Dr Josef Schlittenlacher

Overview

Josef is a Lecturer in the Division for Human Communication, Development and Hearing, and at the Manchester Centre for Audiology and Deafness (ManCAD). The focus of his research lies on auditory perception and machine learning for healthare and audio. Current projects of his team are

• Bayesian active learning for remote hearing assessment
• Machine-to-human communication for the hearing impaired
• Irrelevant Speech Effect: Features of speech
• Loudness modelling
• Perception in background noise
• Using EEG to characterise a hearing loss

Josef graduated from TU Munich with a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. During this time he enjoyed working part-time as a software developer for helicopter simulators at ESG. His curiosity about decoding the human brain took him to obtaining a Ph.D. in Psychology at TU Darmstadt. He has done several research visits to Seikei University (Tokyo).

While being a postdoc at the University of Cambridge he sped up hearing tests by using Bayesian active-learning techniques and information theory. This allows clinicians to do more tests in a given time, leading to a more precise knowledge about an individual’s hearing. He did further research in basic auditory science.

He won several awards for his work on perceptual models, including a Best Paper and Presentation Award at ICA 2019 and the DIN Award “Young Science” (DIN is the German Organization for Standardization).