Plenary Talks – IWAENC 2020 – International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement

End-to-End Speech Recognition

Biography: Tara Sainath received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009. The main focus of her PhD work was on acoustic modeling for noise robust speech recognition. After her PhD, she spent 5 years at the Speech and Language Algorithms group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, before joining Google Research. She has served as Program Chair for ICLR in 2017 and 2018. She has also co-organized numerous special sessions and workshops, including Interspeech 2010, ICML 2013, Interspeech 2016 and ICML 2017. In addition, she is a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) as well as Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. Her research interests are mainly in acoustic modeling, including deep neural networks, sparse representations and adaptation methods.

Spatial Acquisition, Interactive Auralization, and Perceptual Modeling of Church Acoustics

Prof. Dr. Toon van Watershoot, KU Leuven

Biography: Toon van Waterschoot received MSc (2001) and PhD (2009) degrees in Electrical Engineering, both from KU Leuven, Belgium, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Consolidator Grantee of the European Research Council (ERC). He has previously also held teaching and research positions at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and the University of Lugano in Switzerland. His research interests are in signal processing, machine learning, and numerical optimization, applied to acoustic signal enhancement, acoustic modeling, audio analysis, and audio reproduction. He has been the Scientific Coordinator for the FP7-PEOPLE Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Dereverberation and Reverberation of Audio, Music, and Speech (DREAMS)” and is currently the PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant “The Spatial Dynamics of Room Acoustics (SONORA)”, both funded by the European Commission. He has been serving as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and for the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Music, and Speech Processing, and as a Guest Editor for Elsevier Signal Processing. He is a Director of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), a Member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee, a Member of the EURASIP Special Area Team on Acoustic, Speech and Music Signal Processing, and a Founding Member of the EAA Technical Committee in Audio Signal Processing. He was the General Chair of the 60th AES International Conference in Leuven, Belgium (2016), and has been serving on the Organizing Committee of the European Conference on Computational Optimization (EUCCO 2016), the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA 2017), and the 28th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2020). He is a member of EURASIP, IEEE, ASA, and AES.

Evolution of Microphone Array Beamformers

Dr. Jens Meyer and Dr. Gary W. Elko, mh acoustics

Biographies: Jens Meyer received his Dipl.-Ing (M.Sc.) and Dr.-Ing. (PhD) from Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany). In 2002, he cofounded mh acoustics. Jens spent three years developing technologies for hearing diagnostic for Mimosa Acoustics before working full time for mh acoustics. Together with Gary Elko, he developed the Eigenmike® microphone array. First sold in 2003, the Eigenmike array was the first microphone capable of recording Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA). To this day his main technical interest is in acoustic signal processing with emphasis on array beamforming technologies. He is the author of numerous publications and patents.
Gary W. Elko started his professional career at AT&T Bell Labs in 1984 after completing his BSEE degree at Cornell and MS and Ph.D. degrees at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Elko was a Research Supervisor of the Electroacoustics and Signal Processing Group in the Acoustics Research Department at Bell Labs working on acoustic signal processing related to full duplex hands-free speech communication. In 2002, he cofounded mh acoustics with other Bell Labs colleagues. mh acoustics works with customers on the development and implementation of acoustic signal processing algorithms for audio communication products. The company also develops and markets the Eigenmike® and other associated microphone array systems. He is a fellow of both the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE. He received the Acoustical Society of America’s Silver Medal in Engineering Acoustics in 2012 and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Industrial Innovation Award in 2015. He has more than 60 publications and over 30 patents in the area of acoustic transducers and acoustic signal processing.