UI Computer Science researchers recently received an Outstanding Paper award at the 14th IEEE conference on Healthcare Informatics (IEEE ICHI 2026), in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for their paper: “Real-Time Environment-Specific Deep Denoising for Edge-Assisted Hearing Aids.”
Project supervisor, Dr. Octav Chipara explains: "We are trying to improve the ability of hearing aids to perform well when picking up speech within noisy environments. What we were able to show is that if you build denoising models that are specific to that environment, those models can have smaller computational demands, so they can run on hearing aid hardware.” Chipara, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, leads the Mobile Systems Laboratory at the University of Iowa.
In addition to Professor Chipara, co-authors include:
- Yumna Anwar, recent PhD grad in computer science from UIowa, who’s thesis was on “Deep Learning for Real-World Sound Processing in Healthcare.”
- Ian Pope, a current PhD student in Computer Science
- Yu-Hsiang Wu, F. Wendell Miller Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, CLAS, University of Iowa
- Steve Goddard, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Computer Science, CLAS, University of Iowa
ICHI 2026 is a premier community forum concerned with the application of computer science, information science, data science, and informatics principles, as well as information technology, and communication science and technology to address problems and support research in healthcare, medicine, life science, public health, and everyday wellness.
University of Iowa’s Department of Computer Science, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is a leader in health and human centered computing. It offers both graduate and undergraduate students opportunities for hands-on experience in working directly with faculty mentors like Chipara and others, in both computer science and interdisciplinary research.