Biography

Wenwu Wang is a Reader in Signal Processing and Co-Director of the Machine Audition Lab at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, where he joined since May 2007. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London (from May 2002 to December 2003) and Cardiff University (from January 2004 to April 2005). He also worked in UK industry, first as a DSP Engineer at Tao Group Ltd (now Antix Labs Ltd) (from May 2005 to August 2006), then as an R&D engineer at Creative Labs (from September 2006 to April 2007). During spring 2008, he has been a visiting scholar at the Perception and Neurodynamics Lab and the Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University. He is currently a member of the MoD UDRC in Signal Processing and the BBC Audio Research Partnership, as well as an associate member of Surrey Centre for Cyber Security. He obtained the PhD degree in April 2002 from Harbin Engineering University, China.

His current research interests include blind signal processing, sparse signal processing, audio-visual signal processing, machine learning and perception, and machine audition (listening). He has over 150 publications in these areas. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and belongs to the IEEE Signal Processing, Computational Intelligence, and Circuits and Systems Societies. He was a Local Arrangement Co-Chair of the 2013 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, an Area Chair of the 2012 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), a Track Chair and Publicity Co-Chair of 2009 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop, Program Co-Chair of the 2009 IEEE Global Congress on Intelligent Systems. He has been a Session Chair for numerous conferences including 2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) and the EUSIPCO 2012. He was a Tutorial Speaker on ICASSP 2013 in Vancouver, Canada, and of UDRC on Signal Processing summer school 2014 in Edinburgh, UK. He is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (since 2014).

Please visit my personal page for more information, including downloadable publications.

Research interests

• Blind Signal Processing
• Machine Learning and Perception
• Machine Audition (Listening)
• Speech and Audio Processing
• Audio-Visual Signal Processing

Research Grants

I appreciate the financial support for my research from the following bodies (since 2008): Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), Ministry of Defence (MOD), Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), Home Office (HO), Royal Academy of Engineering (RAENG), European Commission (EC), Samsung Electronics Research Institute UK (SAMSUNG), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the University Research Support Fund (URSF), and the Ohio State University (OSU). [Total award to Surrey where I am a PI/CI: approximately £5.4M (as PI £1.2M, as CI £4.2M). As PI/CI, on a total grant award portfolio: approximately £15M]

Research Team

Postdoc Research Fellows

• Dr Mark Barnard (09/2014 - ): Visual tracking for future spatial audio (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Adrian Hilton and Dr Philip Jackson)
• Dr Qingju Liu (04/2014 - ): Source separation and objectification for future spatial audio (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson and Prof Adrian Hilton)
• Dr Cemre Zor 04/2013 - ): Statistical anomaly detection (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Josef Kittler)
• Dr Swati Chandna (05/2013 - ): Bootstrapping for robust source separation (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Dr Mark Barnard (10/2010 - 12/2013): Audio-visual speech separation of multiple moving sources (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Josef Kittler. External Collaborators: Prof Jonathon Chambers, Loughborough University; Dr Sangarapillai Lambotharan, Loughborough University; Prof Christian Jutten, Grenoble, France, and Dr Rivet Bertrand, Grenoble, France)
• Dr Qingju Liu (01/2013 - 03/2014): Words spotting from noisy mixtures & Lip-tracking for voice enhancement

