VCCA2022 Conference Report

VCCA2022 Conference Report

3rd Virtual Conference on Computational Audiology: VCCA2022 Conference Report

Date                  June 30th and July 1st, 2022
Venue               Virtual
Report by         Maartje Hendrikse, Audiology, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, NL

The VCCA2022 was hosted online by Hearing4all (University of Oldenburg and Hannover Medical School) on Thursday 30 June and Friday 1 July. With five keynote talks, four special sessions, and over 500 registered participants, this yearly event keeps growing.

To accommodate different time zones, the event took place on Thursday afternoon/evening and Friday morning CEST. After a word of welcome by the organizers, the scientific part started with two keynote talks. Stefan Launer talked about the transformation of hearing aids in health agents that can monitor vital signs. Elle O’Brien discussed approaches from other disciplines to share data in the context of machine learning and possibilities for hearing research. Furthermore, there were two special sessions about ‘Predictive Coding’ and ‘Remote Audiology’. The parallel sessions were themed ‘mHealth and remote testing’, ‘Signal processing for hearing devices’, ‘Measurement tools and hearing device fitting’, and ‘Inspirations from physiology and models’. The day ended with a featured talk by Roger Miller about best practices for data sharing. In between the talks, conference participants could (video) chat with each other on the online platform.

The organizing committee during the opening of the conference.

 

Friday started with two keynote talks. Lorenzo Picinali gave an overview of achievements with Virtual Reality in hearing research and summarized future challenges with VR that were pointed out by conference participants in a questionnaire. Bernd Meyer talked about potential applications for deep machine learning in audiology. He showed speech perception models that use deep learning, and automated speech recognition models that may enable automated speech audiometry in the future. The two special sessions were about ‘Machine Learning Challenges to improve Hearing Devices’ and ‘Virtual Reality for hearing research and auditory modeling in realistic environments’. The parallel sessions were themed ‘Perception in children and adults’, ‘Complex environments’, ‘Objective measures’, and ‘Supporting tools for audiology and rehabilitation’. In the final keynote talk, Giovanni di Liberto discussed prediction mechanisms of the brain in the context of music perception and described his research framework to assess the neural tracking of sounds.

VCCA 2022 featured many talks from early career researchers, and every special session had an early career researcher as co-chair. Moreover, there were five awards for early career researchers. The two video pitch awards were awarded to Mark Saddler (– The role of temporal coding in everyday hearing: evidence from machine learning) and Nancy Sotero (- Electrophysiological and pupillometric measures in monitoring auditory cortex plasticity and listening effort after hearing aids fitting). Iordanis Thoidis (- Towards differentiable auditory models as objective functions for listener-specific speech enhancement) and Lakshay Khurana (– Model-based prediction of optogenetic sound encoding in the human cochlea by future optical cochlear implants) were awarded a young scientist award. Finally, Giulia Angonese received the special award for her interdisciplinary work on ‘-Psychological profiling in a Virtual Hearing Clinic’.

Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Volker Hohmann, Waldo Nogueira, Anna Warzybok for organizing VCCA2022. Special thanks to Inga Holube for coordinating the prize committee and Mareike Buhl for her digital support and skills. And of course many thanks to the Hearing4all team including Nina Aldag, Tomas Gajecki, Daniel Kipping, Eugen Kludt, Tobias Weller.

Future meeting details.  We are glad to announce that the 4th Virtual Conference on Computational Audiology (VCCA2023) will be hosted online on 29-30 June 2023 by Jessica Monaghan (National Acoustic Laboratories), Karina de Sousa (University of Pretoria), and Fan-Gang Zeng & Kaye Wang (University of California, Irvine).

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