Machine Learning Challenges for Hearing Aids (Clarity-2023)
19th August 2023, Trinity Business School, Dublin, Ireland
We are now pleased to announce the 4th Clarity Workshop for Machine Learning Challenges for Hearing Aids, to be collocated with Interspeech 2023, Dublin, Ireland. This will be the first in-person Clarity event, following the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Clarity workshops that were held as online event.About
One of the biggest challenges for hearing-impaired listeners is understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Everyday social noise levels can have a devastating impact on speech intelligibility. Inability to communicate effectively can lead to social withdrawal and isolation. Disabling hearing impairment affects 360 million people worldwide, with that number increasing because of the ageing population. Unfortunately, current hearing aid technology is often ineffective in noisy situations. Although amplification can restore audibility, it does not compensate fully for the effects of hearing loss.
Recent advances in hearing aid hardware are presenting opportunities for increasingly sophisticated processing and machine learning solutions. For example, wireless communication between the hearing aid and a mobile device can allow non-latency critical computation to be freed from the low-power constraints attendant with traditional aids. These advances raise the prospect that the computationally demanding techniques employed with great success in statistical speech modelling and statistical acoustic scene analysis could soon be exploited for hearing aid processing. We believe that new directions in hearing aid research can be inspired by bringing together speech technologists and hearing researchers.
The Clarity workshops are designed to stimulate a two-way conversation between the speech research community and hearing aid developers. Hearing aid developers, who are not typically represented at Interspeech, will have an opportunity to present the challenges of their industry to the speech community; the speech community will be able to present and discuss potentially transformative approaches to speech in noise processing in the presence of hearing researchers and industry experts.
Topics
Any work related to the challenges of hearing aid signal processing will be considered relevant topics include,
- Binaural technology for speech enhancement and source separation
- Multi-microphone processing technology
- Real-time approaches to speech enhancement
- Statistical model-driven approaches to hearing aid processing
- Audio quality & intelligibility assessment hearing aid and cochlear implant users
- Efficient and effective integration of psychoacoustic testing in machine learning
- Machine learning for diverse target listeners
- Machine learning models of hearing impairment
The 2nd Clarity Prediction Challenge
The Clarity-2023 will also host the 2nd Clarity Prediction Challenge, that is tacking the problem of developing new intrusive and non-intrusive approaches to hearing-aid speech intelligibility prediction. The Challenge will be launching on 1st March, is you may be interested in participating please sign up to our Google group for further announcements.
Organisers
- Michael Akeroyd
University of Nottingham, UK - Will Bailey
University of Sheffield, UK - Jon Barker
University of Sheffield, UK - Fei Chen
Southern Uni. Sci. & Tech, China - Trevor Cox
University of Salford, UK - John Culling
University of Cardiff, UK - Simone Graetzer
University of Salford, UK - Andrew Hines
University College Dublin, Ireland - Graham Naylor
University of Nottingham, UK - More info
Keynote Speakers
- DeLiang Wang
Ohio State University, US - Fei Chen
SUSTech, China
Invited Talks
- Daniel Wong
Meta, US - Peter Derleth
Sonova AG, Switzerland - Dominika Woszczyk
Imperial College, UK - Lorena Aldana
University of Edinburgh, UK - Emma McAuley
Chime, Ireland
Registration
- Registration is open