FACULTY
Research and Industry-Academia Collaboration
研究・産学連携
JULIAN Alberto Villegas Orozco
Senior Associate Professor
- Affiliation
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering/Division of Information Systems
- Title
- Senior Associate Professor
- julian@u-aizu.ac.jp
- Web site
- https://onkyo.u-aizu.ac.jp/
Education
- Courses - Undergraduate
- LI10 Introduction to Multimedia Systems
IT09 Sound and Audio Processing
FU14 Intro. to Software Engineering (exercise class)
FU15 Introduction to Data Management (exercise class)
- Courses - Graduate
- Spatial Hearing and Virtual 3D Sound
Introduction to Sound and Audio
Digital Audio Effects
Multimedia Machinima
Research
- Specialization
- I am interested in spatial sound, audio signal processing, phonetics, psychoacoustics, and aural/oral human-computer interaction.
- Educational Background, Biography
-
2021 – Senior Associate Professor, University of Aizu.
2013 - Associate Professor, University of Aizu.
2010 - Researcher, Ikerbasque - University of the Basque Country.
2010 - Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Aizu.
- Current Research Theme
- PSYPHON: Psychoacoustic features for Phonation prediction
- Key Topic
- Aural/oral human-computer interaction, real-time programming, visual programming
- Affiliated Academic Society
- • Audio Engineering Society • Acoustical Society of Japan • Acoustical Society of America • IEEE
Others
- Hobbies
- Running, playing music, etc.
- School days' Dream
- Building spatial ships
- Current Dream
- Make of this world a better place to live.
- Motto
- Nothing can stop you if you really want to do something.
- Favorite Books
- • “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller;
• "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks;
• “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams
- Messages for Students
- We are always looking forward to doing collaboration research; email me if you are interested. We’re particularly interested in Master and Doctoral students.
- Publications other than one's areas of specialization
- Encuentros entre Colombia y Japón: homenaje a 100 años de amistad, chapter "De como el mundo es un pañuelo y de las misteriosas maneras" (Of how the world is a handkerchief and other mysterious ways). Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bogotá D.C., Colombia, 2010. (Fiction) In Spanish.
Main research
- Sound and Audio Technologies
-
We are interested in sound as a vehicle to transmit information between humans and machines. In our research we focus mainly on spatial sound, applied psychoacoustics, and applied phonetics.
Spatial sound
Vision is saturated with information coming from gadgets we use on a daily basis; we want to find ways to convey part of that information via spatial (3D) sound using loudspeakers or headphones. We are particularly interested in synthesizing auditory distance and elevation in virtual environments and multi-sensory interfaces.
Applied psychoacoustics
The processing capabilities of the brain are sometimes exceeded by hardware. This brings opportunities for new interfaces explored in our lab, such as near ultrasound communication, bass enhancements using vibration motors, etc.
Applied phonetics
In collaboration research, we are studying effects of noise on speech, multilingualism, articulation and phonation phenomena. Speech technologies are the ultimate interaction method for human-machine communication. Understanding how speech is produced and perceived in different setups is of paramount importance for such technologies.
We use sound regularly to communicate with others, yet our understanding of it is so limited that there are many opportunities for new technologies to be discovered. This is a difficult task that requires common efforts.
Dissertation and Published Works
For a complete list, please check https://onkyo.u-aizu.ac.jp/#/Publications
[1] J. Villegas, N. Fukasawa, and C. Arevalo, “The presence of a floor improves subjective elevation accuracy of binaural stimuli created with non-individualized head-related impulse responses,” J. Audio Engineering Society, vol. 69, pp. 849–859, Nov. 2021. DOI 10.17743/jaes.2021.0045.
[2] J. Villegas, J. Perkins, and I. Wilson, “Effects of task and language nativeness on the Lombard effect and on its onset and offset timing,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., vol. 149, pp. 1855–1865, Mar 2021. DOI 10.1121/10.0003772.
[3] E. Ly and J. Villegas, “Generating artificial reverberation via genetic algorithms for real-time applications,” Entropy, vol. 22, p. 1309, Nov. 2020. DOI 10.3390/e22111309.
[4] J. Villegas, K. Markov, J. Perkins, and S. J. Lee, “Prediction of creaky speech by recurrent neural networks using psychoacoustic roughness,” IEEE J. of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 14, pp. 355–366, Feb. 2020. DOI 10.1109/JSTSP.2019.2949422.
[5] I. de la Cruz Pavía, G. E. Alcibar, J. Villegas, J. Gervain, and I. Laka, “Segmental information drives adult bilingual phrase segmentation preference,” Int. J. of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Jan. 2020. DOI 10.1080/13670050.2020.1713045.