VCCA2025 Conference Report

VCCA2025 Experiences

Author list:
Nasrin Akter, Dennis Barbour, Andrew Bellavia, Öğütnaz Çoban, Caitlin Frisby, Mériem Jaïdane, Akash Yallamati, Jan-Willem Wasmann, Sil van Zoest.

Below you find a collection of perspectives on the VCCA2025. We thank the authors for their contributions.

Sil van Zoest (first-time VCCA attendee), Keel-, Neus-, en Oorheelkunde (KNO), UMCG, University of Groningen (RUG)
As a first-time VCCA attendee, I particularly liked how this conference was able to pack so many talks into so little time. One that stood out to me was the keynote on the BEARS project for CI children, which seemed like a culmination of a lot of interesting research I wasn’t familiar with. Another talk that caught my attention was on speech intelligibility differences between channel selection strategies using vocoders, as it showed a similar strategy to our own research, and comparing them gave new insights.

Overall, the event showed me research I hadn’t seen before, which expanded my view on what audiology researchers are working on today! The diversity of angles on measuring different aspects of hearing impairment, learning tools, and innovations in hearing technology was very insightful.

Akash Yallamati (1st-time participant) – Undergraduate Computer Science student at the University of South Florida
I was introduced to VCCA2025 by my supervising professor, Dr. Theresa Chisolm, as I was working with her on the ACHIEVE Clinical Trial study. Although I was only able to attend Day 2, it was a mesmerizing experience because it marked my first technical conference attendance as a student. Additionally, I was fascinated by many research studies pertaining to AI chatbots, LLMs, AI safety, and applied AI/ML that are solving real-world hearing aid-related problems. Although certain concepts were difficult to grasp during the presentations, one thing I took away was that AI/ML is playing a key role in audiology, and with more AI-informed researchers, serious breakthroughs will be made. Can’t wait for VCCA2026 and the amazing improvements and groundbreaking studies that will be presented then!

Öğütnaz Çoban (2nd-time participant) MSc Student at Ankara Medipol University, Turkey
In 2024, the reason I opened my screen with excitement in the morning and didn’t want to close it in the evening was VCCA! Each abstract reminded me how much potential there is in audiology and how early we still are in this journey. It really inspired scientists like me who want to explore new ideas and push the field forward.

That’s why I was counting down the days to VCCA2025 – and this time, I had the chance not only to attend but also to present my own abstract. Even though I’m just in the first year of my Master’s, VCCA has already had a big impact on how I think about science and research. It helped me grow and gave me lots of new ideas. Sharing my own work was exciting, but what I enjoyed just as much was listening to scientists from all over the world. It felt great to be part of a global community with shared goals and interests. VCCA2025 was one of the most inspiring and well-organized online events I’ve been part of. Big thanks to Jan-Willem Wasmann and Seba Ausili for making it happen.

Nasrin Akter (2nd-time participant) – Doctoral candidate, ECE at the University of Oklahoma, ML research extern at Hearts for Hearing, Oklahoma, USA
As a doctoral candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, I was exploring new territory when studying the connection between audiology and data-driven methods. It wasn’t easy at the beginning—there weren’t many communities or conferences I knew that focused on this mix of fields. Everything changed for me when I found Dr. Jan-Willem Wasmann’s work while preparing for my doctoral qualifying exam. His papers opened my eyes and helped shape my research goals. Following his guidance, I attended the VCCA24 conference, which felt like discovering cherished connections hidden for ages.

Since then, I’ve followed the VCCA’s growth and became a CAN-SIG member. I was lucky to attend VCCA25 this year, which reignited my passion for this field. I was especially inspired by the talks in Session 1-C: From Big Data to Better Care: Predictive Audiometry & Family-Centered Rehabilitation. The critical research presented in this session showed how data can improve clinical audiology and patient care. Another highlight was Session 2-B: AI-Powered Tele-Audiology: Automated Testing, Monitoring & Remote Hearing Care. It was exciting to see how AI is used to make audiology services more accessible to everyone. The discussions during this session strengthened my passion for the great potential of using AI/ML to solve real issues in hearing healthcare for my research. Session 2-A, titled “Innovations in Hearing-Aid Technology: Devices, Algorithms & Performance Assessment,” was amazing in underscoring the importance of technological advancements, especially state-of-the-art algorithms, in bridging communication gaps for those with hearing impairments.

Attending VCCA25 gave me clear direction towards my doctoral research and connected me with a community in this unique area. Malcolm Slaney, Marina Salorio Corbetto, and Dietmar M. Wohlbauer’s featured talk was profoundly enlightening and offered invaluable insights. I left the conference with new ideas and strong motivation to contribute to the growing link between engineering and audiology.

Andrew Bellavia (3rd-year attendee) Founder, AuraFuturity
VCCA is such a great conference. My first experience was in 2023 when I had the honor of presenting. I remember being surprised at the 10-minute format, but after attending that year and the next two, I came to appreciate the arrangement. The 2025 conference showed just how well it works. Twelve separate tracks, each packed with presentations, offered an extremely wide breadth of topics. Though it’s impossible to watch them all live, with sessions in focused, bite-sized chunks, it will be easy to catch up on those I missed.

I haven’t even watched everything I want to yet, and I am already looking forward to next year! Kudos to everyone involved in organizing this year’s event.

Mériem Jaïdane (1st-year attendee) – L3S Lab ENIT & co-founder of dB.Sense – University of Tunis El Manar – Tunisia
Sixty-seven countries present; that is impressive. We’re Tunisian researchers, and this is our first participation at VCCA 2025. We hope that the VCCA multidisciplinary community extends to other countries and that the conference format, with free registration and held entirely remotely, is sustainable. For many research laboratories and for some countries, it is more difficult to give visibility to work at conferences for logistical and financial reasons. It is, therefore, difficult to access “real-time” R&D results. Computational audiology in the service of hearing health deserves to be shared on a large scale.

