Anurag KUMAR

Humans are social beings and verbal communication with other humans is an integral part of our life. At the same time, humans also rely on hearing of environmental sounds for contextual awareness and perceptual understanding of their surroundings. However, hundreds of millions of people across the world face challenges in their daily life due to hearing loss.

Anurag Kumar was driven by the goal of building acoustically intelligent systems to enhance human well-being. His research direction covers everything from intelligent sound recognition for contextual awareness to complex noise suppression and speech quality enhancement technologies.

His innovations have led to technologies that help humans hear better in difficult noisy environments and are especially useful for people with hearing impairments. Moreover, his work in the field of AI for speech and sounds also find applications in crucial areas such as safety, healthcare, eldercare, and more.

Anurag developed methods that can detect unnecessary noise, enhance the quality and intelligibility of degraded speech signals, and extract relevant speech from a mixture in real-time, improving speech quality and intelligibility in noisy environments.

He has especially focused on development of weakly supervised and unsupervised methods. These methods reduce reliance on human labeled data, thus reducing cost and time to build such AI systems. These methods also enable one to adapt a previously trained model to an unseen noise scene without having to collect noise and speech samples from that scene.

Besides enhancing human hearing by allowing one to have effortless communication in noisy conditions, these innovative works lead to other applications as well. For example, safety notifications—alerting people of siren/fire alarms and other such safety sounds (crucial for those with hearing loss); smart home safety (e.g., detection of window breaking can notify homeowners of possible intrusion); and automated fall detection of patients or old people with immediate notification to caregivers.