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The EPFL Press and the World Knowledge Dialogue

As transdisciplinary studies attract ever more attention from scholars and teachers all around the world, the EPFL Press is pleased to announce its collaboration with the World Knowledge Dialogue Foundation.  A first volume based on the discussions of the WKD Foundation is under way, with plans to pursue the publication program this fall at its second Symposium.  The first book spans topics from natural complexity to neuroscience, from education theory to climate change, from immunology to archaeology, as a goup of renowned multidisciplinarians engage each other, through a series of original essays, in a climate of constructive criticism and with the amibition to build a new foundation for the transdisciplinary approach.

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Linear operators in Hilbert space play a fundamental role in the formulation of quantum theory. This book offers a self-contained presentation of the most important tools and methods from Hilbert space theory, with particular focus on the spectral theory of self-adjoint operators.
The book presents the state of the art in machine learning algorithms as applied to the classification and mapping of spatially distributed environmental data. The book provides a CD-ROM with the Machine Learning Office software, including sample sets of data, that will allow both students and researchers to put the concepts rapidly to practice.
This volume grew out from a one-semester research program at the Bernouilli Center (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) from January to June 2007. The research articles and survey papers...
In the spotlight
Book cover
Signal Processing for communications
Authors:
Prandoni Paolo, Vetterli Martin
Series: Computer and Communication Sciences
Information
ISBN EPFL Press: 978-2-940222-20-9
2008, 392 pages, 16x24cm, Hardcover
ISBN CRC Press: 978-0-8493-8239-4
 





With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun. The treatment is therefore less focused on the mathematics and more on the conceptual aspects, the idea being to allow the readers to think about the subject at a higher conceptual level, thus building the foundations for more advanced topics.

The book remains an engineering text, with the goal of helping students solve real-world problems. In this vein, the last chapter pulls together the individual topics as discussed throughout the book into an in-depth look at the development of an end-to-end communication system, namely, a modem for communicating digital information over an analog channel.

Richly illustrated with examples and exercises in each chapter, the book offers a fresh approach to the teaching of signal processing to upper-level undergraduates. 
About the authors:
 

After studies in Padua and Berkeley, Paolo Prandoni received his Doctorate from the EPFL in the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory in 1999. His interests have included musical timbre, audio modelling and compression, communication system design and image analysis.  He is now the founder and Director of  Quividi, a company based in Paris, France, and is a visiting lecturer in signal processing at the EPFL.
   


Martin Vetterli works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) on signal processing and communications, with an emphasis on wavelet theory and applications, image and video compression, joint source-channel coding, self-organized communication systems and sensor networks. He is currently a Vice-President of EPFL, in charge of international relations. He has won many prizes including the Swiss National Latsis Prize in 1996, the SPIE Presidential award in 1999, and the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Achievement Award in 2001. He is a fellow of the IEEE, a member of SIAM, and has held numerous editorial roles. He is the author of two other books and more than 150 research articles.