Robert L. White's Cochlear Implants
Date:
Fri, 05/31/2024 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
Fee Library, 801 Welch Road, Stanford, CA
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar This CI Hearing Seminar will be led by several of Prof. White's students who implemented the hardware and algorithms that made cochlear implants successful. They had access to a handful of auditory nerve cells in patients who lost their hearing, could electrically stimulate them, but what stimulus do you apply so people can actualy understand a signal as compiicated as a speech signal?
This seminar will be held at at the Biomedical Innovations (BMI), near the medical center, so we can accomodate the surgeons and resident who actually do today's implants.
Participants in the panel include: Rob Mathews, Marty Walker, Les Atlas
Who: Students and colleagues of Prof. Robert L White.
What: Technology driving the first cochlear implants
When: 10:30AM on Friday May 31, 2024
Where: BMI-1021, Biomedical Innovations Building, 240 Pasteur Dr Rm 1700, Palo Alto, CA 94304
Prof. White's obituary: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/robert-white-expert-magnetics-and-former-chair-electrical-engineering-dies-96
Dr. Blair Simmons obituary (he was the first person in the US to perform direct auditory nerve stimulation on a human subject): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/fullarticle/220651
Biographies:
After leaving the prosthesis project, Martin Walker worked in the EDA field (software for IC design), where he co-founded three businesses. Later he practiced as an expert witness involved in IP litigation.
Rob Mathews worked on the Prosthesis Project, He finished his PhD in '78, then continued for one year as a post-doc. From '79 - '83, he was an assistant prof in EE, originating and teaching the Mead/Conway VLSI design classes and conducting DARPA-sponsored research with his friend John Newkirk. They left Stanford to start Silicon Solutions, which sold a system for simulating IC designs; their competitor Zycad bought the company in the late 80's. After attempting another startup targeting the electric power industry, he joined Marty's one-year-old EDA startup, Frequency Technology, in the mid '90s. Many acquisitions and mergers later, he retired from ANSYS, still working on EDA software for IC design. He then worked for Marty in his expert-witness practice..
After leaving the prosthesis project in 1984, Les Atlas joined what is now the Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor. He has since been a leader in signal processing research and educational activity in the Pacific Northwest. Atlas’ research has had an impact on applications in acoustics, machine monitoring, sensor arrays, speech processing, and auditory sciences. His publication “Improving Generalization with Active Learning” initiated the machine learning area of active learning. Atlas’ recent and current research is funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and the Office of Naval Research.
FREE
Open to the Public