Associate Professor (Instructional Faculty)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Rochester
Google Scholar
611 Computer Studies Building
Rochester, NY 14227
585-273-5753
mheilema @ ur <dot> rochester <dot> edu
Bio
Michael Heilemann received a B.S. in Physics from Canisius College in 2013, and an M.S and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 2015 and 2018, respectively. He was named the Harman Scholar by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Educational Foundation in 2017, and joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) as an Assistant Professor the following year. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. His research is focused on signal processing for vibration and acoustics, and is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the New York State Center for Excellence in Data Science, and the New York State Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences. He received the best technical paper award at the 153rd Convention of the AES in 2022, best student paper at the 157th Convention of the AES in 2024, the ECE Department Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2023, and the ECE Department Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2024. He is a member of the AES, Acoustical Society of America, and IEEE, and has been awarded eight patents.
Research Interests
My research lies in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), and is specifically focused on the electronic and acoustic design of new interfaces to facilitate more natural interactions between humans and smart devices. As computing technology has continued to advance, the limitation on the performance of smartphones, tablets, and video screens is now set by a user’s ability to navigate the large amount of visual information presented on the display of the device rather than the available computing power. There is strong evidence to suggest that devices that combine additional modalities such as spatial sound and touch can improve user’s ability to perform search tasks, and give a greater sense of immersion. However, conventional means of incorporating these additional modalities, especially spatial sound, requires physical installations of loudspeaker and/or microphone arrays that are not conducive to the compact designs of modern displays, and can affect the aesthetics of the space in which they are deployed. This challenge raises two fundamental questions:
1) How can we design systems that incorporate additional modalities such as spatial sound and touch into display devices without disturbing the aesthetics of the device, or the built environment?
2) To what extent can devices employing these new systems improve the performance of a human/machine during an interaction, and/or create a greater sense of immersion for the user?
My research addresses these challenges by utilizing the bending vibrations of flat surfaces to serve as the primary audio interface – either by capturing vibration signals induced in the structure by acoustic sources, or by exciting the surface to produce sound-radiating vibrations. Similar methods may also be employed to capture touch inputs for haptic feedback. Combining these capabilities gives the potential to transform the traditional display into a versatile interface capable of employing features such as noise cancellation, texture control, audio source/image pairing, and others outlined in the figure to the left. I call these interfaces smart acoustic surfaces. My research in this area has been supported by NSF grant 2104758.
The proposed vision of smart acoustic surfaces that combine audio capture, touch input, audio reproduction, image reproduction, and haptic feedback. Potential applications are shown in the bubble corresponding to each capability. Center image reproduced from [1]
News
10/2024 - Ben, Jenna, and I traveled to New York, NY to present a paper at the 157rd AES Convention. We won the award for Best Student Paper! Congrats to first author Ben Thompson!
09/2024 - Aaron Bundy officially joined as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Aaron!
07/2024 - My students and I volunteered with the Broadening Exposure to Science and Technology (BEST) program at East High School in the Rochester City School District. We lead a two-day course on acoustics, audio recording, and digital effects. Thanks to Ben, Jenna, Tre, and Yunji for volunteering, and the folks at the LLE for sponsoring the program
07/2024 - I was promoted to Associate Professor in the ECE Department at the University of Rochester
06/2024 - Tre was hired by Harman International as a Principal Acoustics Research Engineer. Congratulations, Tre!
06/2024 - I received a Student Course Development Project Grant from the UR to make new materials for AME 233: Musical Acoustics. AME undergraduate student Yunji Kim will be helping out with that project.
05/2024 - I received the ECE Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
05/2024 - Ben, Jenna, and Tre gave a total of 5 talks at the 186th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada.
11/2023 - Jenna and Tre presented posters at IEEE WNYISPW in Rochester, NY.
10/2023 - Tre, Ben, Mark Bocko, and I traveled to New Paltz, NY to present a paper at IEEE WASPAA.
09/2023 - Jenna officially joined as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Jenna!
06/2023 - Advisee Tre DiPassio successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis (co-advisor Mark Bocko). Congratulations, Tre!
06/2023 - Ben, Jenna Rutowski, Tre, and I hosted an exhibit called “The Science of Sound” at Manor Intermediate School in the Honeoye Falls-Lima School District.
06/2023 - Tre and I traveled to Rhodes, Greece to present a paper at ICASSP.
05/2023 - I received the ECE Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching
05/2023 - Ben and Tre traveled to Helsinki, Finland to present a paper at the 154th AES Convention.
12/2022 - Advisee Stephen Roessner successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis (co-advisor Mark Bocko). Congratulations, Steve!
11/2022 - I gave an invited talk “Smart Acoustic Surfaces - New Dimensions in Human-Computer Interaction” at IEEE WNYISPW in Rochester, NY.
10/2022 - Tre DiPassio and I traveled to New York, NY to present a paper at the 153rd AES Convention. We won the award for Best Paper!
01/2022 - Benjamin Thompson joined as a Ph.D. student. Welcome, Ben!
06/2021 - I received NSF grant 2104758 to research smart acoustic surfaces as multimodal interfaces! Thank you, NSF!
10/2019 - I was invited by the Editor-in-Chief of J. Audio Eng. Soc. to write a review paper on flat-panel loudspeakers (published 2021).
06/2019 - I gave an invited talk “Audio Displays - New Dimensions in Sound Reproduction” at the Light and Sound Interactive Conference in Rochester, NY.
03/2019 - I gave an invited talk “Audio Displays - New Dimensions in Sound Reproduction” at the Canisius College Dept. of Physics.
07/2018 - I was hired as Assistant Professor (Instructional Faculty) in the ECE Department at the University of Rochester.
06/2018 - I successfully defended my Ph.D thesis titled “Spatial Audio Rendering with Flat-Panel Loudspeakers”.
07/2017 - I was named the Harman Scholar by the Audio Engineering Society Educational Foundation.