Queen Mary academic awarded Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering

Dr Emmanouil Benetos is one of seven outstanding engineering researchers who has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Fellowships allow awardees to focus on full-time research for up to a year by covering the costs of a replacement academic to take over their teaching and administrative duties, allowing engineers to reinvigorate their research interests and the time to work on an engineering challenge.  

Throughout the Fellowship, Dr Benetos will investigate machine listening in data and resource-constrained environments. The amount of audio data being generated has dramatically increased over the past few years, as has the need to create computational methods to make sense of that data through machine listening technologies. New applications of machine listening include technologies for smart homes, security, autonomous systems, urban planning, acoustic ecology, and the creative industries. However, the resources required as well as the computational cost and environmental impact for building and deploying machine listening technologies is also increasing. Current technologies therefore need vast amounts of data and compute power for development and deployment, leading to a large computational and environmental cost. To address these issues, Dr Benetos will develop models that can learn and rapidly adapt using limited data and will also investigate methods for resource-constrained machine listening, aiming for compact and efficient models for understanding audio, leading to measurable socioeconomic and environmental benefits. 

“I'm thrilled to have been awarded this Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering to support my research in machine listening,” said Dr Benetos. “The Fellowship will have a particular focus on creating computationally efficient systems for understanding sounds, applied to urban and domestic sounds, but also music.”  

“This research can have a positive impact in many areas of life, including smart homes, assisted living, urban planning, and the creative industries, and the Fellowship will help grow our capability for audio research at Queen Mary, both at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science and the Digital Environment Research Institute.”