Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Barton Hall 105
macarlin AT jhu DOT edu

I am a final year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, working under the guidance of Mounya Elhilali. I was previously supported by a Graduate Fellowship from the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence where I worked with Aren Jansen. From 2006 through 2008 I was with the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory and worked on variety of speech signal processing problems. In the summer of 2009 I worked with the speech group of SCALE.

In the fall of 2009, I had the privilege of studying information theory with Prof. Frederick Jelinek.

In the summer of 2011, I spent the summer working with the HLT group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory with Nicolas Malyska and Thomas Quatieri.

In the summer of 2013, I participated in another SCALE, working with Alan McCree, Pascal Clark, and Aren Jansen.

Research Interests

I am interested generally in computational neuroscience, machine learning, and biologically inspired methods for speech and audio signal processing. Our work has explored how enforcing temporal stability in model thalamo-cortical neurons yields highly structured spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) akin to those commonly observed in auditory physiology. We have also developed a computational model of task-driven auditory plasticity, demonstrating how a discriminative model can induce adaptive changes in STRFs akin to those seen in neurophysiological studies. Finally, we consider how such models can be used to generate noise-robust features for common speech tasks.

Refereed Publications and Conference Presentations

• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. “Modeling attention-driven plasticity in auditory cortical receptive fields.” Submitted to PLoS Computational Biology.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. “A computational model of optimal adaptive changes in auditory cortical receptive fields during behavioral tasks.” COSYNE Abstracts 2014, Salt Lake City, USA, 2014.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. ”Sustained firing of model central auditory neurons yields a discriminative spectro-temporal representation for natural sounds.” PLoS Comp. Bio., 9(3), e1002982, 2013.
• Carlin, M. A., Patil, K., Nemala, S. K., and Elhilali, M. ”Robust phoneme recognition using biomimetic speech contours.” In Proc. Interspeech, 2012.
• Carlin, M. A., Malyska, N., and Quatieri, T. F. ”Speech enhancement using sparse convolutive non-negative matrix factorization with basis adaptation.” In Proc. Interspeech, 2012.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. ”On the role of pitch in binding auditory streams.” InAbstracts of the 16th International Symposium on Hearing, 2012.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. ”Sustained firing of model cortical neurons yields richly structured spectro-temporal receptive fields.” In Abstracts of the Thirty-fifth ARO Mid-winter meeting, Volume 35, Mt. Royal, NJ: Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2012.
• Carlin, M. A., Thomas, S., Jansen, A., and Hermansky, H. ”Rapid Evaluation of Speech Representations for Spoken Term Discovery.” In Proc. Interspeech, 2011.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. ”Exploiting temporal coherence in speech for data-driven feature extraction.” In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Information Sciences and Systems, 2011.
• Carlin, M. A. and Elhilali, M. ”Exploring the relationship between principles of temporal coherence and coding strategies in the auditory system.” In Abstracts of the Thirty-fourth ARO Mid-winter meeting, Volume 34, Mt. Royal, NJ: Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2011.
• Lawson, A., Linderman, M., Leonard, M., Stauffer, A., Pokines, B, and Carlin, M. A. ”Perturbation and Pitch Normalization as Enhancements to Speaker Recognition.” In Proc. ICASSP, 2009.
• Carlin, M. A. ”Estimation of Target-to-Interferer Ratio using the Auditory Image Model.” Presented at Acoustics ’08, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 2008.
• Lawson, A., Carlin, M. A., Stauffer, A., and Linderman, M. ”Automatic Data Enhancement for Language Identification using STRAIGHT Voice Generation.” Presented at Acoustics ’08, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 2008.
• Carlin, M. A., Smolenski, B. Y. ”Detection of Speaker Change Points in Conversational Speech.” In Proc. IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2007.
• Carlin, M. A., Smolenski, B. Y., and Wenndt, S. J. ”Unsupervised Detection of Whispered Speech in the Presence of Normal Phonation.” In Proc. Interspeech, 2006.

© Michael Carlin, 2015. All rights reserved.