## MSc Course Projects 1: Direction of Voice Filter

I’ve just finished my first year of my Master’s program and I’ve so far done a couple of course projects in a variety of areas. This is the Direction-of-Voice filter, which I’ve done with my colleague Abi Kuganesan for Dr. Robert Xiao’s “Machine Learning for Signal Processing” course. It’s an audio filtration application that filters unintended voice audio out of an audio signal by using machine learning to eliminate the portions of the audio generated by speakers not facing the microphone. Please also check out our presentation and demo that I’ve uploaded to YouTube!

The full report is also available on GitHub as well.

There’s not much to update this week, I’ve mostly just been doing lifestyle adjustments in preparation for my remote internship, which starts for me in a week. Comments are open for the first time on this blog. This was definitely a daunting decision to make, but I found it worthwhile. My social media addiction post last week got a really good response; I have two comments on the post and several other people reaching out to me on private channels, and some good conversations started.

## Trying to understand social media addiction

I’ve spent a little bit of time combing through research papers about social media, mostly by using Google Scholar. I didn’t have a particular goal in mind when setting out on this exploration, but I was primarily interested in the links between social media usage and mental health, as well as the analysis of social media addiction (how prevalent it is, its forms, patterns that differ among cultures and are common along cultural lines, etc).

## Logs 2020-05-11: Sequences of Sets

Here’s a quick little math one. In a probability theory class that I was sitting in on, one of the core concepts taught was the limit infimum and limit supremum of a sequence of sets. If $$A_n$$ is a sequence of sets (that are all subsets of some larger set $$E$$) then the two constructs are also known as $$A_n$$ almost always and $$A_n$$ infinitely often respectively.

## Quarantine Logs 2020-04-13: Circuit-Sim Progress!

Been a week! This is by far the most frequently I’ve ever posted. I’m hoping to keep it up.

I’m happy to update that I made a little progress on the circuit simulator I’ve been working on. Here I’ll get into some of what that’s all about in a little bit more detail. All the relevant code is up on Github, though it’s really bare-bones and without documentation as of the time of writing.

Learning about circuit analysis introduced me to the concept of nodes. A node is a point in a circuit where two or more components meet. This concept is important because of Kirchhoff’s Current Law, which states that the sum of currents leaving a node is 0.

$$\text{Current leaving node i} = \sum_{j \in N(i)} I_{i,j} = 0$$

Here’s an example:

## Moving to Hugo and Netlify

I just moved this website over from my makeshift homemade setup on my self-hosted Digital Ocean box to a more convenient stack. See the very first post here to see what the old stack looked like. I’m using Hugo with the whiteplain theme, keeping some of the simplicity of the old design. I’m currently hosting on Netlify It takes a nontrivial amount of work to migrate a website across setups like this.
Overall, my theme for the summer was finding ways to improve the performance of mutation statements - that's your INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs. At the tail end of the internship, I was able to contribute a major performance gain by adding a fast path to a particular kind of DELETE, involving a kind of table called an interleaved table. This post is about this particular performance fix and everything about how it works.