PhD Students

• Pengming Feng: Multi-target tracking (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Jonathon Chambers and Dr Syed Mohsen Naqvi)
• Waqas Rafique: Acoustic source separation (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Jonathon Chambers and Dr Syed Mohsen Naqvi)
• Luca Remaggi: Informed acoustic source separation (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Jing Dong: Analysis model based sparse representations for denoising (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson; External Collaborator: Dr Wei Dai, Imperial College London)
• Volkan Kilic: Robust audio visual tracking of multiple moving sources for robot audition (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Josef Kittler and Dr Mark Barnard)
• Shahrzad Shapoori: Tensor factorization in EEG signal processing (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Saeid Sanei, Department of Computing)
• Amran Abdul Hadi: Audio-visual fusion for convolutive source separation (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Saeid Sanei, Department of Computing)
• Atiyeh Alinaghi: Joint sound source localisation and separation (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Dr Marek Olik (PhD defended in December 2014): Personal sound zone reproducation with room reflections (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Dr Syed Zubair (PhD awarded in June 2014): Dictionary learning for signal classification (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson; Internal collaborator: Dr Fei Yan; External collaborator: Dr Wei Dai, Imperial College London)
• Dr Philip Coleman (PhD awarded in May 2014): Loudspeaker array processing for personal sound zone reproduction (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Dr Qingju Liu (PhD awarded in October 2013): Multimodal blind source separation for robot audition (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson, Prof Josef Kittler; External collaborator: Prof Jonathon Chambers, Loughborough University) [Qingju Liu was the winner of the Best Solution Award on the DSTL Challenge Workshop for the signal processing challenge "Undersampled Signal Recognition", announced on the SSPD 2012 conference, London, September 25-27, 2012.]
• Dr Tao Xu (PhD awarded in June 2013): Dictionary learning for sparse representations with applications to blind source separation (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson; External collaborator: Dr Wei Dai, Imperial College London)
• Dr Rakkrit Duangsoithong (PhD awarded in Oct 2012): Feature selection and causal discovery for ensemble classifiers (Co-supervisor; Co-supervised with Dr Terry Windeatt)
• Dr Tariqullah Jan (PhD awarded in Feb 2012): Blind convolutive speech separation and dereverberation (Primary Supervisor; Co-Supervised with Prof Josef Kittler; External collaborator: Prof DeLiang Wang, The Ohio State University)

Academic Visitors

• Dr Xiaorong Shen (02/2015 - ): Associate Professor, Beihang University, Beijing, China. Topic: Audio-visual source detection, localization and tracking.
• Mr Hatem Deif (02/2015 - ): PhD student, Brunel University, London, UK. Topic: Single channel audio source separation.
• Mr Jian Guan (10/2014 - ): PhD student, Harbin Institute of Techonology, Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, China. Topic: Approximate message passing and belief propagation.
• Dr Yang Yu (04/2014 - ): Associate Professor, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China. Topic: Underwater acoustic source localisation and tracking with sparse array and deep learning.
• Mr Jamie Corr (10/2014 - 10/2014): PhD student, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK. Topic: Underwater acoustic data processing with polynomial matrix decomposition.
• Dr Xionghu Zhong (07/2014 - 07/2014): Independent Research Fellow, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Topic: Acoustic source tracking.
• Xiaoyi Chen (10/2012 - 09/2013 ): PhD student, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China. Topic: Convolutive blind source separation of underwater acoustic mixtures.
• Dr Ye Zhang (12/2012 - 08/2013): Associate Professor, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China. Topic: Analysis dictionary learning and source separation.
• Victor Popa (04/2013 - 07/2013), PhD student, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania. Topic: Audio source separation.
• Dr Stefan Soltuz (10/2008 -07/2009), Research Scientist, Tiberiu Popoviciu Institute of Numerical Analysis, Romania. Topic: Non-negative matrix factorization for music audio separation (Primary supervisor. Co-supervised with Dr Philip Jackson)
• Yanfeng Liang (MSc, 05/2009), MSc Student: Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China. Topic: Adaptive signal processing for clutter removal in radar images (Co-supervisor. Co-supervised with Prof Jonathon Chambers, Loughborough University)

