We are happy to announce that a recent hiring of AD:MT, Assistant Professor Hendrik Purwins, has joined the Audio Analysis Lab! We welcome Hendrik to the fold and look forward to years of fruitful collaborations.

After concluding his studies in mathematics at Bonn and Münster universities, Hendrik Purwins was awarded a Ph.D. on machine learning and musical signal processing with a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (given only to the best 0.5 % students at German universities) after studying at Berlin Institute of Technology (BIT), CCRMA, Stanford, and the Psychology Dept. of McGill University. Since, he has been guest professor, senior researcher, and lecturer at Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and guest researcher at IRCAM, Paris, and Neurotechnology Group / Berlin Brain Computer Interface, BIT. In 2013, he became Assistant Professor at Aalborg University Copenhagen. He has (co-)authored more than 70 scientific papers, has received 10 personal research grants and prizes, and has lead research teams in 3 European projects. Starting with playing the violin at age of 7, he has played several string quartet and orchestra concerts during his mandatory military service with the professional German head quarters chamber orchestra. His research interests include signal processing, machine learning, and experimental methods (psychological and EEG experiments) for models of sound and music and their application to resynthesis, visualization, user adaptation, and non-Western music.

We are extremely pleased and proud to announce that Audio Analysis Lab founding member Jesper Rindom Jensen has received one of the very competitive postdoc grants from The Danish Council for Independent Research! Only 24 out of a total of 170 grant proposals received funding. The project is entitled Localization and Tracking of Speech – A Joint Audio-Visual Approach and receives approximately 2.6 mio DKK in funding! Read more here.

The Audio Analysis Lab is extremely pleased to announce that the Academic Council at the Faculty of Engineering and Science has decided to confer the title of adjunct professor to Jacob Benesty for a period of 5 years from January 1 2014. He will be part of our lab and will work closely with us to expand the research activities in noise reduction and microphone array signal processing.

Jacob Benesty received his M.Sc. from Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris France in 1987 and his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from Orsay University, Paris France in 1991. He is currently Professor at INRS-EMT, University of Quebec, QC, Montreal, Canada. Before joining INRS-EMT, he was Member of Technical Staff in the Acoustics Research Department at Bell Laboratories from 1995 to 2003. He has published no less than 18 books, 103 journal papers, 33 book chapters, 153 conference papers and is inventor of 14 granted patents, all on the topics of adaptive filtering, microphone array signal processing, and speech enhancement. Moreover, he has received several best paper awards, including two prestigious IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Awards for his contributions. His high impact is evident from the very high number of citations his work has received. According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index of 44, an i10-index of 133 and a total of 8005 citations.

The Audio Analysis Lab had two out of two papers accepted for presentation at EUSIPCO 2013:

• Fast Joint DOA and Pitch Estimation Using a Broadband MVDR Beamformer
• On the Influence of Inharmonicities in Model-Based Speech Enhancement

The papers were written by Sam Karimian-Azari and Sidsel Nørholm (with  co-authors) who are funded by the Villum Foundation. Congratulations to Sam and Sidsel on work well done!

EUSIPCO 2013, i.e., the 21st European Signal Processing Conference, is held in September in  Marrakech in Morocco.

On May 15, the first workshop on the project Spatio-Temporal Filtering Methods for Enhancement and Separation of Speech Signals was held. The program consisted of the following presentations:

• A. Jakobsson “Estimation of Multiple Pitches using Block Sparsity”
• J. K. Nielsen “Model Comparison with the g-Prior”
• S. I. Adalbjörnsson “Robust Fundamental Frequency Estimation in the Presence of Inharmonicities”
• S. M. Nørholm “Inharmonicities in Model-Based Speech Enhancement”
• J. R. Jensen “Joint DOA and Fundamental Frequency Estimation Based on Relaxed Iterative Adaptive Approach and Optimal Filtering”
• S. Karimian-Azari “Fast Joint DOA and Pitch Estimation Using a Broadband MVDR Beamformer”
• S. M. Nørholm “Noise Reduction using Joint Diagonalization”
• J. R. Jensen “Multichannel Signal Enhancement using Non-Causal, Time- Domain Filters“
• M. G. Christensen “An Exact Subspace Method for Fundamental Frequency Estimation”

The participants were Jacob Benesty, Andreas Jakobsson, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Jesper Rindom Jensen, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Stefan Ingi Adalbjörnsson, Sam Karimian-Azari, Sidsel Marie Nørholm, and Søren Vang Andersen.

Sturm BL, Mailhé B, Plumbley M. On Theorem 10 in “On Polar Polytopes and the Recovery of Sparse Representations”. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 2013.

Sturm BL. Evaluating music mood recognition: Lessons from music genre recognition. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

Sturm BL. Music genre recognition with risk and rejection. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

Sturm BL. On music genre classification via compressive sampling. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

The Audio Analysis Lab is extremely proud to announce that Jacob Benesty has joined the lab as Professor! Jacob Benesty is well-known in the community for his work on microphone array signal processing, which is both highly-cited and has received several awards. He is currently on sabbatical from his normal position at University of Quebec, INRS-EMT, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and he will be employed by Aalborg University for the next six months working on the Villum Foundation project.

We are happy to announce that Audio Analysis Lab member Bob Sturm has just been promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. Bob, who graduated from UCSB and has been with us at AAU since January 2010, is currently working on the project Greedy Sparse Approximation and the Automatic Description of Audio and Music Data , which funded by an individual postdoc grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research, and will continue do so for another year. Congratulations to Bob!

On October 29 and 30, the Audio Analysis Lab held its first annual workshop. The workshop started with a social event and dinner on the 29th followed by presentations and discussions on the 30th, where ongoing research as well as ideas for future projects were discussed.

On Friday Nov 2, Lei Yu will give a talk at 13:00 in room A6-306.

Title: Coordinated Scheduling and Beamforming for Multicell Spectrum Sharing Networks

Abstract:  We consider the downlink of a multicell network where neighboring multi-antenna base stations share the spectrum and coordinate their frequency and spatial resource allocation strategies to  improve the overall network performance. The objective of the coordination is to maximize the number of users that can be scheduled, meeting their quality-of-service requirements with the minimum total transmit power. The coordinated scheduling and multiuser transmit beamforming problem is combinatorial; we formulate it as a mixed-integer  second-order cone program and propose a branch & bound algorithm that  yields the optimal solution with relatively low-complexity. The algorithm can be used to motivate or benchmark approximation methods and  to numerically evaluate the gains due to spectrum sharing and coordination.

Bio: Lei Yu received his Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Sheffield, UK, in 2010, M.Sc. degree in Signal Processing and Communications from University of Edinburgh, UK, in 2005, and B.Eng. degree in Communication Engineering from Xidian University, China, in 2004. He joined Communication Systems Division, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden in March 2010 as a postdoctoral researcher. He is currently working on the project of EU FP7 SAPHYRE. His research interests include: robust beamforming, stochastic and array signal processing, and convex optimization.