This evening, David Landsberger spoke to the New York City Chapter of the Hearing Loss Association of America. He spoke about "Cochlear Implants: Where we started and where we are going."  The best part of his talk was about Rod Saunders who was the first person to receive a prototype of the Nucleus cochlear implant in 1977 and a personal hero for the lab.  

For those of you who don't know, the HLAA is a fantastic organization and highly recommend to those with hearing loss (or an interest in hearing loss).

Thanks to Rick Savadow for the photo!

Congratulations to Roozbeh Soleymani!  He has won second place at the NYU Tandon Research Expo for his development of the SEDA noise reduction algorithm and its implementation in the Bab.el software. 

The below text (and above photo) is taken from article written about the event by technical.ly:

Roozbeh Soleymani, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, won second place for his app Bab.El, on which he collaborated with two NYU faculty members. The app, which is not yet available publicly, eliminates what’s known as babble noise: unintelligible background speech that can make it difficult to decipher the main conversation. That’s especially a challenge for people who have cochlear implants, devices that restore hearing to deaf individuals. Bab.El works in real time to reduce interfering babble noise on phone calls, as Soleymani demonstrated using a noise generator.