After completing his B.E.Sc at Western, and transferring into the PhD programme in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western, Ervin Sejdic's passion for his research has become firmly rooted in his desire to improve the quality of life for all Canadians.

One of his more outstanding achievements lies in his development and leadership of the student chapter for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) at Western. The IEEE EMBS is the world's largest international society of biomedical engineers, and it is notable that the University of Western Ontario is among the first few universities in Canada to have an IEEE EMBS student chapter.

One of Western's preeminent NSERC scholars, his work on Selective Regional Correlation has been acknowledged by The ScienceDirect Top 25 Hottest Articles (January-June, 2006). His doctoral studies focus on signal processing. While this project will deal with a specific range of applications, such as heart sounds, mechanical vibrations and engine knock analysis, the proposed work will benefit the whole community of signal processing. The diagnostic signal processing techniques developed during his doctoral studies can be widely used in many different applications as methods for analysis of non-stationary signals.

Ervin is clearly passionate: "Some of my proposed algorithms have an exceptional value when it comes to everyday life. The first algorithm I have developed was actually developed to differentiate two heart diseases". So, what's a big deal? "Fundamentally, we need to explore alternative ways of providing better training to our health care professionals using the advanced technology available to us today". Ervin's research will play a key role in providing advanced healthcare solutions to a broader range of the world's populations.

Ervin believes that the University of Western Ontario has facilitated his success and has cultivated such diverse opportunities because Western offers a variety of research positions for graduate students, but also because faculty members are devoted to the development and quality of graduate student education. Thankful for his family's support, Ervin looks forward to teaching at a Canadian University, and one of his greatest pieces of advice for upcoming or current graduate students is to "Publish, publish, publish! But also take time to enjoy life". Citing his love of music, Ervin expands upon striking an equilibrium between work and play: "In order to be 100 % focused on a research project, a student should also take time to enjoy life. Why? Simply to make a balance in one's life. Once the balance exists, the productivity increases significantly."

Publications and Other Contributions:

• E. Sejdic, "Pattern Classification in Time-Frequency Domain with Application to the Heart Sound Analysis," Technical Report, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ont., Canada. September 2001.
• E. Sejdic, "Time-Frequency Analysis of the Heart Sounds," 4th year thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ont., Canada, April 2002.
• E. Sejdic, J. Jiang, "Time-Frequency Analysis of the Heart Sounds," in Proceedings of 2002 ECEGRS, London, Ontario, Canada, 9-12 May 2002, pp. 5-9 .
• E. Sejdic,, J. Jiang, "Comparative Study of Three Time-Frequency Representations with Applications to a Novel Correlation Method," in Proceedings of 2004 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, (ICASSP '04), 17-21 May 2004, vol. 2, pp. 633- 636.
• E. Sejdic, J. Jiang, "Selective Regional Correlation for Pattern Recognition," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, (Accepted) 2005.
• A.G. Rehorn, E. Sejdic, Y. Jiang, J. Jiang, P. Orban, "Advanced Modeling, Diagnosis and Control of Manufacturing Equipment," AUTO21 HQP Conference, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, 10-12 May 2005, Poster Presentation.
• E. Sejdic, I. Djurovic, J. Jiang, "S-transform with optimized window width," Signal Processing, (Submitted and Revised), January 2006.
• A.G. Rehorn, E. Sejdic, J. Jiang, "Fault Diagnosis in Machine Tools using Selective Regional Correlation," Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 1221-1238, July 2006.
• P. Rakovic, E. Sejdic, LJ. Stankovic, J. Jiang, "Time-Frequency Signal Processing Approaches with Applications to Heart Sound Analysis," in Proc. of 33rd Computers in Cardiology Conference, Valencia, Spain, Sep 17-20, 2006, (Accepted).
• I. Djurovic, E. Sejdic, J. Jiang, "Frequency Based Window Width Optimization for S-transform," AEU International Journal of Electronics and Communications, (Submitted), September 2006.
• E. Sejdic, I. Djurovic, J. Jiang, "S-transform with Frequency Dependent Kaiser Window," in Proc. of IEEE International Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2007), (Submitted), September 2006.
• E. Sejdic, P. Rakovic, M. Dakovic, LJ. Stankovic, "Heart Sounds Decomposition by S-method," in Proc. of IEEE International Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2007), (Submitted), September 2006.