[AUDITORY] UK EPSRC COG-MHEAR: Two postdoctoral research fellowships & invite to IEEE EMBC 2022 Workshop

["Hussain, Amir" <0000016168b2549a-dmarc-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all:

Please see below and help circulate as appropriate - thank you in advance.

(1) The UK EPSRC funded COG-MHEAR research programme is recruiting two postdoctoral research fellows based at Edinburgh Napier University - please see application details below.

COG-MHEAR Research Fellow post 1 (for up to 39 months - closing date:  8^th May 2022):

https://www.s1jobs.com/job/research-fellow-cog-mhear-63666718

COG-MHEAR Research Fellow post 2 (for up to 30 months - closing date:  22^nd May 2022):

https://www.s1jobs.com/job/research-fellow-cog-mhear-63666724

(2) COG-MHEAR Workshop at IEEE EMBC 2022, Glasgow 11-15 July 2022

Don't miss our forthcoming COG-MHEAR Workshop on “Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Multi-Modal, Transformative Hearing Assistive Technologies” being held as part of the 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) 2022, in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, on 11th July, 2022 (https://embc.embs.org/2022/)

Workshop Synopsis:

Hearing loss affects at least 1.5 billion people globally and is associated with poorer health and social outcomes. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates 83% of people who could benefit from hearing aids (HAs) do not use them. Barriers to HA uptake are multifaceted but can include: social stigma; cost; a lack of understanding of hearing loss interventions; and limitations of current HA technology. Limited research developments in speech enhancement have been implemented into commercially available HAs. However, even sophisticated aids remain ineffective in very noisy environments where human performance is known to be dependent upon input from both the aural and visual senses.

Creating multi-modal HAs that draw on the principles of normal, visually-assisted, hearing raises many technical and usability challenges which need to be tackled holistically. For example, making use of lip movements or facial expressions traditionally requires a video camera filming the speaker, which introduces questions of privacy. Ambitious solutions to these challenges include exploring the use of radio signals for remote monitoring and designing all processing to be done on the hearing device itself to minimise latency and increase privacy.

This interdisciplinary workshop will be facilitated by leading academic and industry experts who will showcase a hands-on demonstration of a first of its kind real-time, multi-modal speech enhancement prototype that can exploit lip reading cues to effectively enhance speech in real noisy environments. The workshop will serve to stimulate discussions on current trends, future research and innovation, clinical evaluation and commercialisation challenges and opportunities to transform the current HA landscape. The prototype demonstrator will be made freely available as an open testbed for further research, evaluation and benchmarking by participants, who will also benefit from interdisciplinary networking and collaboration opportunities.

You can register for our Workshop (number 29) via the EMBC website: https://embc.embs.org/2022/workshops-2/   

We hope to see you soon.

Kindest regards

Amir

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Professor Amir Hussain

Programme Director: EPSRC COG-MHEAR (http://cogmhear.org)

School of Computing

Edinburgh Napier University 

Edinburgh EH10 5DT

Scotland, UK

E-mail: A.Hussain@xxxxxxxxxxxx 

https://www.napier.ac.uk/people/amir-hussain

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