Connectionists: UK EPSRC funded COG-MHEAR Research Fellowships & IEEE EMBC 2022 Workshop invite

[Amir Hussain]

Dear friends,

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

(1) The UK EPSRC funded COG-MHEAR research programme (http://cogmhear.org)
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:  8th 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:  22nd 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
---
Professor Amir Hussain
Programme Director: EPSRC COG-MHEAR (http://cogmhear.org)
Editor-in-Chief: Cognitive Computation (Springer Nature -
http://springer.com/12559)
School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh EH10 5DT, Scotland, UK
E-mail: A.Hussain at napier.ac.uk
https://www.napier.ac.uk/people/amir-hussain
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