On thursday June 4th at 3pm in room 52.321 Bob Sturm, from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, will give a seminar on "Sparse Approximation and Some of its Applications to Analysis, Visualization, and Transformation of Acoustic and Musical Signals".

 Abstract: Sparse approximation attempts to model a signal using few terms selected from a large set of functions (atoms) that can be defined with minimal restrictions. Even though research in this area began more than 15 years ago within the signal processing field, the computational costs associated with applying sparse approximation to audio data have remained prohibitive until recently. Thus, such applications are just now beginning to be explored. In my work I specifically address the use of sparse approximation to facilitate representations of audio data to provide a rich interface to the contents of such signals for purposes of analysis, extraction, and modification. This talk will present an overview of this work.

Bob Sturm website