Wiebke Middelberg, MSc, a doctoral candidate in Prof Dr Simon Doclo's Signal Processing group, has been awarded the German Society of Acoustics (DEGA) study prize of 500 euros for her master's thesis entitled: "GSC-Based Noise and Interferer Reduction for Binaural Hearing Aids Exploiting External Microphones". In her master's thesis, which she wrote in 2021 as part of the CRC Hearing Acoustics, Middelberg focussed on improving the speech intelligibility of a specific speaker in hearing aids by filtering out unwanted noises and interfering speakers. To do this, she not only used the hearing aids themselves, but also other microphones distributed around the room, for example in smartphones that are connected to the hearing aids. The prize was awarded online during the opening of the DEGA conference in Stuttgart on 22 March 2022.
Wiebke Middelberg obtained her B.Eng. in Engineering Physics and her M.Sc. in Engineering Physics with a specialisation in Acoustics in 2019, both in the Signal Processing department under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Simon Doclo. Since September 2021, she has also been working towards her Dr.-Ing. Her research interests lie in multi-microphone processing and the combination of deep learning and model-based approaches to speech enhancement.
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