11 April 2018

La Salle-URL participates in the 2nd Catalan Acoustic Congress

La Salle-URL participates in the 2nd Catalan Acoustic Congress held on 25 and 26 April at the Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia in Terrassa.

The Congress will have various parallel activities of debate and reflection related to the issue of noise and noise pollution and will be divided into three types of capsules or workspaces: Open Acoustic Challenges, Dilemmas and Complementary Activities. La Salle-URL Media Technologies research Group (GTM) proposes a challenge to monitor noise through sensors.

The challenge that is proposed is "Automatic monitoring of noise of the city using a sensor network" and will be coordinated by Francesc Alías. We will discuss about the challenges of the deployment of acoustic sensors networks of the cities to monitor noise, the design of low cost sensors and the identification of noise sources, as derived from the management and treatment of the collected data. 

This event, which will be the first of all the participants of the Congress, will take place on the first day of April 25 at 11:00 and will be aimed at all audiences.

The project is based on the fact that noise in urban environments is nowadays considered a public health problem, and that is why town councils and public entities often promote awareness-raising campaigns about the measurement of the level of acoustic pollution, especially in urban areas with high noise pollution. Thanks to the latest technological advances within the Smart Cities framework, new solutions based on wireless acoustic sensors (WASN) networks are being developed and deployed, which allow monitoring of the noise automatically and in real time. However, this paradigm shift puts new technological and management challenges on the table. These challenges range from the capture of reliable data automatically, linked to the accuracy and robustness of the low cost sensors of the network, through the processing of the acoustic signal collected, to the management and integration of this information from efficient way and at a reasonable cost.

These and other questions that may arise from the debate between the guests and those attending the challenge will be discussed.