Wiebke Middelberg, a doctoral student at the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics, was recently honoured in Bonn with third place in the ARD/ZDF "Women + Media Technology" 2022 prize, which is endowed with 2,000 euros. This was the first time a female graduate from the University of Oldenburg had been successful in this competition.
Middelberg was honoured for her Master's thesis, which she completed last year as part of her Engineering Physics degree. Her thesis focussed on the question of how people who use hearing aids can follow conversations better. Her approach: the numerous microphones available in everyday life - for example in smartphones - can help to better distinguish between background noise and desired speech signals. Using the example of a cocktail party, she used these microphones in addition to the hearing aid microphones to increase the intelligibility of a single voice from the voice mix and suppress all other unwanted sound sources.
"Areas of application for new solutions using improved algorithms lie not only in the investigated hearing aid technology, but also, for example, in the voice control of digital media," said the jury in its statement. Middelberg's work was carried out in the Collaborative Research Centre for Hearing Acoustics, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The 25-year-old is currently working on her doctorate in the Signal Processing working group led by Prof. Dr Simon Doclo.
This is the 14th time that the public broadcasters have honoured female graduates from colleges and universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with the award. The aim is to motivate talented women to work in the field of audiovisual media production and distribution as part of their studies and research. Under the motto "My idea writes the future", women can submit theses that deal with current issues in the field of media technology. The competition also aims to provide participants with career-enhancing contacts at public broadcasters.
