Research on Hearing Assistive Technology: From Psychoacoustics to Brain-Computer Interface

Speaker: Prof. Fei Chen
Chair: Prof. Huiguang He
Time: 14:00, Monday, May 27th, 2024
Venue: No. 8 Meeting Room (17th Floor), Intelligent Building, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Effective spoken language communication is essential for our daily work and quality of life. However, for many people with hearing impairments due to various causes (hearing loss, structural damage, etc.), understanding speech is a significant challenge. Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology offers new possibilities for restoring speech communication capabilities, and AI-based techniques have further advanced research in this field.
This talk will first introduce key psychoacoustic principles relevant to improving speech communication for hearing-impaired individuals. It will then discuss the application of BCI in hearing assistive technology research, including artificial cochlear technologies for speech comprehension recovery, EEG-based attention decoding in auditory tasks, and finally, work related to speech imagination decoding.

Biography

Prof. Fei Chen is a tenured professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Nanjing University, and his Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has long been engaged in research on speech communication, hearing assistive technologies, BCIs, and biomedical signal processing.
He currently serves as a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society of China, a member of the Rehabilitation Engineering Committee of the Guangdong Medical Engineering Society, and a member of the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence. He has led major national and provincial research projects and published over 140 journal papers and 100 international conference papers. He is an associate editor of Biomedical Signal Processing and Control and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and serves on the editorial boards of other leading journals. His research has won awards including the “Best Paper” in Physiological Measurement.

Organizer: Laboratory of Brain Atlas and Brain-Inspired Intelligence