As always, the Audio Analysis Lab will be present at the European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) which this year will be held on September 2-6 in beautiful A Coruña, Spain. We will be presenting the following papers:

• A Privacy-Preserving Asynchronous Averaging Algorithm Based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing by Qiongxiu Li and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Adaptive Pre-whitening Based on Parametric NMF by Alfredo Esquivel Jaramillo, Jesper Kjær Nielsen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Sound-based Distance Estimation for Indoor Navigation in the Presence of Ego Noise by Usama Saqib and Jesper Rindom Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Indoor Sound Source Localization Based on Sparse Bayesian Learning and Compressed Data by Zonglong Bai (Harbin Institute of Technology & Aalborg University, Denmark); Jinwei Sun (Harbin Institute of Technology, P.R. China); Jesper Rindom Jensen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Privacy-Preserving Distributed Average Consensus Based on Additive Secret Sharing by Qiongxiu Li, Ignacio Cascudo and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

EUSIPCO is the the flagship conference of EURASIP and offers a comprehensive technical program addressing all the latest developments in research and technology for signal processing. EUSIPCO 2019 will feature world-class speakers, oral and poster sessions, plenaries, exhibitions, demonstrations, tutorials, and satellite workshops, and is expected to attract many leading researchers and industry figures from all over the world.

On August 19 2019, the Audio Analysis Lab helds its annual workshop, the Audio Analysis Workshop, at CREATE, Aalborg University. The workshop was attended by ~40 reseachers from TU Delft, KU Leuven, Lund University, Imperial College, Aalborg University as well as a number of companies. The program featured 25 scientific presentations on topics such as source localization, beamforming, speech enhancement, and sound zones. The keynote talk was given by Professor Patrick Naylor from Imperial College who gave a very interesting talk entitled “Broadband Signal Processing Using Polynomial Eigenvalue Decomposition with Application to Speech Enhancement”. This was the 8th edition of the workshop which was started as part of the Villum Young Investigator Programme grant that the lab was founded on. Since the grant ended, the workshop has been kindly supported by the GN Foundation and various projects.

This wek, the Audio Analysis Lab is presenting several papers and demos at the 44th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2019, in Brighton, United Kingdom. The papers are:

• A STUDY ON HOW PRE-WHITENING INFLUENCES FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY ESTIMATION by Alfredo Esquivel Jaramillo, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen
• ESTIMATION OF GUITAR STRING, FRET AND PLUCKING POSITION USING PARAMETRIC PITCH ESTIMATION by Jacob Møller Hjerrild, Mads Græsbøll Christensen
• TOWARDS PERCEPTUALLY OPTIMIZED SOUND ZONES: A PROOF-OF-CONCEPT STUDY by Taewoong Lee, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen
• HEARING AID-CONTROLLED BEAMFORMER FOR BINAURAL SPEECH ENHANCEMENT USING A MODEL-BASED APPROACH by Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Jesper B. Boldt
• QUALITY CONTROL OF VOICE RECORDINGS IN REMOTE PARKINSON’S DISEASE MONITORING USING THE INFINITE HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL by Amir Hossein Poorjam, Yordan P. Raykov, Reham Badawy, Jesper Rindom Jensen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Max A. Little

The lab is also presenting a demo on REAL-TIME BAYESIAN PITCH TRACKING in by Liming Shi, Jesper Kjaer Nielsen, Mads, Graesboll Christensen in the Show & Tell Demonstrations.

On March 11 2019, Audio Analysis Lab member Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled ” Model-based Speech Enhancement for Hearing aids”. The Ph.D. assessment committee was comprised of Professor Rainer Martin, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institut für kommunikationsakustik , Senior Research Scientist Emmanuel Vincent, Inria Nancy – Grand Est , and Associate professor Thomas Arildsen, Aalborg University, Department of Electronics Systems. Mathew was supervised by Professor Mads Græsbøll Christensen with Research Manager Jesper Boldt, GN Hearing A/S, and Assistant Prof. Jesper Kjær Nielsen.

The Audio Analysis Lab is happy to announce that Prof. Lijun Zhang of the North Wester Polytechnical University in Xi’an will be Guest Professor at Aalborg University for six months. He will be working closely with the Audio Analysis Lab on adaptive algorithms for audio applications. Lijun Zhang received the Ph.D. degree in Systems Theory from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, in 2003. From Aug. 2003 to Jul. 2005, he held a Post-doctoral position in the University of Tsinghua, China. From Mar. 2004 to Nov. 2004, he worked as a Visiting Scholar in the National University of Singapore. From Oct. 2006 to Jan. 2007, he worked as a Visiting Scholar in the City University of Hong Kong. From Aug. 2005 to Nov. 2011, he was a Professor of Harbin Engineering University. Since 2012, he has been with the College of Marine Science and Technology of Northwestern Polytechnical University, where he is currently a Professor. He has been a reviewer of Mathematical Reviews since 2008. His research interests include nonlinear systems control and identification, logic dynamic systems theory, adaptive signal processing, etc. He was a recipient of New Century Excellent Talents in the University of Ministry of Education of China. Currently he serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Systems Sciences and Mathematics (in Chinese). He was also an author or coauthor of more than 60 journal or conference papers.

