Krzysztof
Name: Krzysztof
From: Zgorzelec, Poland
Degree: BSc Computer Science
Status: Krzysztof was interviewed in the third (final) year of his course
You came to the UK from Poland. What do you think of Sheffield?
Sheffield is a good place to live and I particularly enjoy the nightlife. My wife manages a restaurant so I often pick her up from work quite late and there´s always something going on – the city never sleeps. We have both lived in several places in the UK and like Sheffield the most. It´s a big city with a lot going on but the city centre is compact and getting around is straightforward.
You´re now in your final year. What modules have you chosen this year?
In the third year there is more personal choice in the topics that you study. I have chosen a breadth of modules as I enjoy the variety. The staff teach their own personal research area and the lectures are absolutely brilliant. I´m currently attending Professor Roger Moore´s speech technology lectures. He explains the mechanisms of speech and hearing in a detailed but very entertaining way, for example by using video clips to demonstrate how the mouth and lips move while we speak. . He records all his lectures so you can download them as an MP3 file and listen to them again. I find this and the use of multimedia in lectures extremely helpful.
Is this a topic you find particularly interesting?
Yes. I wanted to learn more about this research area, so in the summer break I undertook an internship, (a 10 week paid placement) in the department´s Speech and Hearing Research Group. The group carries out research into all aspects of speech technology and computational hearing, including modeling hearing and speech perception in humans and machines, and developing improved speech recognition systems.
What did your internship involve?
Professor Martin Cooke and Dr Jon Barker are trying to identify the common errors that people make when they hear a word, but mistake it for a different word. This happens a lot in noisy situations. What we hear depends on the different levels and types of background noise, but in order to fully understand this we first need to quantify it. Their research requires volunteers to listen to words spoken under varying noise conditions and to write down what they hear. We aim to get a million participants, so there´s going to be a lot of data to collect and analyse. I had to develop an application that could collect this raw data to be used in generating a testable computational model.
What other aspects of your degree have you most enjoyed?
Earlier this year, I was part of a team of students from the department who represented the University at the `IBM ThinkPad Challenge´ – a national software design competition. We visited the IBM headquarters to take part in the challenge day which involved a variety of problem-solving, mathematical, computing and teamwork tasks. Our team came second out of the 18 top UK's Universities competing. An achievement like this looks great on your CV and it was also a good opportunity to introduce yourself to the IBM staff.