Organization: A conference of this scale, entirely online, required meticulous organization. Recording pitches that synchronize the sessions are followed by questions in real-time. Boosting interaction between people present on video—who can’t see each other—and a “present” speaker, whose video pitch we’ve just listened to, is a “challenging” point. Chat interaction is one solution, but there is a certain restraint, perhaps a language problem… How can we stimulate questions, give satisfaction to the interviewed researcher who has just “presented” their work, strengthen links between participants, and optimize community cohesion? Specific thought needs to be given to analyzing the factors at play in this new, totally virtual, community-based conference format. This is a matter of human behavior and virtual human interaction. The spirit and scope of the VCCA conference is an immense in vivo laboratory.

What impressed me: I went into Special Session 1: Implementation of AI into clinical practice: Some global perspectives (Internet & Audiology). It was very interesting. As co-founder of the university spinoff dB.Sense, which develops solutions in collaboration with audiologists, we realize how important it is to multiply dialogues of this type for co-construction of solutions. A chairwoman (whose name I’ve forgotten) – present in another session – spoke of “embracing and accepting”. The VCCA can play a unique role in this respect.

S. Gaied, R. Amara, N. Mechergui, M. Jaïdane Exploring the standard Hugston Westlake protocol in tone audiometry using Gaussian process regression: a virtual patient framework. meriem.jaidane@enit.utm.tn

Caitlin Frisby (3rd-time participant) – Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Pretoria & hearX Foundation, South Africa
It was a pleasure to return for my third VCCA and to present our feasibility study on Digital Technologies for Community Health Worker-Facilitated Hearing Assessment in Low-Resource Settings. The virtual format once again offered an incredible opportunity to share our work with a global audience and connect with researchers tackling similar challenges in hearing healthcare. I especially appreciated the thoughtful discussions that followed my presentation, which focused on the real-world scalability of CHW-led models and how such approaches could be adapted across different countries and income contexts. VCCA continues to be a unique platform for fostering collaboration and innovation in computational audiology.

Dennis Barbour (6th-time participant, professor at Washington University in St. Louis) about his VCCA2025 experience:
My favorite conferences have always been the triennial European conferences like the International Symposium on Hearing. They are small and focused, move to different locations, include a sightseeing tour or artistic performance, plan plenty of social interaction, and perhaps most importantly, occur every 3 years. This cycle seems about right both for spreading out the efforts of the hosts but also for allowing presenters to showcase new work, which is not always possible at annual conferences.

The sentiment that struck me the most at VCCA 2025 was Brent Edwards’s summary of the pace of progress in AI. During the time period since the first VCCA, the compute capabilities supporting AI have increased at a rate well above historical trends going back decades. The progress this capability has enabled implies that new results from each computational audiology group could be available each year. Perhaps this is a reason every VCCA seems fresh. We are a small group, but one pushing the envelope on what is going to be possible for audiological applications in the near future. Each year new heights seem to be reached, with great potential for patients. And with such a strong international focus, I am quite enthusiastic about the potential for low- and middle-income countries to benefit directly from some of the advances that are emerging.

What an exciting time to be in this field! Many thanks to Jan-Willem for continuing to lead the charge, and I look forward to more VCCAs to come!

Jan-Willem Wasmann (6th-time organizer, President of CAN, audiologist at Radboudumc)
It’s been a pleasure to jointly host six virtual conferences. You may wonder what motivated me to organize a conference and continue doing this? There are multiple reasons. One important aspect is that I believe in the power of stories (see the book Sapiens by Harari). So, for us as a community to get clear ideas on how to combine AI and Audiology and how to shape the future of hearing healthcare, we need to come together and exchange these stories. Providing the platform that was accessible for all who are interested in joining our conversation by exchanging stories (presentations) and listen to them was all it took. I’ve been again and again surprised by how many volunteers helped in organizing special sessions, the sheer number of submissions, and the nice personal stories people shared after the VCCA. Linked to these stories is the actual impact. Years after the VCCA2020, I heard about a presenter who found a job in our field via the contacts she made during that conference. Let’s hope we have planted more seeds that, in the next years, will come to fruition.

I must admit that now, if I think about how to organize a conference, I feel I get the hang of it, feel the wide support by the Computational Audiology Network, and our ‘playbook’ provides clear guidelines on how to approach all the elements important for a meaningful meeting. Overall, I feel less stressed about Zoom disruptions and more at ease with presenting and chairing, knowing that it’s appreciated. A small story I like to share is from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Tom needed to whitewash a fence. It was a task he didn’t like much, but he was able to motivate the other boys in town to do the task. In a way, I see this happening with the conference; people feel honored to be involved, and this way, it is a win for all. Other suggestions I made to the community, such as writing blogs or collecting models and tools, did not lead to the same enthusiasm. A last element I like about whitewashing the fence is that I hope people will see that they can choose to paint the fence, but they can add new elements. Who will be the next Banksy, creating a cool picture on the fence? Or who will take the initiative to create a gate, or who knows what other creativity will emerge in the future.

Looking ahead, I am excited about the potential for new formats and initiatives that can further enrich our community. One of our goals is to foster even greater collaboration and innovation, and I am confident that with the enthusiasm and dedication of our members, we can achieve this. I’d like to conclude that it has been wonderful to be part of this expanding community. Hopefully, we can all regard strangers within this group as unmet friends. Let’s all make sure that people within our group feel safe to share their experiences and to collaborate, and that we will continue to learn from each other and our distincts perspectives. It’s great to know that we already have enthusiastic organizers for future VCCA meetings, and I’m confident we will embark on many more new initiatives when we recognize our common interests.