TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Samuel Clarke presents talk titled Audio for Object and Spatial Awareness

Date & Time:

Wednesday, October 30, 2024; 1:00 PM

Abstract:

Acoustic perception is invaluable to humans and robots in understanding objects and events in their environments. These sounds are dependent on properties of the source, the environment, and the receiver. Many humans possess remarkable intuition both to infer key properties of each of these three aspects from a sound and to form expectations of how these different aspects would affect the sound they hear. In order to equip robots and AI agents with similar if not stronger capabilities, our research has taken a two-fold path. First, we collect high-fidelity datasets in both controlled and uncontrolled environments which capture real sounds of objects and rooms. Second, we introduce differentiable physics-based models that can estimate acoustic properties of objects and rooms from minimal amounts of real audio data, then can predict new sounds from these objects and rooms under novel, “unseen” conditions.

Speaker:

Samuel Clarke
Stanford University

Samuel Clarke is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University, advised by Jiajun Wu. His research interests are broadly within embodied perception, so far focusing on acoustic perception for learning from physical sounds in real environments. Previously, he completed an MS in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, advised by Oliver Kroemer and Chris Atkeson. He completed BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at Georgia Tech, researching with Polo Chau. He is currently supported by a Meta Fellowship (2023) and previously received an Astronaut Foundation Scholarship (2015).

MERL Host:

Gordon Wichern

Research Areas:

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Speech & Audio