MSc Students

• Denise Chew (MSc, 2014, awarded Distinction); Project: Audio impainting
• Yan Yin (MSc, 2014); Project: Audio super-resolution
• Dalton Whyte (MSc, 2014); Project: Audio retrieval using deep learning
• Dan Hua (MSc, 2013, awarded Distinction) Project: Super-resolution audio based on sparse signal processing
• Dichao Lu (MSc, 2013) Project: Polyphonic pitch tracking of music
• Xiao Han (MSc, 2012, awarded Distinction); Project: Underdetermined reverberant speech separation
• Jian Han (MSc, 2012, awarded Distinction); Project: Microphone array based acoustic tracking of multiple moving speakers (co-supervised with Dr Mark Barnard)
• Tianyu Feng (MSc, 2012); Project: Multi-pitch estimation and tracking
• Yuli Ling (MSc, 2012); Project: Audio event detection from sound mixtures
• Danyang Shen (MSc, 2012); Project: Audio-visual tracking of multiple moving speakers (co-supervised with Dr Mark Barnard)
• Kai Song (MSc, 2012); Project: Environment recognition from sound scenes (co-supervised with Dr Fei Yan)
• Xinpu Han (MSc, 2012); Project: Compressed sensing for natural image coding
• Steven Grima (MSc, 2011, awarded Distinction); Project: Multimodal tracking of multiple moving sources (co-supervised with Dr Mark Barnard)
• Anil Lal (MSc, 2011, awarded Distinction); Project: Monaural music sound separation using spectral envelop template and isolated note information
• Xi Luo (MSc, 2011, awarded Distinction); Project: Reverberant speech enhancement
• Yunyi Wang (MSc, 2011); Project: Compressed sensing for image coding
• Ritesh Agarwal (MSc, 2011); Project: Multiple pitch tracking
• Yichen Li (MSc, 2011); Project: Environmental sound recognition (co-supervised with Dr Fei Yan)
• Tengxu Yang (MSc, 2011); Project: Ideal binary mask estimation in computational auditory scene analysis
• Jin Ke (MSc, 2011); Project: Audio-visual tracking and localisation of moving speakers (co-supervised with Dr Mark Barnard)
• Zijian Zhang (MSc, 2011); Project: Convolutive blind source separation of speech mixtures
• Hafiz Mustafa (MSc, 2010); Project: Single channel music sound separation

BSc Students

• Xiao Cao (BSc, 2014); Project: Real-time speech separation demonstration

Research collaborations

Academic:

• Loughborough University (UK)
• RIKEN (Japan)
• Ohio State University (USA)
• Imperial College London (UK)
• Cardiff University (UK)
• Strathclyde University (UK)
• University of East Anglia (UK)
• Nanchang University (China)
• Northwestern Polytechnical University (China)
• RMIT University (Australia)
• Gipsa-lab (France)
• Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)

Industrial:

• Dstl
• BBC
• Thales
• Qinetiq
• Texas Instruments
• Stellar
• Digital Barriers
• Selex Galileo
• PrismTech
• Steepest Ascent

Teaching

2012/2013

• EEM.ivc - Image and Video Compression (Spring 2013)
• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2012)
• EE2.mpr - Media (Audio-Visual) Processing (Spring 2013)
• EE1.pro - Programming: Labs & Marking (Spring 2013)

2011/2012

• EEM.ivc - Image and Video Compression (Spring 2012)
• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2011)
• EE2.mpr - Media (Audio-Visual) Processing (Autumn 2011)
• EE1.pro - Programming: Labs & Marking (Autumn 2011 & Spring 2012)
• EE1.eps - EDPS: Basic Computing Skills (Autumn 2011)

2010/2011

• EEM.ivc - Image and Video Compression (Spring 2011)
• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2010)
• EE1.pro - Programming: Labs & Marking (Autumn 2010 & Spring 2011)
• EE1.eps - EDPS: Basic Computing Skills (Autumn 2010)

2009/2010

• EEM.ivc - Image and Video Compression (Spring 2010)
• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2009)
• EE1.pro - Programming: Labs & Marking (Autumn 2009 & Spring 2010)
• EE1.eps - EDPS: Basic Computing Skills (Autumn 2009)

2008/2009

• EEM.ivc - Image and Video Compression (Spring 2009)
• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2008)
• EE1.pro - Introduction to Programming: Labs & Marking (Autumn 2008 & Spring 2009)

2007/2008

• EEM.sap - Speech and Audio Processing & Coding (Autumn 2007)
• EE1.pca - C Programming Labs (Autumn 2007 & Spring 2008)

Note: EEM - Master students module; EE1 - First-year undergraduate students module.

Departmental duties

• Director of FEPS Mathematics Drop-in Centre
• Coordinator of EE Audio Media Engineering
• External Seminar Organiser at CVSSP (2009-2012)

