A research scientist in the Qualcomm Institute, Hari Garudadri (at left) is principal investigator on a more than $2 million project funded by NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) that involves a team of researchers and graduate students as well as externl collaborators, including from San Diego State University. The team of engineers from UC San Diego and audiologists from SDSU has set out an ambitious timetable for delivering two new electronic platforms to dramatically improve and accelerate research on better hearing aids. Announced this week at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif., the Open Speech Platform project at UC San Diego is one of the six groups awarded funding under the NIDCD Open Speech program to develop open-source solutions and development platforms to make it easier for researchers to develop enhanced algorithms and techniques to improve the intelligibility of hearing aids in widespread use today. The UC San Diego-based project will develop a 'real-time, open, portable, extensible speech lab' to be used by audiologists and technology developers. The first platform will be released in early 2018 in a desktop form factor (see image), and by the end of 2017, the researchers will shrink the system for use as a wearable, chip-based embedded system that could be used ito take hearing-aid testing into the field.
While the two co-PIs on the Open Speech Platform project are ECE faculty members (Patrick Mercier and Bhaskar Rao), CSE is also involved on several counts. CSE Prof. Rajesh Gupta is a collaborating investigator whose research is focused on energy efficiency and mobile computing issues in embedded systems (currently in connection with the NSF-funded RoseLine project on which Gupta is PI). Also representing CSE on the research project is Ph.D. student Sean Hamilton. Hamilton still works part-time as a software engineer at Tortuga Logic, a chip design security startup founded by CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner and CSE alumnus Jason Oberg (M.S., Ph.D. '12, '14). .(Pictured: CSE Prof. Gupta, and Ph.D. student Hamilton.)
Read the full news release on the Qualcomm Institute website.
Open Speech Platform Website
Download 2-Page Data Sheet on Open Speech Platform