The aim of this paper is to document the process of developing a usable publication guide to support students to publish their first academic paper. Academic publishing is obviously a wide and complex field, taking many years to master. The intention was therefore not to develop students to “expert” level in a single event, but rather to get students to “novice” level with a first success behind them - enough to ensure that they will try a second time. We are here reminded of a quote from Henry Boettinger: “Training teaches us the rules, experience teaches us the exceptions” - we will focus on teaching the rules, by the second paper a student will be a bit more experienced and can start to experiment with the exceptions.

In this paper we describe the development of a unique undergraduate engineering research program that has been run for two years. It has focussed on the proposition that undergraduate students if properly trained and adequately mentored can produce publishable results while still at the undergraduate level. The aims, curriculum development and preliminary results of students that have attended the course are discussed. Proposals for changes during the 2011/2012 IP Challenge (the marketing name for the Image Processing Research Training Course) are also discussed.

In this paper we consider engineering education as a process that has over many years developed a particular ethical and philosophical framework. These ethical and philosophical frameworks are often dormant and unquestioned. During the development of an innovative reality TV mediated engineering design and test project (the Fuelduel1project) for undergraduate students ethical issues arose that challenged long-held views on engineering education. This paper discusses the ethical issues that became evident during the course of the Fuelduel project and how these lead to a consideration of the underlying philosophical framework inherent in most engineering education.

In this paper we present the key learning points from a publicly broadcasted reality TV show produced by the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg. This reality TV show was based on a preliminary development for the university's entry in the 2012 South African leg of the Solar Challenge. It featured undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students working on the project. We describe the factors that gave rise to this unusual project, the process involved in setting up the project and the key learning points.

In this paper we analyse the impact of a reality TV show on the participating engineering students through a qualitative case study. The reality TV show depicted an in-house engineering student competition through the constructing of alternative fuel-sourced vehicles for participation in the biannual international Solar Challenge competition. The role of the reality TV camera proved to be instrumental in students' enhanced learning experiences and improved academic results.

A proof that the Helberg code is capable of correcting multiple deletion/insertion errors is presented. This code is a generalization of the number-theoretic Levenshtein code which is capable of correcting a single deletion/insertion. However, apart from exhaustive testing of short codes, no proof was hitherto given to verify that the Helberg code is indeed capable of correcting multiple deletions and insertions.

A code construction is proposed to add a multiple insertion/deletion error correcting capability to a run-length limited sequence. The codewords of this code are themselves run-length limited. The insertion/deletion correcting capability is achieved by requiring several weighted sums of run-lengths in the codewords to satisfy certain congruences modulo primes. The construction is similar to the number-theoretic code proposed by Dolecek and Anantharam, which can correct multiple repetition errors or, equivalently, multiple insertions of zeros. It is shown that if the codewords in this code are run-length limited, then the code is capable of correcting both insertions and deletions of zeros and ones. An algorithm is proposed for decoding over a multiple insertion/deletion channel. Following the work of Dolecek and Anantharam, a systematic encoding method is also proposed for the codes. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed construction has a higher rate asymptotically than the Helberg code, which is unconstrained in terms of run-lengths, even though our construction has the additional run-length constraints. The need for run-length limited codes that can correct insertion/deletion errors is motivated by bit-patterned media for magnetic recording.

We propose the construction of a non-binary multiple insertion/deletion correcting code based on a binary multiple insertion/deletion correcting code. In essence, it is a generalisation of Tenengol'ts' non-binary single insertion/deletion correcting code. We evaluate the cardinality of the proposed construction based on the asymptotic upper bound on the cardinality of a maximal binary multiple insertion/deletion correcting code derived by Levenshtein.

Moment balancing templates have been proposed for channels with a small probability of an insertion/deletion (several orders smaller than additive errors) that add a minimal amount of redundancy. These templates are essentially a systematic way of encoding number-theoretic codes (primarily Levenshtein's s = 1 insertion/deletion code). Moment balancing templates proposed up to this point have been of fixed length. In this paper, it is shown that by using variable length templates, it is possible to obtain better performance than the optimal fixed length moment balancing template. Here, performance is defined as the amount of redundancy, which includes the moment balancing bits and the marker, that needs to be added.

Moment balancing templates have been proposed for channels with a small probability of an insertion/deletion (several orders smaller than additive errors) that add a minimal amount of redundancy. These templates are essentially a systematic way of encoding number-theoretic codes (primarily Levenshteinpsilas s = 1 insertion/deletion code). Moment balancing templates proposed up to this point have been fixed length. In this paper, it is shown, that by using variable length templates, it is possible to obtain better performance than the optimal fixed length moment balancing template. Here, performance is defined as the amount of redundancy that needs to be added.

A partitioned moment balancing template (systematic encoding of some number theoretic codes) is presented that can correct a single insertion/deletion. Instead of dispersing the moment balancing bits across the template, they are grouped together. Moment balancing templates are used to add insertion/deletion correcting capability to an additive-error-correcting code. The effect of using a particular additive-error-correcting code on the minimum number of moment balancing bits is investigated.

It is firstly shown that the use of a fixed length decoding window in a channel that introduces insertions/deletions can propagate the errors to such an extent that stronger insertion/deletion correcting codes must be used. It is further shown that random insertion/deletion correcting codes based on the Levenshtein distance are not optimal for such channels. A modification to the Levensthein distance is proposed and codes based on this distance are shown to be better suited to a channel with a fixed length decoding window. Rates of the codes based on the Levenshtein decoding distance are compared with that of codes based on the Levenshtein distance.

We present a new insertion/deletion detection and correcting decoding scheme for convolutional codes that is based on the Viterbi decoding algorithm. Firstly, we show that, when using a coding scheme that utilises a standard rate, R=k/n, convolutional code and n Viterbi decoders in parallel, it is possible to correct up to n-1 consecutive deletions or insertions. Our results show the effectiveness of this scheme to re-establish bit-synchronisation after the deletion of bits. Further, we investigate the correction of multiple deletions or insertions using standard concatenated coding schemes employing convolutional inner codes, and Reed-Solomon outer codes.

Levenshtein (1966) proposed a class of single insertion/deletion correcting codes, based on the number-theoretic construction due to Varshamov and Tenengolt's (1965). We present several interesting results on the binary structure of these codes, and their relation to constrained codes with nulls in the power spectral density function. One surprising result is that the higher order spectral null codes of Immink and Beenker (1987) are sub-codes of balanced Levenshtein codes. Other spectral null sub-codes with similar coding rates, may also be constructed. We furthermore present some coding schemes and spectral shaping markers which alleviate the fundamental restriction on Levenshtein's codes that the boundaries of each codeword should be known before insertion/deletion correction can be effected.