Dr. Niels Pontoppidan heads the Augmented Hearing Science group at Eriksholm Research Centre at Oticon
Since 2016 Dr. Pontoppidan also coordinates the EVOTION Project. His research at Eriksholm and with international collaborators focuses on understanding how hearing loss affects the perception of sound with the aim to invent new hearing healthcare interventions.
The research combines investigation of sound perception in the lab with collecting contextual data describing sound environments, the operation of the hearing device, the settings of the hearing devices, and the individual parameters that characterize the individual. This combination of data enables the search for behavioural patterns to identify individual as well as health care strategies for hearing problems. The aim is to transform these patterns into insights that fuel future hearing health care and the evidence for beneficial interventions.
Dr. Pontoppidan’s research also target the cocktail party problem, which in 2017 led to the first breakthrough where a voice separation algorithm became good enough that it can help a person with hearing loss to divide attention between two voices. This breakthrough came applying deep learning to mixtures of voices and hereby learning the algorithm to separate voices.
