Last week I got an enjoyable novelty in my mailbox: the acceptance letter of Masters application. I applied to Postgraduate Electrical Engineering Program at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) in Electronics/Signal Processing area.

I am very glad to be accepted for many reasons:

• First of all, I am thirsty of breathing the academical air. I stopped breathing it since I interrupted the masters I was taking at UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco – also in Electrical Engineering Program in Signal Processing area. I am sick and tired of only reading papers. I do want to write them too!
• UFRJ’s Electrical Engineering Program owns a fantastic reputation in the academia and industry as well. It is on top of Brazilian Ministry of Education ranking.
• The diversity and quality of the faculty members is awesome: most of them with a huge amount of publications, an intense research activity and some really active members of IEEE.
• Besides all of this, (at least here in Brazil) Masters is a necessary step to the Doctorate studies.

I am really motivated to get started, but I need to wait until march.

I believe that some facilities brought by so called Web 2.0 should not be ignored. Who usually reads news in different sources has reasons enough to become a mashup user. My favorite mashup tool is still a beta release but works fine so far: Yahoo! Pipes – there I can mix different feed sources into one or exactly the opposite: split one source into many other subfeeds. More sophisticated ideas (like geocode a feed into a map, filter and even translate the feeds) can also be implemented. Everything is done graphically, in a very intuitive way, connecting blocks and pipes – that’s why the name.

Certainly this short description of Pipes can be useful, but it’s not the main idea of this post: one of the first pipes I’ve created is a IEEE Communications Digest (for those who are not familiarized with, IEEE means Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is the biggest technical professional organization in the world). This mashup is a short compilation of some IEEE publications feeds in Communications area. It aggregates:

• IEEE Communications Magazine
• IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
• IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
• IEEE Transactions on Communications
• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
• IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

If you are interested, check it out: http://pipes.yahoo.com/dilsonlira/ieee_communications_digest. To have access to the texts pointed by the feeds, an IEEE member login is required. Otherwise, only the feed titles can be read.