MCL has a new Master’s student, Terna Kpamber, in Spring 2016. Let’s give him a warm welcome! Here is a briefly interview with him.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

I’m from Nigeria and I moved to the UK in 2009 and studied there until I completed my undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering in 2014. I worked at Tyco Safety Products form 2012 to 2013 as part of my degree during which I was an electrical hardware engineer. My final project there was to design a wirelessly controllable socket strip which monitored current consumption and sent real time updates to the control hub.
I began my masters at USC in the Spring of 2015 and I focused on engineering application courses in signal processing. Currently I’m working on a project in which we monitor the board game of scrabble through a camera and we want to be able to automatically detect words formed by players during the game and calculate their game points.
I’m more of an application person than a research person, so I regularly read research papers and write programs to implement their algorithms. My languages of choice are C++ and Python, but I also program in Swift for the iOS and OS X platforms.
Outside of engineering I really enjoy playing and watching soccer and since moving to America I’ve become interested in watching basketball.

 

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

I wasn’t sure what to expect before coming to USC because I had never been to America. Once I settled in I began to enjoy USC, because the weather was fantastic and there were always activities going on on campus.
I jumped at the chance to apply to work in Professor Kuo’s MCL team, because I took his image processing course in the Fall of 2015 and it was thoroughly challenging and I learned a lot. It was a bit weird at first being one of the few students in the group who didn’t speak Mandarin, regardless I’ve settled in to the team and I’m happy I can reach out to fellow team members to get advice on my research for the team as well as my own projects.

 

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I hope the team can include people from more cultural backgrounds.