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Signal processing expert Tuomas Virtanen named an IEEE Fellow

Published on 2.3.2021
Tampere University
Tuomas Virtanen
Tuomas Virtanen. Kuva: Virpi Andersin / Tampere University
Tuomas Virtanen, professor of signal processing at Tampere University, has been named an IEEE Fellow. Virtanen was recognized for his contributions to sound event detection and source separation as well as his outstanding record of accomplishments in the field.

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is the highest grade of membership of IEEE, which is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology. The nomination is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

“It has been great to see how the work done in my group has impacted the whole research field. The practical implications of one’s research may not often be visible in a researcher’s everyday work, but being able to do basic research that paves the way to new applications has been encouraging,” says Tuomas Virtanen, who works as professor of signal processing at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University.

Sound event detection and source separation methods developed by Virtanen have numerous applications, for example, in context-aware devices, acoustic monitoring and assistive technologies.

He has been able to open new avenues, for example, for improving the speech intelligibility in hearing aids, and noise-robust automatic speech recognition.

“My research group has developed techniques that allow detection of large number of sounds in everyday environments, opening several research and commercial opportunities,” Tuomas Virtanen explains.

Encouraging other scientists with shared data and tools

One of the major reasons for Virtanen’s nomination was his contribution to the growth of the field of everyday sound analysis by organizing international DCASE (Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events) evaluation campaigns. Publicly available datasets and evaluation tools produced by Virtanen’s group have encouraged reproducible science in the field.

IEEE has over 400,000 members in 160 countries and is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. The association publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields and has developed more than 1300 active industry standards. Read more on www.ieee.org (you are transferred to another site). 

Check the research profile of Tuomas Virtanen.