Krzysztof - Full Interview

Name: Krzysztof
From: Zgorzelec, Poland
Degree: BSc Computer Science

I'm from Zgorzelec, in Poland, and I came to the UK to study for a BSc degree in Computer Sciences. I'm currently in the third and final year of my course. I liked the academic, research based approach to the subject that Sheffield offers, and the facilities here are good.

In the second year you learn to programme using Haskell. It´s a very different language type to Java or C++, being much more mathematical. The advantage is that it provides a very straightforward way of programming equations and is particularly useful when solving academic problems and mathematical issues.

Software Hut is a great module, and one that Sheffield is famous for. We worked in teams to build an application for a customer. Our client wanted a web based application, but he required much more flexibility than could be produced using his existing web development software. We therefore had to develop our own content management system and then use this to create his website. Software Hut is a great exercise because you learn a lot of new technology then put it into practice to build a real application for someone to use. It´s not just an academic exercise. Each client had three groups that independently produced an application he required, and my group's solution was chosen as the best of these three. We were awarded a cash prize for this.

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.

In the summer break between my second and third year I undertook an internship, working for the department´s Speech and Hearing Research Group. I wanted to learn more about the research area, and this 10 week paid placement provided a great way of doing this. 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.

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. My internship involved developing an application that could collect this raw data to be used in generating a testable computational model.

I created a web based programme that captures user details, and then plays a sound. The user types in the word they think they hear, and the results are stored on a database for later interpretation and analysis. The end results will help us to improve the way that computers recognise human speech. If we can quantify what errors people make in different situations, we can allow for this when producing speech recognition systems. I really enjoyed my internship and working in the research group. Everyone was very kind and it felt more like fun than work.

Now I´m in my third year and 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 speech technology lectures by Professor Roger Moore who explains the mechanisms of speech and hearing in a detailed but very entertaining way, e.g. 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. About half of your third year is taken up by your individual project, which I have just started. My task will be to build a tool that allows us to capture a person´s medical records in an electronic way and generate a treatment pathway for different medical conditions.

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.

What´s my advice to anyone thinking of applying? Before I started, the one thing that I was worried about was my level of English and how I would cope in the more technical lectures. I had a formal English qualification but I also found it extremely useful to read a few English computing books before I started the course. This helped me with the terminology for more specific computing and mathematical terms, which gave me a head start and I easily understood my lectures.