Astrid

What is

ASTRID is proposed as a project that involves several PhD researchers in the field of signal processing and computing, with long-term, well-established collaboration between them and showed experience to confidently address a suitably selected range of scientific and technological challenges in the field of signal processing of sound signals and computing. Furthermore, this project exhibits a strong vocation for research excellence, internationalization, training and transfer. ASTRID Project promotes multidisciplinary research since it mobilizes complementary knowledge from various scientific fields, mainly: signal processing, telematics, computing, applied matematics and applied physics; to get its objectives, which are oriented to: research, dissemination, formation and transfer; towards finding solutions to society's problems, through publication of research results in forums with high scientific and technological impact, technology transfer and internationalization of activities

Objectives

The general objective of ASTRID is to contribute to sound-field deployment systems by the design and development of test beds, algorithms and computational kernels, that improve the performance, increase the resiliency, and reduce the energy consumption in order to transfer knowledge and tools to the productive sector. ASTRID will address complex sound deployment scenarios along three research fields: Fast multichannel adaptive algorithms, Distributed and collaborative systems and Psychoacoustic aspects of listening; focused on four related application target domains: Active sound field control, Personal sound zones and spaces, and Computational and matematical tools for sound processing.

This general objective can be settled down in the following ones:

• Improve the sound deployment systems in complex scenarios when listener or reproduction zones moves or change, particularly through develop algorithms resilient to:
  • Moving sources and/or listeners,
  • Update and downdate of reproduction zones.
• Improve the sound deployment systems in distributed scenarios, particularly through develop:
  • Distributed array PSZ systems,
  • Self stabily-concious active noise controllers,
  • Network-constraints resilient collaborative controllers.
• Improve human perception of sound deployment systems, particularly through develop:
  • Performance metrics based on human perception,
  • Personal-sound devoted systems.
• Develop and implement a Road Active Noise Control system.

Team

Team members

• Alberto González Salvador (project co-leader)
• Miguel Ferrer Contreras (project co-leader)
• María de Diego Antón
• Laura Fuster Criado
• Víctor M. García Mollá
• Juan Carlos Guerri Cebollada
• Pau Arce Vila
• Francisco José Martínez Zaldívar

Research team
facilities for ASTRID

Considerable effort has been made in recent years to equip the group with top-notch equipment. Among the facilities, a large listening room of 40 m² is fully available, totally equipped with audiovisual and control instrumentation (see top figure). Moreover, car seats surrounded by sound transducers are placed in this room to measure both objectively and perceptually, local sound zones around listener heads in enclosures (such as a cabin of a public transport or a living room). As singular equipment, a self-designed robotic X-Y-Azimuth platform (see next figure),

which is able to support and move any sound recording or emitting device, is available, i.e. arrays of microphones or audio-heads as shown in the previous and next figures. This platform will be used to characterize and monitor dynamic acoustic zones in indoor environments, as well as experiment with moving sound sources. For acoustic zone control, different loudspeakers arrays are also available

Regarding computing facilities, ASTRID team has recently acquired a last generation computation cluster within the project: “COMunicación y compuTACión inTeligentes y Sociales-COMTACTS”, GVA INFRAESTRUCTURAS Y EQUIPAMIENTO DE I+D+i, IDIFEDER/2020/050 (1/1/20 to 31/12/21), IP: A. González, budget: 263.742,26€. This infrastructure grant has provided a cluster system consisting of 10 nodes, connected via an Infiniband Mellanox HDR high performance switch. Each node comprises two AMD EPYC Rome 7282 processors (with 16 cores per processor, running at 2.8 GHz), 512 GiB of DDR4 RAM, an NVIDIA Ampere graphics accelerator, plus Infiniband HDR and Gigabit Ethernet links.

Contact

• Mail
• GitHub
• Web
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';