Please join the Physics & Astronomy Department for our next Seminar Speaker Series event!

A Dynamical System Approach to the Cocktail Party Problem: Using Optics Instead of your Brain to Separate Signals

Professor Marty Baylor, Professor of Physics at Carleton College

Snacks at 4:30 pm, talk begins at 4:45 pm.

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 can 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 non-linear 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, similar to predator-prey systems modelled by the Lotka-Volterra equations, 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. I invite you to come and find out about this truly fascinating system.

Martha-Elizabeth “Marty” Baylor graduated with more credits in her Chinese minor than her Physics major. She worked as a middle and high school teacher at the Maret School and as an optical engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center prior to attending graduate school at CU-Boulder in an NSF-Funded Optical Science and Engineering IGERT Program. As part of this program, she had the opportunity to do an internship at Hans Laser in Shenzhen, China. After earning her PhD in physics, she completed a visiting position at Carleton College and a Postdoc in Electrical and Chemical Engineering at CU-Boulder. She started a permanent position at Carleton College in 2010 where she is now a full professor.

Sponsored by the Physics & Astronomy Department, the Charlotte Haywood Lecture Fund, and the Office of the Provost.