4 Introduction
Welcome to 12-778: Sensors, Circuits and Data Interpretation/Management for Infrastructure Systems. This course will provide you with the necessary knowledge and skills to design and develop an instrumentation system for physical phenomena of interest to civil and environmental engineers.
During the first lecture, we will first get to know each other beginning with a short introduction to myself (your instructor) and following with a short introduction to each of you in the class. We will also review the syllabus and go through a simple introduction to measurements, instruments and transducers to set our bearings for the remainder of the course. Towards the end of the lecture, I provide two examples of instrumentation systems from my own research(Sensor Andrew and FORK) so as to ground the discussion and the concepts on practical applications.
The slides for the lecture can be found here.
Here is a list of questions you should try to answer after this first lecture (even if you can’t come up with an answer, trying these is useful!):
- How will grades be calculated?
- What are good topics for the final project?
- What pre-requisites do I need to fulfill to be successful in this course?
- What is a sensor?
- What is an actuator?
- How are sensors and actuators related to transducers?
- If we assume physical reality exists independent of ourselves, but we can only experience it through our senses (i.e., through measurements), how accurate is our own internal model of the world?
- If we assume measurements can be performed with perfect accuracy and infinite resolution, would the answer to the previous question change?
- What biases may still persist during our interpretation of perfectly accurate measurements?
4.1 About this Book
This is a book created from markdown and executable code. It is very much a work in progress, it will be always evolving, and it is intended to serve as a companion document to the course.