At the Technical Faculty of IT and Design, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology one or more PhD stipends are available within the general research programme Electrical and Electronic Engineering. The stipend(s) are open for appointment from 1st of April 2018 or as soon thereafter as possible.

The open position(s) are with the research group Audio Analysis Lab. The PhD students will work on a research project entitled ‘Sound Processing for Robots and Drones in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

Sound is an often overlooked modality in robot and drones despite its potential to increase the application of robots and drones in industrial production. By using echolocation like bats, the robots may orient themselves and navigate blindly by emitting sound and listening for reflected echoes. Compared to commonly used sensors such as depth cameras and LIDAR, the usage of microphones (MEMS) can offer a cheaper solution, which is robust against, e.g., changing lighting conditions. Sound may therefore facilitate autonomous and indoor robot operation for production, which is a key to increase the competitiveness of high-tech countries. This is also known as the fourth industrial revolution. The aim of this project is, thus, to facilitate such operation via advanced signal processing for robots equipped with microphone arrays (multiple microphones in a known geometrical configuration).

The successful applicant should have a M.Sc. (or equivalent) in engineering within signal processing. Prior experience with audio and acoustic signal processing and mobile robot platforms is a plus but not required. Moreover, the successful applicant should be fluent in English, have strong programming and math skills, and be familiar with MATLAB (or similar tools). The applicant must submit his/her M.Sc. thesis (or a draft thereof) as part of the application. The degree must be completed at the time of the appointment.

The Audio Analysis Lab at Aalborg University conducts basic and applied research in signal processing theory and methods aimed at or involving analysis of audio signals. The research focuses on problems such as compression, analysis, classification, separation, and enhancement of audio signals, as well as localization, identification and tracking using microphone arrays. The lab and its members have in recent years been funded by grants from the Villum Foundation, the Danish Council for Strategic Research, the Danish Council for Independent Research, and Innovations Fund Denmark. The research projects are carried out in close collaboration with leading industrial partners and universities around the world.

You may obtain further information from Assistant Professor Jesper Rindom Jensen, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, phone: +45 9940 7450, email: jrj@create.aau.dk concerning the scientific aspects of the stipend.

PhD stipends are allocated to individuals who hold a Master’s degree. PhD stipends are normally for a period of 3 years. It is a prerequisite for allocation of the stipend that the candidate will be enrolled as a PhD student at the Technical Doctoral School of IT adn Design in accordance with the regulations of Ministerial Order No. 1039 of August 27, 2013 on the PhD Programme at the Universities and Certain Higher Artistic Educational Institutions. According to the Ministerial Order, the progress of the PhD student shall be assessed every six months. It is a prerequisite for continuation of salary payment that the previous progress is approved at the time of the evaluation.

The qualifications of the applicant will be assessed by an assessment committee. On the basis of the recommendation of the assessment committee, the Dean of the Technical Faculty of IT and Design will make a decision for allocating the stipend.

For further information about stipends and salary as well as practical issues concerning the application procedure contact Ms. Helene Ulrich Pedersen, The Technical Faculty of IT and Design, email: hup@adm.aau.dk, phone: +45 9940 9803.

You can read more and apply at http://www.stillinger.aau.dk/vis-stilling/?vacancy=956268.

We are extremely happy and proud to announce that the Audio Analysis Lab (AAL) has received a grant from InnovationsFonden together with GN ReSound.

In the project, AAL and ReSound will research in new methods for detecting situations where hearing-aids typically are not able help the users, such as in so called cocktail party scenarios. By being aware of when these situtations happen, the cocktail party problem can be dealt with much more efficiently. Furthermore, wireless communication is now present in many hearing-aids, so distributed processing will be considered for making the above features feasible.

The 12 mill. DKK project will be running for 4 years, starting from this year, and also covers training of three PhD’s. The project will headed by Prof. Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Senior Research Manager Frederik Gran, and Senior Research Scientist Jesper Bünsow Boldt.

Further details about the project can be found here.

We are proud to announce that our recent results on speech enhancement using subspace-based filtering have now been published in a book. The book, entitled “Speech Enhancement — A Signal Subspace Perspective” is published with Academic Press, and is authored by Prof. Jacob Benesty, Postdoc Jesper Rindom Jensen, Prof. Mads Græsbøll Christensen and Prof. Jingdong Chen.

In the book, we are the first to treat subspace approaches in a unified way for time and frequency domain, single-channel, multichannel, as well as binaural, speech enhancement. Moreover, the book bridges the gap between optimal filtering methods and subspace approaches, which has previously been considered as separate fields within speech enhancement.

Two of the lab members (Mads Græsbøll Christensen and Jesper Rindom Jensen) are participating in this years IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA). WASPAA is held every 2nd year in the Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, and is visited by the leading experts within audio signal processing.

During the workshop, the lab will present the work entitled:

• An LCMV Filter for Single-Channel Noise Cancellation and Reduction in the Time Domain.

The work was carried out in collaboration with Prof. Jacob Benesty and Prof. Jingdong Chen.

See you in New Paltz!

The Audio Analysis Lab are pleased and proud to announce that, primo September 2013, the head of the lab, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, was appointed professor mso within audio processing.

Congratulations to Mads from the Audio Analysis Lab members!

A reception will follow in the early 2014, to celebrate Mads on his new appointment.

On March 15th, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, founder of the Audio Analysis Lab, received the Statoil Prize (Statoil Prisen) 2013. Mads received the prestigious prize of 100.000 DKK for his significant research contributions within digital signal processing and analysis of speech, music and sound.

The Statoil Prize is one of the oldest, danish prizes within the field of technical research, and has been awarded once a year since 1951.

Congratulations to Mads on this impressive achievement!

We are pleased to announce that the Audio Analysis Lab had 8 out of 8 papers accepted for presentation at the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). The titles of the papers are:

• Multichannel Signal Enhancement using Non-Causal, Time-Domain Filters
• Statistically Efficient Methods for Pitch and DOA Estimation
• Joint DOA and Fundamental Frequency Estimation based on Relaxed Iterative Adaptive Approach and Optimal Filtering
• An Exact Subspace Method for Fundamental Frequency Estimation
• Bayesian Model Comparison and the BIC for Regression Models
• Estimating Multiple Pitches Using Block Sparsity
• Real-Time Implementations of Sparse Linear Prediction for Speech Processing
• Recovery of Nested Support by Greedy Sparse Representation Algorithms

This year, ICASSP is held in Vancouver, Canada, and the conference is taking place from May 26 to May 31. The paper presentations are not scheduled yet, but they should soon be available on the conference homepage.