Selected Recent Activities

• Organising Committee Member, CISP 2013, London, December, 2-3, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, BMVC 2013, Bristol, UK, Sept 9-13, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2013, Banff, Canada, July 17-19, 2013.
• Special Session Co-Chair (with Jonathon Chambers and Zoran Cvetkovic), DSP 2013, Santorini, Greece, July, 1-3, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, ICICIP 2013, Beijing, China, June, 09-11, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, ICASSP 2013, Vancouver, Canada, May, 26-31, 2013.
• Tutorial Speaker (with Wei Dai and Boris Mailhe), ICASSP 2013, "Dictionary Learning for Sparse Representations: Algorithms and Applications", Vancovar, Canada, May, 26-31, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, SENSORNETS 2013, Barcelona, Spain, February 19-21, 2013.
• External PhD Examiner, PhD Thesis: "Sparse Approximation and Dictionary Learning with Applications to Audio Signals", Queen Mary University of London, December 2012.
• Independent Expert, European Commission, grant evaluation, November 2012.
• Session Chair, SSPD 2012, "Sensor Arrays", London, UK, 25-27 September, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, ISCSLP 2012, Hong Kong, China, December 5-8, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, SSPD 2012, London, UK, 25-27 September, 2012.
• Session Chair, EUSIPCO 2012, "P-ML-1: Machine Learning", Bucharest, Romania, 27 - 31 August, 2012.
• Session Co-Chair (with Ali Taylan Cemgil), ICASSP 2012, "MLSP-L3: Applications in Audio, Speech, and Image Processing", Kyoto, Japan, 25-30 March, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, S+SSPR 2012, Hiroshima, Japan, 7 - 9 November, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, CISP 2012, Chongqing, China, 16-18 October, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, UKCI 2012, Edinburgh, UK, 5-11 September, 2012.
• Area Chair, EUSIPCO 2012, Bucharest, Romania, 27 - 31 August, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, BMVC 2012, Guildford, UK, 3 - 7 September, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, EUSIPCO 2012, Bucharest, Romania, 27 - 31 August, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2012, Honolulu, USA, 20 - 22 August, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, ISNN 2012, Shenyang, China, 11-14 July, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, ICSAI 2012, Yantai, China, 19-21 May, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, ICASSP 2012, Kyoto, Japan, 25-30 March, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, ICIST 2012, Wuhan, China, 23-25 March, 2012.
• Program Committee Member, SENSORNETS 2012, Rome, Italy, 24-26 February, 2012.
• Internal PhD Examiner, PhD Thesis: "Novel Tensor Factorization Based Approaches for Blind Source Separation", Department of Computing, University of Surrey, December 2011.
• Session Chair, EUSIPCO 2011, "Multichannel Acoustic Processing I", Barcelona, Spain, 29 August -2 Sept, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2011, Dallas, USA, 14-16 December, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, CISP 2011, Shanghai, China, 15-17 October, 2011.
• Technical Committee Member, SSPD 2011, London, UK, 28-29 September, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, UKCI 2011, Manchester, UK, September, 2011.
• Special Session Co-Chair (with Jonathon Chambers and Bertrand Rivet), EUSIPCO 2011, "Multimodal (Audio-Visual) Speech Separation", Barcelona, Spain, 29 August -2 Sept, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, BMVC 2011, Dundee, UK, 29 August -2 Sept, 2011.
• Headstart Project Leader, School Outreach, Guildford, 17-20 July, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, SIPA 2011, Crete, Greece, 22-24 June, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, CSIE 2011, Changchun, China, 17-19 June, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, ISNN 2011, Guilin, China, 29 May- 1 June, 2011.
• Program Committee Member, ICIST 2011, Nanjing, China, 26-28 March, 2011.
• Grant Reviewer, EPSRC, first grant proposal, March, 2011.
• External PhD Examiner, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, 2010.
• Grant Reviewer, PASCAL2, internal visiting proposal, August, 2010.
• Headstart Project Leader, School Outreach, Guildford, 19-22 July, 2010.
• Technical Committee Member, Conference on Sensor Signal Processing for Defence (SSPD 2010), London, UK, 29-30 September, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, BMVC 2010, Aberystwyth, UK, 31 August - 3 September, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE WCSE 2010, Wuhan, China, December 19-20, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, IWACI 2010, Suzhou, China, August 25-27, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2010, Maui, Hawaii, USA, August 23-25, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, SSSPR 2010, Cesme, Turkey, August 18-20, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, ISNN 2010, Shanghai, China, June 6-9, 2010.
• Publicity chair, IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing (SSP 2009), Cardiff, UK, Aug. 31- Sept. 3, 2009.
• Program Co-chair, IEEE Global Congress on Intelligent Systems (GCIS 2009), Xiamen, China, May 19-21, 2009.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 17-19, 2009.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE WCSE 2009, Xiamen, China, May 19-21, 2009.
• Session Chair, ICA Research Network International Workshop (ICARN 2008), Liverpool, UK, September 25-26, 2008.
• Chair, oral session "Unsupervised learning III", IEEE WCCI 2008, HongKong, China, June 1-6, 2008.
• Guest editor, special issue "Advances in Nonnegative Matrix and Tensor Factorization", Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience(Hindawi), edited by A. Cichocki, M. Morup, P. Smaragdis, W. Wang, and R. Zdunek, May 2008.
• Program Committee Member, SIP 2008, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA, August 18-20, 2008.
• Technical Committee Member, IEEE WCCI 2008, HongKong, China, June 1-6, 2008.

