- I got into this area because of my personal experience as a person with hearing loss. I've worn hearing aids most of my life. I've always been very frustrated with how poorly they work, especially in noisy environments. So my research focuses on how to improve those really challenging situations like going out to dinner at a restaurant or trying to network at a, a conference where it's very noisy. A lot of people are talking at once, and you want to be able to have a conversation.

- This is the "ORISE Feature Cast." Join host Michael Holtz for conversations with ORISE experts on STEM workforce development, scientific and technical reviews, and the evaluation of radiation exposure and environmental contamination. You'll also hear from ORISE research program participants and their mentors as they talk about their experiences and how they are helping shape the future of science. Welcome to the "ORISE Feature Cast."

- Happy Wednesday, and welcome to another episode of the "ORISE Feature Cast." As always, I'm your host, Michael Holtz in the Communications and Marketing department of ORISE and ORAU, and today I'm speaking with one of the inaugural winners of the ORISE Future of Science Awards, Dr. Ryan Corey. Dr. Corey, how does it feel to be the first winner of the ORISE Future of Science Awards in the postdoctoral category?

- Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for having me today. I'm very honored by this award. It's exciting to be part of the inaugural set of The Future of Science Awards. So it came as a very pleasant surprise.

- Very nice. So tell us a little bit about who you are.

- So, I am a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne. I work in electrical engineering in the area of signal processing, especially for audio. And my work focuses on acoustic sensor networks and hearing enhancement, especially for hearing aids and assistive listening technologies.

- How very cool. And I would think a very much needed technology in this same age.

- Absolutely. So I got into this area because of my personal experience as a person with hearing loss. I've worn hearing aids most of my life. I've always been very frustrated with how poorly they work, especially in noisy environments. So my research focuses on how to improve those really challenging situations like going out to dinner at a restaurant or trying to network at a, a conference where it's very noisy. A lot of people are talking at once, and you wanna be able to have a conversation.

- And it's hard to focus when all you're hearing is background noise, right?

- Exactly. It can be very fatiguing even for people with normal hearing, going out to a live restaurant can be very draining. So I, I think the technology could be useful for everyone, and for earbuds augmented reality systems, communications platforms, which have become even more prevalent the last few years with remote communication and social distancing. So definitely something that everyone at some point probably connected with. Dr. Corey, is the work that you've been doing, part of your intelligence community post-doctoral research fellowship, or is it, I guess in addition to you, has it sprung from that fellowship? Yes. So my fellowship focuses specifically on censoring networks. So connecting multiple devices together, and that is, my research on hearing enhancement is about connecting hearing devices like hearing aids, earbuds, to external devices that can help a lot more than any one device can. So say you have microphones around the room, like a conferencing system that's built into the walls of ceiling, smart speakers around the living room, wearable devices, or if you can connect multiple hearing devices together, you can get a lot more benefit in telling apart different sounds, and reducing background noise. So my, my fellowship research is focusing on those problems and connecting those devices together, processing the sound. In particular, dealing with motion, when people are moving around and talking, turning their heads from side to side, keeping up with that motion is a big part of the challenge.

- Absolutely. And again, it sounds like very beneficial on a number of, on a number of levels for certainly individuals like yourself with hearing loss, but even, I would assume, for the intelligence community not to project, but if you're looking for specific voices or specific pieces of information, to know where it's coming from, who's voice you're listening for, all of those sorts of things.

- Right. So it's all about kind of analyzing the acoustic scene, as we would say in the research jargon. So kind of the analogy I would want to use is to a mixing board.

- Okay.

- So if you think about in a music studio, or you might do this with your podcast production. You have a mixing board with sliders that you can move up and down to change the volume and different sounds. And normally, if you're making a movie, you have separate recordings of everything. But I wanna be able to do that in real life, in real time. And so we need to be able to separate out what are all the different sounds, is it something a person wants to hear or not, where are they in the room, to be able to change them and recombine them. So to do that effectively, it helps not only for hearing, but for conferencing systems, for anything where you want to understand the sound in an environment.

- Wow. It sounds like really great work. And as, as we both said, very beneficial and important. Talk to me about your background, and how, how did you get to the point of wanting to pursue a career in science, in the STEM fields?

- Oh, well I've always had kind of an engineering mindset. I would drive my parents crazy, taking apart and fixing all of our household appliances, and so when I went to college, I knew I'd do engineering. I quickly hit on electrical engineering. I actually bounced around specialties for a few years before I settled on hearing, which seemed so obvious in hind sight. But, and I worked on communication systems, optics, and that was helpful because I think a lot of the same ideas can apply. An acoustic system is not so different from a, a cell phone network that's transmitting electromagnetic waves.

- Gotcha. Okay. So as you were, as you were taking apart appliances and, and watches and what not, were you able to put them back together?

- Usually. Sometimes.

- I know that can be a challenge sometimes, right?

- And like you said, so that was something that started from a young age. Just that sort of pursuit of how things work and how things are built, and how they're made.

- Absolutely. Yeah, I really like analyzing systems and how different devices can work together in networks, and software architectures and things, building complex systems with multiple devices, which is the research I'm doing now. Let's see... In high school I put together an electronic Christmas display that drove my parents crazy. I upgraded it in college, and now we have kind of a similar set up in our lab that controls robots to turn speakers on and off, have robots move to simulate motion, and turn on and off different sound sources.

- Very cool. Just as an aside, 'cause as we're talking, I just sort of had this thought pop into my head as you talked about sort of connected systems. Is the internet a thing sort of play into any of this, or all of this, or whether it's related to intelligence community or otherwise?

