Arun Narayanan, a 5th year CSE PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence with concentration in computational audition and machine learning, recently received an SBC Presidential Fellowship. The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by The Ohio State University Graduate School to recognize the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students. Arun joins 16 others in winning the autumn 2012 competition, and this is the first time a CSE graduate student has received this honor in several years.
The goal of Arun's research is to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition systems in the presence of background noise by utilizing both the low-level acoustic properties of speech and the learned top-down models of phonetic units and time-frequency masks. The fellowship will fund 12 months of his study towards the completion of a doctoral dissertation.
"Arun is one of the very top students I have come to be associated with. His doctoral research has the potential to elevate the performance of robust automatic speech recognition to a new level," Arun's advisor DeLiang Wang said.
Prior to joining Ohio State, Arun earned an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Kerala, India. Afterwards, Arun worked at IBM India for three years until beginning his graduate program in 2008.