On Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, at 11 a.m., the thesis reading of the doctoral student Ester Vidaña Vila, will take place in Aula Magna of La Salle Campus Barcelona, entitled "Real-time acoustic event classification in urban environments using low-cost devices", which has been carried out under the direction Dra. Rosa Maria Alsina Pagès. The doctoral student is part of the GTM - Research Group on Media Technologies of La Salle Campus Barcelona.
In the modern society, the presence of noise has become a daily threat to the population. Being overexposed to high levels of noise may interfere with day-to-day activities and, thus, could potentially bring severe side-effects in terms of health such as annoyance, cognitive impairment in children or cardiovascular diseases. Some studies point out that it is not only the level of noise that matters but also the type of sound that the citizens are exposed to.
With current technologies used to track noise levels, for both private and public administrations, it is hard to automatically identify which sounds are more present in most polluted areas. Due to the high number of of citizen complaints that are generated every day (specially in highly populated areas), the development of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) that would automatically monitor the noise pollution of a certain area have become a research trend. Currently, most of the networks that are deployed in cities measure only the equivalent noise level by means of expensive but highly accurate hardware but cannot identify the noise sources that are present in each spot. Given the elevated price of these sensors, nodes are typically placed in specific locations, but do not monitor wide areas. So, the thesis addresses an important challenge that is still latent in this field: acoustic monitoring of large areas in real time and in a scalable and economical way. And they have selected the city of Barcelona as a case study to carry out this research.
The tribunal is made up by Dr. Francesc Daumal Domènech (UPC), Dr. Francesco Aletta (University College London), and Dr. Roberto Benocci (University of Milan - Bicocca).