ASCIIMath creating images

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

EUSIPCO2013 and MLSP2013 papers

The Museum of Marrakech, a CC-licensed picture by
Donar Reiskoffer, from Wikimedia Commons here.
September will be a busy time for me, since I will be going to two conferences - on one of which my family will be accompanying me - including the in-laws!  The first one (with entourage) will be in Marrakesh, Morocco: EUSIPCO 2013. This will be my first time visiting Africa, and I'm really looking forward to it. (After that, I'll need to find an excuse to visit Australia and Antarctica!)

The other conference I'm going to is MLSP 2013, in Southampton, UK, and it should be ... nice.  For some reason, Madeline declined to accompany me on that trip.

The papers I will be presenting are some results from my time at IRISA as part of METISS - now called PANAMA.  At EUSIPCO, I will be presenting "A fast EM algorithm for Gaussian model-based source separation", on the BAEM algorithm, while at MLSP I'll be presenting "An experimental comparison of source separation and beamforming techniques for microphone array signal enhancement", some observations of the Generalized EM algorithm implemented in FASST when applied to multichannel signals.

Hope to see you there!

Friday, July 5, 2013

Multilevel Non-negative Matrix Factorisation à la FASST

The main graphical description of the FASST
NMF procedure from Alexei's paper [1] 

A particularly useful technique I got acquainted with at my old PostDoc position is the use of Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), in particular how it is being used in the FASST toolbox. While the FASST toolbox is a great comprehensive framework for source separation, its inner workings are a bit obtuse.  At my new group here in Oldenburg, my colleagues are interested in NMF - but rather than ripping it out of FASST, I decided to simply reimplement the key algorithm used (it's not very hard). The final MATLAB code can be found here, with a quick test script here (oh, and you'll need this function for testing as well). Read on for full explanation...

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Post-Docs and Conferences

A poster session at ICA 2013
It's a bit odd.  I'm at ICA 2013 in Montreal right now, and as a Post-Doc, I kind of feel I should be here mostly to be angling for future employment.  In a sort-of kinda way I am, but long-term...

This time around, I tell people I'm "in between Post-Docs" - and it's not an euphemism for being out of a job.  I am here, visiting my old (adopted) hometown, having literally left Rennes and heading to Oldenburg in a few days.  My soon-to-be supervisor and several of my future colleagues are also attending, and it's nice being able to show them a bit of my former haunts before I go to my new home.  Meanwhile all my furniture (a family of 3 has a lot of that, BTW) is currently in some storage space in Rennes or possibly Paris, and the moving truck is supposed to arrive in Oldenburg the same day we all get there - so never mind jet-lag, there are boxes to be moved! (And a washer, fridge, bed, ...)  Good times.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Updates to the DEMAND project

Yes, I haven't updated for a considerable while.  As usual, I am incredibly busy both at work and at home... yay academia! But those issues are for a different post.

What this post is about is that there are a couple of things happening regarding the DEMAND noise database:
  • First off, DEMAND will be officially presented (by me) at the International Conference on Acoustics (ICA) 2013 in Montreal, Quebec!  Yay, I get to go back to what is effectively my home town and favourite city, paid for by Research money!
  • More recordings have been made and will be added to the database - still some finalisation to be done, but then DEMAND v1.1 will be ready to go out into the wild!
  • I'm in the process of building a second array since the original went with Emmanuel to Nancy.  While the basic layout will be the same, I will try to construct it with higher precision, given the knowledge acquired from the first round.


Friday, February 1, 2013

Blog updates (why it hasn't and why it will)

Ok, I admit this post has been spurred on since there is actually a comment asking "why hasn't this updated?", and how I decide to post an update anyways.  (I've tried twice to reply directly to the comment in the comments section, but blogger ate my reply... no clue why!).

Hmmmm, Arduino or Raspberry Pi?
Which one shall I play with?
The simple answer is that I put up a post a) when I feel I have something significant to post and b) I have time to post.  And lately I have been very busy, both with my work and in my personal life. In a very good way.

Yes, my last post was in October.  Since then there was an ICASSP deadline (result will be known end of February), an ICA deadline, and early March is the deadline for EUSIPCO. Last Monday we had a deadline for some internal documentation.  Oh, and since my Postdoc contract ends in July I'm hunting for a new job, which means I'm also spending time on applying places (and being interviewed already!)

In December we visited family in Maastricht (in the Netherlands) and Kitchener, ON, and experienced the joys of transatlantic air travel with an infant.  We even managed to visit Montreal for a few days around new years day.

But eventually I should get to play with my toys again.  Maybe even with some help :-)  In the meantime, I will post some stuff on my work results (esp. the DEMAND array and the ICA paper - which is on the DEMAND database).  Real soon now.