Ivan Dokmanic awarded the Denantes Memorial Prize
© 2015 EPFL
“Listening to Distances and Hearing Shapes: Inverse Problems in Room Acoustics and Beyond”, Ivan Dokmanic’s PhD thesis has been awarded the 2015 Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize given to doctoral students from IC School on the basis of an outstanding thesis.
Ivan’s thesis focuses on using echoes to achieve useful and interesting results. It highlights that multipath propagation resulting from echoes reveals essential geometric information about the source-channel-receiver systems—an outlook opposed to one where a multipath approach is considered as universally poor.
“The key idea is to think of echoes as being more than just delayed and attenuated peaks in 1D impulse responses; they are actually additional sources with their corresponding 3D locations.”
The research led to the development of a toolbox for dealing with echoes, which enables, for example, to hear the shape of a room—that is, to reconstruct a room's shape from sound. The approach developed by Ivan has applications not only in acoustics, but wherever sound waves and reflections are encountered, or in time-of-flight measurements.