We are extremely proud to announce that Audio Analysis Lab member Taewoong Lee has been awarded the North Jutland University Foundation’s Innovation Prize for his innovative work on sound zones. He received the award during the annual Ph.D. graduation ceremony on January 25 2019. In his work, he has developed a novel and general method capable of generating a number of sound zones in an acoustic environment (e.g., a living room or a car cabin) using a number of loudspeakers. In his method, auditory perception is taken into account and the tradeoff between the quality of the desired reproduced sound field within a zone and the interference from other zones can be controlled.

The North Jutland University Foundation’s Innovation Prize, which is comprised of DKK 50,000, is awarded annually by the foundation board in recognition and support of a PhD student. The student is recognised for having major innovation potential in their research area and is expected to contribute significantly to strengthening Denmark as a knowledge society. Particular emphasis is given to innovation, business potential, and solutions for specific societal needs and problems.

You can learn more about the award here.

Audio Analysis Lab members Jesper Kjær Nielsen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen were on a roadtrip in California. First, they gave a presentation about the lab’s work on sound zones at Sonos, Inc. in Santa Barbara where AAU alumni Daniele Giacobello works. Then, they attended the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in beautiful Monterey, California, where the lab had two papers:

• Revisiting the Linear Prediction Analysis-by-Synthesis Speech Coding Paradigm using Real-time Convex Optimization by Daniele Giacobello, Manohar Murthi, Tobias Lindstrøm Jensen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen
• Sound Zones as an Optimal Filtering Problem by Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Taewoong Lee, Jesper Rindom Jensen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen

The 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) was held on September 3-7 2018 in beautiful Rome, Italy. As usual, the Audio Analysis Lab was well-represented at the conference with the following papers:

• Model-Based Voice Activity Detection in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks by Yingke Zhao (Northwestern Polytechnical University, P.R. China); Jesper Kjær Nielsen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark); Jingdong Chen (Northwestern Polytechnical University, USA)
• Online Parametric NMF for Speech Enhancement by Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Liming Shi and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark); Jesper Bünsow Boldt (GN ReSound, Denmark)
• On Optimal Filtering for Speech Decomposition by Alfredo Esquivel, Jesper Kjær Nielsen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Model Based Estimation of STP Parameters for Binaural Speech Enhancement by Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam, Jesper Kjær Nielsen and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark); Jesper Bünsow Boldt (GN ReSound, Denmark)
• Speech Enhancement by Classification of Noisy Signals Decomposed Using NMF and Wiener Filtering by Mahmoud Fakhry (Aswan University, Egypt); Amir Hossein Poorjam and Mads Græsbøll Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

The Audio Analysis Lab’s annual workshop, the Audio Analysis Workshop, was held on August 21 this year.  The workshop featured a keynote talk entitled Multi-Microphone Speaker Localization on Manifolds by Prof. Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and 14 oral and 15 poster presentations about ongoing research. The 2018 edition of the workshop, which was co-sponsored by the GN Store Nord Foundation and the Independent Research Fund Denmark, was attended by 40+ people from both academia (Delft University of Technology, Lund University, KU Leuven, Aston University, and Aalborg University) and industry (e.g., B&O, Terma, Jabra GN Hearing, UniqiSense, Intel).

The Audio Analysis Lab is extremely happy to announce that Prof. Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University in Israel will be affiliated with us for the next year as Guest Professor. Prof. Sharon Gannot is well-known to all in audio and acoustic signal processing, and he is a prominent figure in our community. He will work with the Audio Analysis Lab on the topics of microphone array signal processing and will be giving a Ph.D. course on this topic at Aalborg University.

Biography: Sharon Gannot eceived the B.Sc. degree (summa cum laude) from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1986, and the M.Sc. (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees from Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1995 and 2000, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In 2001, he held a Postdoctoral position with the Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. From 2002 to 2003, he held a Research and Teaching position with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently, a Full Professor with the Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, where he is heading the Speech and Signal Processing Laboratory and the Signal Processing Track. Since April 2018, he is also a part-time Professor at the Technical Faculty of IT and Design, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include multi-microphone speech processing and specifically distributed algorithms for ad hoc microphone arrays for noise reduction and speaker separation, dereverberation, single microphone speech enhancement, and speaker localization and tracking. He was an Associate Editor for the EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing during 2003–2012, and an Editor for several special issues on multi-microphone speech processing of the same journal. He was a Guest Editor for the Elsevier Speech Communication and Signal Processing journals. He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING during 2009–2013, and the Area Chair for the same journal during 2013–2017. He is currently a Moderator for arXiv in the field of audio and speech processing. He is also a Reviewer for many IEEE journals and conferences. Since January 2010, he has been a Member of the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing technical committee of the IEEE and serves, since January 2017, as the Committee Chair. Since 2005, he has also been a Member of the technical and steering committee of the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC) and was the General Co-Chair of the IWAENC held in Tel-Aviv, Israel in August 2010. He was the General Co-Chair of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in October 2013. He was selected (with colleagues) to present tutorial sessions at ICASSP 2012, EUSIPCO 2012, ICASSP 2013, and EUSIPCO 2013 and was a keynote speaker for IWAENC 2012 and LVA/ICA 2017. He was the recipient of the Bar-Ilan University Outstanding Lecturer Award in 2010 and 2014 and the Rector Innovation in Research Award in 2018. He is also a co-recipient of ten best paper awards.