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Abstract
The world we live in is not nearly as clean and orderly as the training data sets of yesteryear. Our (acoustic) world is noisy, filled with unknown people and events. Mark Tilden, lead robotic designer for WowWee/Hasbro toys, said last July, “The cocktail party effect is costing me money.” In this talk I would like to talk about the need for context and top-down considerations in auditory processing and models of auditory perception. I will demonstrate the need with many examples from visual and auditory perception, and show some directions for future research. I’ll conclude with a short discussion of why Yahoo cares (basically because the Internet is full of really noisy data and we want to help people find and understand it.)
Biography
Malcolm Slaney is a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Laboratory. He received his PhD from Purdue University for his work on computed imaging. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book “Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging.” This book was recently 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 Yahoo!, Dr. Slaney has worked at Bell Laboratory, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Apple Computer, Interval Research and IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He is also a (consulting) Professor at Stanford’s CCRMA where he organizes and teaches the Hearing Seminar. His research interests include auditory modeling and perception, multimedia analysis and synthesis, compressed-domain processing, music similarity and audio search, and machine learning. For the last several years he has lead the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop.