It has been exactly 20 days since I posted last blog, and 12 days since I joined IIT Bombay. Things moved really fast and luckily there were people to help me keep pace with events. Chirag and the gang of Hostel-12 B-wing landed a helping hand and made my naturalization at IITB appear very ‘natural’ to me. Hostel life at IITB is indeed different from other institutes… though not as much as I had thought before coming here.
At the same time, my project guide Prof. Preeti Rao invested a great deal of time and effort in getting me started with research. The work is indeed challenging and *REAL*.
Just to share, currently I am looking at a very low bit rate speech coding technique. The codec (coder-decoder system) can compress human speech to 1.5 kbps while maintaining good intelligibility. And this is really LOW. There is an effort in taking it even down may be by a factor of two. All these techniques rely on complex but realistic signal processing methods. It’s good to see such things implemented. Though, sometimes it is my gut feeling slightly simpler *techniques* (underlying ideas are robust- they don’t change with techniques) can be employed to achieve same results. Seems perfect material for research.
And there are so many (other) interesting things going on around me, there is definitely a lot for me to learn and explore.
Posted by Shalin Mehta 
