Zhiyao Duan

Zhiyao Duan joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor in 2013, and is currently a professor.

His research interests are primarily in the area of computer audition and its connections with computer vision, natural language processing, computational neuroscience, and augmented and virtual reality. Computer audition involves designing intelligent algorithms and systems that can understand sounds, including music, speech, and environmental sounds. This is an interdisciplinary area that draws from many fields including signal processing, machine learning, psychoacoustics, music theory, etc.

Specific problems that Duan has been working on include automatic music transcription, sound source separation, audio-score alignment, music recommendation, music generation, speech enhancement and emotion analysis, speech synthesis, sound retrieval and generation, and audio-visual processing of music and speech.

He received a best paper award at the SMC 2017, a best paper nomination at ISMIR 2017, and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). His research is funded by NSF, NIH, NIJ, New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science, Adobe, IngenID, Kwai, Meta, Microsoft, Tiktok, and University of Rochester internal awards in AR/VR, health analytics, and data science.

He served as a co-chair of the Scientific Program of ISMIR 2021, an associate editor for IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, a guest editor for Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, and a guest editor for Frontiers in Signal Processing. He currently serves as a senior area editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters. He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) technical committee. He is the president of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2024 and 2025.