Reports and Proceedings

Wirelessly functioning devices are omnipresent in our households. However, wireless communication endangers our privacy: Passive eavesdroppers are able to obtain sensitive data through intercepted high-frequency signals.

As part of the 182nd ASA Meeting, Luisa Still, of Sensor Data and Information Fusion, will discuss the important factors in determining shooter localization accuracy. In an urban setting, buildings or other obstacles can reflect, refract, and absorb sound waves, which can severely impact said accuracy. Preemptively predicting this is crucial for mission planning in urban environments. Still and her team used geometric considerations to model acoustic sensor measurements. This modeling, combined with information on sensor characteristics, the sensor-to-shooter geometry, and the urban environment, allowed them to calculate a prediction of localization accuracy.

As the size and number of acoustic datasets increase, accurately and quickly matching the bioacoustics signals to their corresponding sources becomes more challenging and important. This is especially difficult in noisy, natural acoustic environments. At the 182nd ASA Meeting, Elizabeth Ferguson, from Ocean Science Analytics, will describe how DeepSqueak, a deep learning tool, can classify underwater acoustic signals. It uses deep neural network image recognition and classification methods to determine the important features within spectrograms, then match those features to specific sources.

Raceways can produce noise from many kinds of vehicles, such as race cars, street race cars, racing motorcycles, go-karts, monster trucks, and cheering spectators. During the 182nd ASA Meeting, Bonnie Schnitta, from SoundSense LLC, will discuss her efforts to reduce the noise in a Michigan neighborhood from a nearby raceway. She and her team examined several different types of barriers, including berms, acoustic barriers, or dense foliage, to block that noise from reaching surrounding houses and businesses.

Dr. Houtenville: “Over the past four months, the number of unemployed has been relatively steady for people with disabilities, hovering around 590,000, compared with 460,000 prior to the pandemic. In our our May 6 nTIDE, we reported a similar trend for their labor force participation rate, also suggesting there’s not a lot of movement for people with disabilities.” Unemployment for people without disabilities has shown a slow but steady decline over the past two years. “We see greater variability in the data for people with disabilities, which relates to their smaller sample size.” As workers strive to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, other factors are likely to influence future trends. Despite the continued strength of the labor market, the rise in inflation and counter measures to slow the economy may contribute to increases in unemployment. “We need a ‘soft landing’ when bringing down inflation,” Dr. Houtenville cautioned, “to minimize the risk for recession, and maintain momentum in the labor market for all workers, including people with disabilities.”

Being mobile individually, at any time – without owning a car. To facilitate this, public transportation authorities cooperate with service providers for new forms of mobility such as bicycle sharing, car sharing, or ridepooling. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) studied how publicly available mobility options in the Karlsruhe region in the future can optimally fulfill the citizens’ needs. The result: Widespread availability of pooling and sharing services and improved public transportation will profit both – and reduce car traffic.