Ryan Corey receives NSF CAREER award
Ryan Corey receives NSF CAREER award
Assistant Professor Ryan M. Corey received a $690,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for his project “Spatial Signal Processing for Group Conversation Enhancement,” to develop hearing technology to assist listeners in group conversations. This research will help the roughly 50 million Americans with hearing loss to more fully participate in important career and social activities.
It can be hard to follow group conversations in crowded restaurants and in social gatherings such as parties or networking events, especially for people with hearing loss.
“Most hearing aids today are designed for one-on-one conversations,” said Corey, “but they don’t work very well for groups, and that’s where people need the most help.”
Traditional hearing technology focuses on sounds directly in front of the listener, but in group settings, sound can come from many directions. Corey’s team in the Listening Technology Lab is developing proximity-based hearing technology that will enhance sounds close to the listener and turn down more distant noises that make it difficult to hear. These algorithms will use a combination of adaptive filtering, geometry-based parametric models, and machine learning.
To ensure that the system sounds natural, the project will incorporate techniques from virtual-reality audio rendering, which can capture and reproduce complex spatial audio patterns.
“Sometimes these advanced hearing technologies sound distorted, like you’re in a tunnel, or like you’re on a conference call with the people sitting right next to you,” said Corey. “We want it to sound transparent, like you’re hearing through your own two ears, but with the noise turned down.”
Human behavioral studies will evaluate the impact of noise, reverberation, and spatial acoustic cues on group conversation difficulty using both virtual reality and live, unscripted group conversations in the team’s variable-acoustic chamber.
The project will also train students to design assistive technology based on input from people with disabilities and will develop educational materials on assistive listening technology for the hearing loss community.
This is Corey’s second young-investigator-level award; in September 2025 Corey received an Early Career Research Award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to study the effects of delay in wireless hearing assistive devices, which are found in theaters, classrooms, and other public spaces.