June 6-10, 2022

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Purpose

The workshop is aimed as hands-on non-traditional research conference where the focus is more on open forums and live discussions rather than research talks. The meeting is held over 4 and ½ days where interdisciplinary teams including senior researchers and younger trainees and students work together to pilot new ideas, exchange approaches, and compare methodologies around themes relevant to auditory cognition.

The 2022 workshop is the first in-person edition of the CogHear workshops after a series of online discussions and reading groups held during the COVID pandemic. The workshop aims to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and communication across sensory and cognitive researchers focused on understanding brain function. The meeting provides a forum for knowledge gathering, idea sharing and research dissemination, as well as building bridges between basic science and engineering disciplines.

Scientific program

Meeting agenda

Keynote speakers

Dr. Nima Mesgarani is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from University of Maryland where he worked on neuromorphic speech technologies and neurophysiology of mammalian auditory cortex. He was a postdoctoral scholar in Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University, and the neurosurgery department of University of California San Francisco before joining Columbia in fall 2013. He was named a Pew Scholar for Innovative Biomedical Research in 2015, and received the National Science Foundation Early Career Award in 2016.

Dr. Alexander Bertrand is Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department (ESAT) of KU Leuven, Belgium. He was a visiting researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (in 2010) and at University of California, Berkeley (in 2013). His research involves signal processing algorithm design with a focus on biomedical sensor arrays, such as electroencephalography (EEG), neural implants, ultrasound probes, and distributed body- and neuro-sensor networks. also conducts research in generic signal processing techniques, with a focus on multi-channel and distributed signal processing, spatial filtering, beamforming, adaptive filtering, and signal enhancement.

Dr. Giovanni Di Liberto holds the title of Assistant Professor in Intelligent Systems in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin. Giovanni's scientific interests centre on understanding the brain mechanisms underlying speech comprehension. In his work, he develops data analysis methods and applies them to brain data to identify the neural processes responsible for the transformation of a sensory stimulus into its abstract meaning. Brain electrical data is measured with either non-invasive (e.g., electroencephalography - EEG) or invasive (e.g., electrocorticography - ECoG) technologies.

Dr. Brent Edwards is the director of the National Acoustic Laboratories in Australia since 2017. Prior to that, for over 22 years, he headed research at major hearing aid companies (GN ReSound, Starkey) and at Silicon Valley startups that developed innovative technologies and clinical tools used worldwide. Dr Edwards founded and ran the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, CA that was a leading site for research in hearing impairment and cognition. Dr Edwards is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Fellow of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology, and an Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University.

Dr. Andrew J. Oxenham received the B. Mus. degree in music and sound recording (Tonmeister) from the University of Surrey, Surrey, U.K., and the Ph.D. degree in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. Following positions at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in the Netherlands, Northeastern University, Evanston, IL, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, he is now on the faculty of the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he leads the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory. His interests include auditory perception in normal and impaired hearing, cochlear implants, functional imaging, and music perception. He is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.

Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham joined Carnegie Mellon University in 2018 as the director of the Neuroscience Institute. She holds courtesy appointments in Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before joining CMU, she spent 21 years on the faculty of Boston University. Her research combines behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand how the brain processes sound. She is a Fellow of the ASA and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers. She is an associate member of the National Research Council and has been elected vice president of the ASA and to the governing board of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO). She has degrees in electrical engineering from Brown University and MIT.

Lucas C. Parra received the Ph.D. degree in physics from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany in 1996. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the City College of the City University of New York. Previously he was head of the adaptive image and signal processing group at Sarnoff Corporation (1997–2003) and member of the machine learning and the imaging departments at Siemens Corporate Research (1995–1997). His background is in machine learning, signal processing, and medical imaging. In recent years his interests have shifted to systems neuroscience. Current projects focus on non-invasive “reading and writing the brain,” i.e., interpreting brain signals on a single-trial basis and electrically stimulating the brain to boost neuronal plasticity.

Alain de Cheveigné’s initial training was in Maths, Physics and EE. He has worked on speech signal processing (pitch and spectral estimation), auditory modeling and psychophysics (pitch perception and sound segregation), and more recently, brain data analysis. He recently coordinated the European project COCOHA that aimed to develop a brain-controlled hearing aid. He works for CNRS and is affiliated with the Ecole Normale Superieure and University College London.

Meeting outcomes

Neural decoding of auditory attention:

One of the discussions topics was the possibility of developing an open challenge to the community for decoding EEG/MEG data in response to an attended audio stimulus. The goal of this activity is to push forward the growing research in which auditory attention is decoded from the brain, with potential applications in smart hearing aids. An increasingly popular method in these fields is to relate a person’s electroencephalogram (EEG) to a feature of the natural speech signal they were listening to. This is typically done using linear regression to predict the EEG signal from the stimulus or to decode the stimulus from the EEG. Given the very low signal-to-noise ratio of the EEG, this is a challenging problem, and several non-linear methods have been proposed to improve upon the linear regression methods. In the Auditory-EEG challenge, teams will compete to build the best model to relate speech to EEG. The group explored needs and challenges for such direction as well as possible tasks that would be suitable for this challenge.

Dr. Francart’s group at KU Leuven has been working on a challenge for EEG decoding and have proposed it to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing, the flagship conference on signal processing applied to speech and audio. The challenge is open to the community for submissions in 2023.

Attention and hearing loss:

The group discussed used of AAD (auditory-attention decoding) algorithms in clinical research related to hearing loss and coalesced around the concepts that there are main concepts that need to be addressed:

· Role of background noise?

· How many speakers are present?

· How close are the speakers/background noise to one another?

· How often is switched attention needed to different speakers?

There were discussions to adopt the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement to evaluate what situations were most important for patients to have improved with their hearing aids. The group agreed that surveying users and audiologists is critical at this juncture of the research across the community to evaluate the possible implications of AAD in hearing aid technologies. This is an open topic for discussion and the community needs to explore validity and limits of such evaluations.

Auditory imagery

The group discussed new directions to explore auditory imagery and decoding of brain activity during imagined speech. This is a critical topic in order to push forth possibilities of brain-computer interfaces and its relationship with auditory perception. These questions are a continued topic of interest to the broad community.

Meeting Logistics

The meeting was held at the Hotel at the university of Maryland, College Park, June 6-10, 2022, and was coordinated by the conferences and visitor services at the University of Maryland.

The meeting was attended by 51 attendees from 9 countries (USA, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and the UK), and participants spanned a wide range of expertise and seniority, including graduate students and postdoctoral trainees. Attendees of the meeting were 25% female.

Scientific steering committee:

Mounya Elhilali (Johns Hopkins)
Shihab Shamma (University of Maryland and École Normale Supérieure)
Malcolm Slaney (Google)
Jonathan Simon (University of Maryland)
Tom Francart (Leuven)

With generous support from the National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (R13DC018475)

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