Malcolm Slaney

Biography

Malcolm Slaney, PhD, is a Research Affiliate at ICSI. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, where he has led the Hearing Seminar for more than 20 years, and an Affiliate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. For many years, he has led the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop.

In his research, Dr. Slaney uses signal processing, machine learning, and big data ideas to understand human perception, auditory neurophysiology, and audiovisual processing. His current research focus is on understanding attention and modeling audio perception. Dr. Slaney led the team that built the first real-time auditory attention decoder using EEG signals, as well as the team that built Video Rewrite, the first system to use a data-driven approach to synthesize talking face, which was cited by ACM SIGGRAPH in 2023 as a seminal work in computer graphics. His thesis work on diffraction tomography using microwave and ultrasound energy was cited by the Chinese team examining the sub-surface characteristics on the far side of the moon. 

Dr. Slaney previously worked at Google Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, IBM’s Almaden Research Center, Interval Research, Apple Computer, Schlumberger’s Palo Alto Research Center, and Bell Laboratories. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book “Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging,” and co-editor, with Steven Greenberg, of the book “Computational Models of Auditory Function.” He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• Senior Member, ACM
• Fellow, IEEE
• 2021 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering

Selected Leadership Activities

• IEEE, ACM, Association for Research in Otolaryngology 

Areas of Expertise

• AI in Healthcare, Biomedicine, and Life Sciences
• Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Voice AI
• Auditory Processing and Speech Perception
• Multimodal Perception (Vision + Language + Audio)
• Statistical Modeling, Bayesian Methods, and Inference
• Digital Twins for Simulation, Prediction, and Optimization

ICSI Activity