Research Interests:
Most of the high-end multimedia personal computers on the market today boast audio capabilities which "rival highend home stereo and home theater systems"1. Yet even popular audio hardware manufactures such as Creative Labs©, Turtle Beach©, and ESS© do not realize the shortcomings and pitfalls of this limited goal2. Rather than reinventing home-theater systems (such as Dolby®, THX®, and DTSTM) for computers, we should strive for development of true 3D acoustics, as Aureal© attempted before being taken over by Creative Labs© last decade. I foresee that this will become the path of audio programming in the future, just as truly realistic graphics algorithms have dominated visual programming. Development of accurate and convincing acoustical algorithms will greatly enhance human to computer interaction and requires a depth of knowledge of algorithm design, operating systems, and multimedia programming. My current topic of research is to apply physics-based techniques of acoustical simulations to the audio portion of real-time virtual reality environments. A very few number of other researchers are exploring this topic in any depth. Most of these (such as the group at Princeton3) tackle the problem from a ray tracing approach. Though this method has some merits, especially with respect to efficiency, it can have major drawbacks in terms of effectiveness and portability (i.e. movable sources, etc).

My approach to this topic is unique in that I strongly adhere to the concept of interdisciplinary research and collaboration. This is cursorily demonstrated by the disciplines represented in the thesis committee I gathered: three members from the computer science department, two members of the physics faculty, and a music professor. Though logistically challenging, I assembled this group in order to expand my (and each others) perspective of my research. It is my belief that much of academic research in the future will follow this trend of interdisciplinary collaboration. Specifically, the value of collaborative effort in research manifests itself in my solution to the problem implementing true 3D sound. I am incorporating standard wave equation calculations from physics to efficiently calculate many acoustical properties of the environment and then using these to generate realistic acoustic signals. My method should produce accurate and generalizable results, but possibly at the cost of computation time. Optimization of this will create a powerful acoustic calculating algorithm. Eventually, the basic properties of the research may be transferable to other acoustic simulation topics such as underwater acoustics, non-linear acoustics, and even medical bioacoustics.

Another topic of interest is music information retrieval (MIR). This involves efficient storage and fetching of songs (such as mp3's) in large databases like well-known Napster©. My intention is to develop algorithms that will allow the user to simply hum a tune in order to search for a song in the database. This topic of research utilizes techniques from database and information retrieval, digital signal processing, human computer interaction, and algorithm analysis. The practical results of this research are wide-ranging and can have immediate impact on a variety of online databases.

As both a Master's and PhD student in computer science, I have spent a great deal of time developing 3D graphics virtual environments. Initially this was in the form of research on the implementation of cinematography standards (rules) to automatically generate aesthetically pleasing camera placement and angles. This research topic generated many publications which dealt with our constraint-based approach to the problem, the intelligent user interface we created, and selection and application of visual composition rules. In addition to this, as a Master's student, I began an initial survey of research into pedagogical implementation of multimedia when working with grade-school and learning challenged students. I hope to eventually develop this as a postgraduate topic.

1 Product Highlights from the DELL DimensionTM XPS Gen 4 desktop system.

2 From Creative Labs© Knowledge Base: Sound Blaster Audio Technologies Glossary (SID2648):
As for extending beyond basic 3D positional audio, Aureal tried to develop a real-time geometry based system, which they named "Wavetracing". This was an ambitious attempt to "model" the effect of sound paths in real time, but the few titles that used it were not able to demonstrate any effective improvement in the 3D audio experience, and gameplay suffered from the intensive CPU load that Wavetracing incurred.
3 From the web page of Thomas A. Funkhouser.