Elliot Saba Awarded Mary Gates Research Scholarship

Congratulations to Elliot Saba for receiving the Mary Gates Undergraduate Research Scholarship! These research scholarships enable students from a wide range of disciplines to deepen their involvement in work with faculty on research, curricular design, the creative arts, and other forms of scholarly endeavor.

Saba is working with EE PhD students Pascal Clark and Xing Li and Professor Les Atlas to develop a new pitch-invariant representation of the vocal tract with magnitudes consistent with the frequency response of the vocal tract filter. This technology will be used to integrate Professor Les Atlas' research on demodulation signal processing with the needs for novel speech and music encoding for cochlear implants, in a joint project with Professors Kaibao Nie and Jay Rubinstein of UW Bloedel's Hearing Research Center. The theory behind demodulation signal processing, funded by the AFOSR and the ONR, was originally intended for other applications. Yet Saba's work will allow this theory to widen the range of listening environments where cochlear implant users could hear.

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