Physics & Astronomy Marty Baylor, Carleton College: "A Dynamical System Approach to the Cocktail Party Problem: Using Optics Instead of your Brain to Separate Signals"

Abstract - Have you ever been at a noisy party and still been able to pick out what the person in front of you is saying? If so, then you are intimately aware of the fact that your brain is able to solve the cocktail party problem. How does your brain separate one signal from a mixture of signals? I have no idea, but I will tell you about a half-optical, half-electronic system that is able to mimic that behavior. The optoelectronic system uses dynamic holography combined with nonlinear electro-optics in a feedback loop to solve the cocktail party problem. By analyzing the dynamics of the feedback loop, it turns out that, under certain conditions, the feedback loop likes to separate signals. Moreover, the system doesn't need to know what the signals are or how they are mixed together to solve the problem.

Bio - I am originally from Columbia, Md. I completed my B.A. in physics at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 1998. After Kenyon, I spent two years teaching middle and high school physics and astronomy at the Maret School in Washington, D.C. Then I spent two years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center designing telescopes to study the aurora on Jupiter and optical test beds to study MEMs mirrors and shutters for use in the Near Infrared Spectrometer in the James Webb Space Telescope. I completed my Ph.D. in physics in 2007 at the University of Colorado Boulder, where my thesis was "Analog Optoelectronic Independent Component Analysis for Radio Frequency Signals." After completing my Ph.D., I took a year off and was a visiting professor at Carleton College for seven months and vacationed for four months (traveled to China, volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, went whitewater rafting, etc.). I did a two-year postdoc in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I collaborated with the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering to make integrated optofluidic devices in photosensitive polymers. I am currently an associate professor of physics at Carleton College.