Invited Talks

• W. Wang, "Machine Audition at CVSSP", in UK & IE Speech Conference, Birmingham, UK, December 17-18, 2012.
• W. Wang, "Dictionary Learning Algorithms in Sparse Representations and Signal Processing," (Organizer: Dr Wei Liu),Department of Eletronic and Electrical Engineering , Sheffield University, October 24, 2012.
• W. Wang, "Dictionary Learning Algorithms in Signal Processing," (Organizer: Dr Lu Gan), School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University, August 1, 2012.
• W. Wang, "Adaptive Dictionary Learning Algorithms for Image Denoising, Source Separation, and Visual Tracking," (Organizer: Dr Andrew Aubrey), Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, May 24, 2012.
• W. Wang, "Dictionary Learning Algorithms and Their Applications in Source separation, Speaker Tracking, and Image Denoising," (Organizer: Prof Mark Plumbley), School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, April 25, 2012.
• W. Wang, "Audio and Audio-Visual Source Separation," (Organizer: Dr Xiaorong Shen), School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, September 20, 2011.
• T. Xu and W. Wang, "Compressive Sensing," (Organizer: Prof. Anthony Ho), Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, January 11, 2010.
• W. Wang, "Multimodal Blind Source Separation for Robot Audition," (Organizer: Dr. Tania Stathaki), MOD University Defence Research Centre Launch & Theme Meeting, Imperial College London, London, November 5, 2009.
• W. Wang, "Two-microphone Speech Separation Based on Convolutive ICA and Ideal Binary Mask Coupled with Cepstral Smoothing," (Organizer: Prof. Francis Rumsey), Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR), University of Surrey, Guildford, October 21, 2008.
• W. Wang, "Convolutive ICA and NMF for Audio Source Separation and Perception," (Organizers: Prof. Vladimir M. Sloutsky & Prof. DeLiang Wang), Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, April 11, 2008.
• W. Wang, "Audio Source Separation and Perception," (Organizer: Prof. DeLiang Wang), Perception and Neurodynamics Laboratory (PNL), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, March 07, 2008.
• W. Wang, "Intelligent Data Fusion Based Blind Source Separation," (Organizer: Dr Nathan Wood), Royal Academy of Engineering, London, April 11, 2005.
• W. Wang and J.A. Chambers, "Frequency Domain Blind Source Separation," IEE Seminar on Blind Source Separation in Biomedicine (Organizer: Dr. Christopher J. James), British Institute of Radiology, London, 1 Dec. 2004.
• W. Wang, "Frequency Domain BSS and its Associated Permutation Problem," Contract Researchers Conference at Cardiff School of Engineering (Organizer: Dr. Adrian Porch), Cardiff University, Cardiff, July 16, 2004.
• W. Wang, "Blind Signal Processing and Speech Enhancement," Series Forum for Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Harbin Engineering University (Organizer: Prof. Yanling Hao), Harbin, Apr. 11, 2003.
• W. Wang, S. Sanei, and J.A. Chambers, "Has the Permutation Problem in Transform Domain BSS Been Solved?," IEE Workshop on Independent Component Analysis: Generalizations, Algorithms and Applications (Organizer: Dr. Mike Davies), Queen Mary University of London, London, Dec. 20, 2002

Tutorial Speech

• W. Dai, W. Wang, and B. Mailhe, ICASSP 2013, "Dictionary Learning for Sparse Representations: Algorithms and Applications", Vancovar, Canada, May, 26-31, 2013.