Urban Audio Sensing

Who We Are

Subhro Guhathakurta is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. He joined Georgia Tech in 2011 as the director of the Center for Geographic Information Systems, which was renamed the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization (CSPAV) under his leadership. He was named chair of the School of City & Regional Planning in 2018 and served completed his term in 2021.

Professor Guhathakurta was previously associate director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University (ASU) and among the founding faculty members of ASU’s School of Sustainability. He was instrumental in developing the Urban Modeling and Simulation Lab in ASU’s College of Design. He is an author of 6 books and monographs and over 75 scientific papers. His editorial contributions include books such as "Integrated Urban and Environmental Models: A Survey of Current Applications and Research" (Springer-Verlag, 2003), "Visualizing Sustainable Planning" (Springer 2009), and “The Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education” (Routledge 2019). He was a Co-Editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research (2012-2016) and is serving on editorial boards of several leading planning journals including the Journal of American Planning Association (JAPA). Prof. Guhathakurta is a recipient of the Mercator Professorship by DFG (German National Science Foundation) to conduct research in visualizing unstructured data at the Technische Universität, Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at the University College London; the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore; the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane; and served as a high-end expert for the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

Alexander Lerch is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Music, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on design and implementation of machine learning and signal processing methods targeting audio and music. Lerch studied Electrical Engineering at the Berlin Institute of Technology and Tonmeister (music production) at the University of Arts, Berlin; he received his PhD (Audio Communications) from the Berlin Institute of Technology in the year 2008. He co-founded the company zplane.development, an industry leader providing advanced music technology to the music industry. zplane technologies are nowadays used by millions of musicians and producers world-wide in a wide variety of products.

Lerch has published more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on a wide range of topics in audio and music analysis and processing. His widely used textbook "An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis" was published by Wiley/IEEE Press in 2012. Lerch had visiting appointments at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and ShanghaiTech University and served as co-chair of [ISMIR2021](https://www.ismir2021.ismir.net), the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.

Noah Posner is a research scientist with the IMAGINE Lab and lab manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab (IPDL) in the School of Industrial Design. His focus is on creating interactive experiences that leverage physical interaction. He holds degrees in Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Human Computer Interaction. His research involves creating rich physical interactions, designing and fabricating interactive devices using CAD and Rapid prototyping technologies, and developing educational tools for STEM leaning that focus on utilizing hands on learning with intentionally designed artifacts. He also teaches courses in Physical Prototyping for Human Computer Interaction.

Bon Woo Koo's research is focused on measuring various dimensions of the built environment and how those measurements relate to social equity and public health. He is particularly interested in using emerging technologies and data to fine-tune measurements of the built environment and its implications for urban residents. He works as a research assistant with Nisha Botchwey and Subhro Guhathakurta. Before joining the Ph.D. program, he worked at the Architecture and Urban Research Institute in South Korea. He holds master’s degree in city and regional planning (Georgia Tech) and landscape architecture (Seoul National University), and a bachelor’s degree in interior design.

Pavan Seshadri is a Masters student and research assistant in the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. His research interests encompass intelligent methods of audio and music discovery and synthesis using machine learning and natural language understanding. Before joining GTCMT, he worked at Amazon as a Machine Learning Engineer and previously earned a B.S degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Chaeyeon Han is a Ph.D. student in the School of City of Regional Planning at Georgia Tech and a research assistant at the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization. Her research interest revolves around urban analytics (GIS, GeoAI, GeoData Science) and building resilient cities in the age of the climate crisis. Before joining Georgia Tech, Chaeyeon worked with the CyberGIS Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an M.U.P degree from UIUC and B.S. in Computer Science from Yonsei University, Seoul.

Yiwei Ding is a master’s student and a graduate research assistance in School of Music at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on representation learning of audio and musical signals, and the application of machine learning to music information retrieval. He has several peer-reviewed publications at International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) and International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Before joining Georgia Tech, he got his bachelor’s degree in data science at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He enjoys playing the piano and his favorite composer is Tchaikovsky (in Sep 2023).

Maria Belgodere is an undergrad student and research assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Music. Her interests and projects involve video game design, sound design, and computer music.

Vishnu Mano is an undergraduate Computer Science and Math student at the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and a research assistant at the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization (CSPAV). Apart from pursuing research at CSPAV, Vishnu also leads a startup, called Spotter, which is an app that helps drivers find open parking spots and tracks parking analytics for businesses/governments.