Page 57 - Winter2014

ASANews
Acoustics Today publishes news items that may be of interest to the acoustics community. News items should be sent to the Editor (apopper@umd.edu) and copied to the ASA Pub- lications Office (maryguillemette@acousticstoday.org). The Editor and the Publications staff reserve the right to decide if material is appropriate for Acoustics Today NEWS and to rewrite or rephrase whatever is sent to make it compatible with the format of Acoustics Today. News items may include announcements of meetings, awards to ASA members, or anything else that might be of broad interest to the Acoustical Society community. In the near future, news items will be posted, shortly after receipt, on the forthcoming Acoustics Today web site.
barbara Shinn-Cunningham Receives Mentoring Award
During the December 2013 meeting of the Acoustical Society in San Francisco, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham (Boston University) received the ASA Student Council Mentoring Award. The Student Council Mentoring Award is designed to recognize a person who has demon- strated exceptional ability in guiding the academic and/or professional growth of his/her students and junior colleagues. Previous winners of the award are David Blackstock, Lawrence Crum, David Dowling, Kenneth Suslick, Christy Holland, and Stephen Dance. The presentation of the award to Professor Shinn-Cunningham took place at the Wednesday night student social event
(4 December 2013), which was attend- ed by over 100 students
Attendees at the ASA student social on December 4 congratulate ASA student mentoring award winner Barbara Shinn- Cunningham.
There was lively interest for the student app competition that was organized by ASA’s Signal Processing Technical Committee for the San Francisco meeting.
Smartphone APP Student Competition
A special poster session was held dur- ing the meeting in San Francisco. The session was organized by the Signal Pro- cessing Technical Committee, chaired by Kevin Cockrell. The purpose of the session was to display entries in the Smartphone Acoustic Signal Processing Student Competition. A list of the titles and abstracts is on pages 4134 -4135
of the November 2013 issue, part 2, of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The competition had an open- ended format to allow students to be as creative as possible.
Entrants were required to present a poster describing a smartphone “app” that utilizes acoustic signal processing. Creative ideas and development strate- gies were left up to the students. The six entries were ambitious and crossed
Joshua Bodon explaining the soundmap app at the smartphone session at the December meet- ing of ASA in San Francisco.
many different disciplines represented by the ASA. Third runner up, an entry from K. J. Bodon and Zachary Jensen (Brigham Young University) was for an app that asks the user to draw out the shape of his or her living room and then suggests optimal speaker placement. The second runner up, submitted by Jorge Herrera and Hyung-Suk Kim (Stan- ford University), used audible signals
to estimate inter-smartphone distances and geometry. The 2013 Smartphone Acoustic Signal Processing Student Competition winner was submitted
by Rene L. Utianski, Steven Sandoval, Nicole Lehrer, Visar Berisha, and Julie Liss (Arizona State University). This app was designed to assess the integrity of speech production for the purposes of providing an augmentative tool for tele- medicine. The first, second, and third place teams were awarded $1,000, $500, and $300 respectively.
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