© Matej Meza / Universität Bremen

Excellence Chairs

The ‘U Bremen Excellence Chairs’ programme underscores the strong international networking of existing research strengths and enhances their visibility. It promotes the University of Bremen’s internationalisation efforts on a high level. Eight Chairs will be supported for four to seven years by means of the so-called University Allowance funded within the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. Chair-holders are outstanding experts in their disciplines and represent bridgeheads for collaboration with leading institutions worldwide.For further information concerning U BRemen excellence chairs not asspociated with MMM, please refer to the Excellence webpage of the University of Bremen.

Prof. Dr. Haizhou Li

Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore (Singapore). Prof. Dr. Haizhou Li received the U Bremen Excellence Chair for research on a biologically inspired auditory model for machine listening that matches human listening ability. For this purpose, he has founded the „Machine Listening Laboratory“ as part of the Minds, Media, Machines high-profile area.

Prof. Haizhou Li is the General Chair of ICASSP and will host this IEEE event in Singapore. ICASSP is the largest conference in the field of Speech, Signal Processing and Acoustics. University Bremen acts as Supporting Organization for ICASSP 2022 and Prof. Tanja Schultz is invited to deliver one of the three plenary talks and serves as Tutorial chair.

Project

Prof. Dr. Haizhou Li supervises a research program to model, implement and verify a biologically inspired auditory model for machine listening that emulates human listening ability. The research group takes an anthropomorphic approach to address the machine listening problem that fits into the emerging paradigm of explainable artificial intelligence. The anthropomorphic approach features a two-way cognitive loop between the speech acquisition frontend and speech understanding backend, that will tremendously improve voice-based technologies, such as auditory attention in cocktail-party listening, multi-talker speech recognition, and robotic audition in real-world applications. The research marks a departure from today’s speech processing architecture, that is based on a one-way pipeline.

Prof. Yvonne Rogers

Prof. Yvonne Rogers is the director of the Interaction Centre at UCL (UCLIC), deputy head of department for Computer Science and a professor of Interaction Design at UCL since 2012.

She is presently hosted as an U Bremen Excellence Chair by MMM-member Prof. Dr. Johannes Schöning.

Project

Yvonne Rogers is recognised for foundational research that investigates, invents and designs technologies that extend and augment what humans can do. She has developed new theories (e.g., external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g., in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g., “Being Human: HCI in 2020” that outlined future challenges for Ubiquitous Computing). She has pioneered an approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning and developed a body of empirical research on how interactive technologies can best support collaborative learning and working. In Bremen, Yvonne Rogers and her team explore how personal data when combined with AI techniques can be used, from a human-centered perspective, to improve the quality of healthcare.

Internal Cooperation Network

Members of MMM collaborate closely with each other at the level of individual working groups, as well as in the context of larger projects and initiatives

Cooperation Partners