- Oh, of course. So one of the big opportunities I see for hearing enhancement for audio, scene analysis and machine listening, and kind of audio processing in general, is that there are so many devices around us all the time that have microphones or other sensors, and that are connected to a network. So I think in my living room, I'd counted once, there's 30 or 40 microphones between all of my game systems, and smart speakers, and wearables, and laptops. And if we can connect all those together, we can potentially get a lot of useful information that can help us do better processing, whether that's for hearing enhancement or voice commands, or having a Zoom meeting.

- Gotcha. So are those 30 or 40 speakers listening to you at all times?

- Some of them are, some of them aren't. There are certainly applications for listening to, or a wake word for a voice assistant. Generally, it's pretty inefficient to leave a microphone on and processing all the time if you don't have to.

- Right. Right. Wow. That makes perfect sense. If you will, talk about... I know the intelligence community post-doctoral research fellowship is a mentored opportunity. Talk about through your career, some of the mentors that you've had, and how they've impacted the trajectory of your career.

- Sure. So my academic mentor for this postdoc is Andy Singer who is also my PhD advisor. And he's just been absolutely a fantastic mentor who's given me a lot of great guidance and also freedom to work on the projects I care about. So I actually pivoted halfway through my PhD to working on hearing and audio related projects. And he was very supportive, and he didn't know a lot about audio. He'd done other acoustics work, but he was able to connect me with people in the field, help me find funding, and set up a new lab basically from scratch. He's been wonderful. Also very supportive of travel. We've traveled all around the world together to different conferences, and I've tried to be a good mentor to, to others as well, working with several dozen students over the years who have come, come through our lab and gone on to do great things in the field.

- Awesome. I was actually just gonna ask you, as a follow up question about mentoring others, and how you pour yourself into future scientists like yourself, so.

- Yeah, that's been very rewarding. So we set up a laboratory called "The Augmented Listening Laboratory" and it started with some students who had taken a signal processing class with me. But it then since grew, and we've set up this formal course structure. And it's kind of an interdisciplinary team where we have students from my own department of electrical engineering, but we also bring in mechanical engineers who help us with robots, business students who look at sort of real world applications. We have industrial designers who are great fun to collaborate with because they're good at designing and building things that aren't kind of duct tape and and wires like engineers tend to build. And they love working with engineers because they can make functional things instead of just mock-ups. So we, we had some fun joint projects there. We built the world's largest smart speaker, very loud. We built some head shaped speakers that we used for cocktail party simulations, lots of mock-ups of wearable devices. So it's, it's been really fun working with this team. And so I've tried to sort of steer them to good projects, and I've been... One of the most exciting thing is, is seeing them reach their goals and where they end up. So we had one student who always wanted to be a loud speaker designer. And he built some speakers for us. He ended up getting a great job doing exactly that. I, some of the students that I mentored went on to graduate school, including in our lab. And it's been wonderful watching them kind of grow and succeed over the years.

- Very cool. You talked a lot about collaborate, a little bit about collaboration, talking about some of the other folks you've worked with. Collaboration is really a critical part of kind of the scientific method these days isn't it?

- Absolutely. It, it's important to get perspectives from other fields. And even outside of engineering. So a lot of the issues with hearing enhancement aren't necessarily technical. So even if I could build this really good source separation system that could pick apart every sound in the room, it's not clear how I should present that to someone to help them hear better. How many sounds can they pay attention to at once, how do I prioritize, how do I adjust trade-offs between noise, distortion, reverberation, and all those are hearing science questions. So going forward in my career, I really want to collaborate with audiologists and people in hearing science. And fortunately throughout my fellowship, I've been able to attend some of those conferences, meet people in that field, and understand new problems that I might not have thought of before.

- That's exciting. So you're sort of already mapping out the road ahead for you in terms of where you might go with your career trajectory from here. That's exciting.

- Yeah.

- So let's talk a little bit about the future of science. The word I admit, I don't have a large basis of knowledge, but how did it, how did it come about that you became a winner in the post-doctoral category?

- Well, Michael, I wish I could tell you more about it, but I did nothing. I was nominated by my advisor, Andy Singer, and I really don't know anything about the, the selection process. I found out about it when everyone else did. So it all came as a surprise.

- Very nice. And I know there's a, a nice check that comes with that award so that's always a nice thing, right?

- Yes. And a plaque. I'm excited to see the plaque.

- Very cool. All right. Well, Dr. Corey is there anything that you would like to add that I haven't asked you about?

- Well, I, I just wanna say it's been an absolute pleasure being an intelligence community research fellow. It, this fellowship has been a great source of stability and flexibility, especially during the pandemic. The program staff was very helpful in providing flexibility with work from home, repurposing funds, and it really helped get through what would've been a turbulent time, and helped me make connections and grow my career. So, I'm thrilled to have been part of the program.

- Awesome. And this sounds like an obvious question, but I assume you would recommend the program to anyone else who might be pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship opportunity?

- Oh, absolutely. It's probably the best post-doctoral fellowship program that I'm aware of.

- Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to share a little bit about who you are, and your work with the Intelligence Community Post-doctoral Research Fellowship, and about your award. And congratulations again for being a, an inaugural winner of the ORISE Future of Science Award.

- Thank you very much, Michael. It's been a pleasure.

- Have a great day.

- You too. Thank you for listening to the "ORISE Feature Cast." To learn more about the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, visit orise.orau.gov, or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at ORISE connect. If you like the "ORISE Feature Cast" give us a review wherever you list.