Bernd Fischer Award 2018

The Bernd Fischer Award 2018 for an outstanding PhD thesis in the Departments of Computer Science or Natural Sciences is awarded to Dr.-Ing. Quoc Huy Phan for his dissertation on "Audio Event Detection, Classification, and Beyond” at the Institute of Signal Processing, supervised by Professor Dr. Alfred Mertins.

Dr. Huy Phan is passionate about machine hearing a research topic that typically involves developing artificial machines that mimic the abilities of human hearing in perceiving acoustic environments. In his doctoral thesis, he studied the acoustic event detection problem, aiming to teach a computer to recognize specific events in real world using acoustic signals. He developed machine learning algorithms and signal processing techniques to derive representations for acoustic events that allow a computer to distinguish different events. Human ears can acquire knowledge from an acoustic environment continuously; process information from multiple acoustic sources; and can predict, recognize and locate events in advance. Inspired by these, he extended his algorithms and techniques to mimic the abilities of the human ears in a machine hearing system. Although much more needs to be done, this system opens a few new avenues in machine hearing studies and enables several novel applications, such as security surveillance, home-based monitoring for ambience assisted living, and hearing aid used in healthcare and medical applications.

Dr. Huy Phan was born in 1986 in Ben Tre, Vietnam. He obtained a B.Sc. degree in computer science at the University of Science in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, followed by an Master degree in computer engineering at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. From 2013 to 2017, he pursued his doctoral degree at the Graduate School and the Institute for Signal Processing of the University of Luebeck. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alfred Mertins, his doctoral thesis was awarded "summa cum laude" by the University's exam committee.

Currently, Dr. Huy Phan is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK. He works on developing computational methods for biomedical engineering with a focus on home-based sleep monitoring and digital health. In 2019 he was appointed as a Lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Kent in the UK.

The Bernd Fischer Award has been awarded since 2016 and commemorates the mathematician Prof. Dr. Bernd Fischer (1957 - 2013). As the Head of the Institute of Mathematics and Image Computing and Luebeck`s Fraunhofer Project Group on Image Registration (MEVIS) Professor Fischer played a major role in establishing the field of computer science at the university. He was extremely committed and popular among his colleagues and his students for his excellent teaching, his extraordinary research and his work on behalf of the university.
The award is endowed with 2,500 euros and is awarded annually by the Association of Alumni and Friends of the University of Luebeck.