Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Date: Oct 24, 2019 

Location: LYLE 1150

Time: 10:30 -- 11:20 am

Speaker:  Malcolm Slaney, PhD, Research Scientist, Google Machine Hearing Research (Adjunct Prof., Stanford Univ., Dept. of Music)

Title: Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Attention

Abstract: Our devices work best when they understand what we are doing or trying to do. A large part of this problem is understanding to what we are attending. I’d like to talk about how we can do this in the visual (easy) and auditory (much harder and more interesting) domains. Eye tracking is a good but imperfect signal. Audio attention is buried in the brain and recent EEG (and ECoG and MEG) work gives us insight. These signal can be use to improve the user interface for speech recognition and the auditory environment. I’ll talk about using eye tracking to improve speech recognition (yes!) and how we can use attention decoding to emphasize the most important audio signals, and to get insight about the cognitive load that our users are experiencing. Long term, I’ll argue that listening effort is an important new metric for improving our interfaces. Listening effort is often measured by evaluating performance on a dual-task experiment, which involves divided attention.

Bio: BSEE, MSEE, and Ph.D., Purdue University. Dr. Malcolm Slaney is a research scientist in the AI Machine Hearing Group at Google. He is a Adjunct Professor at Stanford CCRMA, where he has led the Hearing Seminar for more than 20 years, and an Affiliate Faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Signal Processing and IEEE Multimedia Magazine. He has given successful tutorials at ICASSP 1996 and 2009 on “Applications of Psychoacoustics to Signal Processing,” on “Multimedia Information Retrieval” at SIGIR and ICASSP, “Web-Scale Multimedia Data” at ACM Multimedia 2010, and "Sketching Tools for Big Data Signal Processing” at ICASSP 2019. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book Principles of “Computerized Tomographic Imaging”. This book was republished by SIAM in their “Classics in Applied Mathematics” Series. He is coeditor, with Steven Greenberg, of the book “Computational Models of Auditory Function.” Before joining Google, Dr. Slaney has worked at Bell Laboratory, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Apple Computer, Interval Research, IBM’s Almaden Research Center, Yahoo! Research, and Microsoft Research. For many years, he has led the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic (Cognition) Workshop. Dr. Slaney’s recent work is on understanding attention and general audio perception.  He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE.

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Working schedule:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks are posted here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts