People

Bryan Pardo

Professor

Prof. Bryan Pardo is the head of the Interactive Audio Lab. His research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Signal Processing. When he’s not computing he’s probably making music with Son Monarcas or The East Loop

Fatemeh Pishdadian

PhD Candidate

Fatemeh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Interactive Audio Lab at Northwestern University. Her research interest lies in the application of signal processing and machine learning techniques to the analysis of audio/music. More specifically, her doctoral research focuses on the design of audio signal representations and algorithms for audio source separation.

Bongjun Kim

PhD Candidate

Bongjun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University. He received his BS/MS in Industrial Engineering from Ajou University, and MS in Culture Technology from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests include computational analysis of sound scenes and events (e.g. sound event detection), human-in-the-loop interfaces for audio annotation, interactive machine learning, and multimedia information retrieval. [website]

Ethan Manilow

PhD Candidate

Ethan Manilow is a Phd Candidate in the Interactive Audio Lab. He recieved a BS in Physics and a BFA in Jazz Studies from the University of Michigan in 2013, and afterwords worked for two years as a software engineer at National Instruments in Austin, TX. His research interests include source separation (isolating sounds from audio mixtures), audio imputation (repairing damaged sounds), and making novel software interfaces for musicians and recording engineers. [website]

Max Morrison

PhD Candidate

Max is a PhD Candidate in the Interactive Audio Lab. He received his BSE in Computer Science and BFA in Performing Arts Technology from the University of Michigan. His research focus is the application of machine learning for controllable audio generation. Max enjoys playing piano and guitar, as well as exploring the National Parks. [website]

Alisa Liu

Undergraduate

Alisa is a senior undergraduate studying computer science and math, and identifies with the NLP and computer audition communities. Her current interests include audio source separation, common sense reasoning, and text generation, among many other things.

Jack Wiig

Undergraduate

Jack is a BS/MS student at Northwestern University doing research in the Interactive Audio Lab, under Prof. Bryan Pardo. He is currently working with Abir Saha to design audio engineering interfaces for the blind. His work involves reimagining existing digital audio workstations (DAWs) and audio plugins (VSTs) to make them more accessible.

Jinyu Han

Software Engineer, Facebook

Jinyu Han is a software engineer at Facebook. Prior to Facebook, Jinyu has worked at Amazon and Gracenote. He has also collaborated with researchers at Adobe. When he’s not coding, he’s raising a family and living the good life.

Mark Cartwright

Research Assistant Professor, New York University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Mark Cartwright is Brooklyn-based computer scientist and musician. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor in NYU’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering with affiliations to NYU’s Music and Audio Research Lab and the Center for Urban Science and Progress. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, audio signal processing, and machine learning. He completed his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University as a member of the Interactive Audio Lab.

Zafar Rafii

Research Engineer, Gracenote

Zafar Rafii is currently a research engineer at Gracenote. He received a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from both Ecole Nationale Superieure de l’Electronique et de ses Applications (ENSEA) in France and Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, and a PhD in Computer Science from Northwestern University. He also worked as a research engineer at Mist Technologies, now known as Audionamix, in France and as a PhD intern at Gracenote. His research interests are centered on audio analysis, at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, and cognitive science. Some of the projects he has been working on are, among others, music genre classification, adaptive user interfaces, mono and stereo source separation, speech enhancement, audio fingerprinting and cover Identification.

Zhiyao Duan

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester

Zhiyao is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester since July 2013. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science and am affiliated faculty of the Goergen Institute for Data Science.

Prem Seetharaman

Postdoctoral Scholar

Prem got his PhD from Northwestern University in the Interactive Audio Lab, under Prof. Bryan Pardo in 2019. The objective of his research is to create machines that can understand the auditory world like humans can. He works in machine learning, music information retrieval, audio source separation, music structure and similarity, acoustics, and human computer interaction. He currently teaches the Machine Learning course at Northwestern as a postdoc.