believe that, life is a process of learning, each time you learn a
new knowledge, you have one more steppingstone to the success. Professional
knowledges, concepts, standards, and tools in the field of engineering almost
keep updated each year. We need to learn them in time to improve our
competitiveness and avoid being abandoned by the era. I’ve learned lots of
professional knowledges in my major during the studying at Iowa State
University, I hope that what I’ve learned will help me being successful in
the work and career life in future.