Israeli team wins DSP contest

Three students from the Technion/Israel Institute of Technology won the $100,000 grand prize in Texas Instruments' contest for university engineering students to create new applications using TI's TMS320 digital signal processor.

The three students from the Haifa-based university used the programmable DSP to create a real-time digital watermarking system for audio signals using "perceptual masking," according to TI. With this technology, a signature can be embedded within the data of a signal, thus resolving multiple ownership claims to digital media. The digital watermark is inaudible to the human ear, virtually undetectable and resistant to attempts to remove it, TI said. In addition to the student prize, the Technion team's advising professor won $15,000. TI received 241 entries from 730 students in 37 countries.