Engaging Undergraduate Students in Signal Processing Research: Vision, Strategy, and A Success Story

There is a great deal of effort (and literature) on preparing undergraduate students to work on research-based problems in the area of signal processing during their undergraduate studies. However, most of the undergraduate students are in fact not ready to carry out some meaningful research until their graduation. One possible reason could be that most of the research problems in the area of signal processing require significant background knowledge in advanced linear algebra and stochastic processes. As a result, students are typically assigned mini-projects (derived from a larger problem being solved), or student-driven design projects in some independent study course. It is expected that after graduating, they will be ready and motivated to do research during their graduate-level higher studies. The focus of this paper, on the other hand, is to present the efforts and results on engaging students in doing research during their undergraduate studies. The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Nazarbayev University (NU) attracts some of the best students in the country. Considering their potential and motivation level, a strategy has envisaged to engage them for doing research during the early stage of their undergraduate studies. The results of this strategy have been very promising. The selected undergraduate students learned to do independent research in the area of signal processing (and machine learning). Furthermore, their research work has resulted in numerous publications in top-ranked journals and conferences.