Abdullah Fahim, a PhD student from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering will travel to the United States this weekend to commence a summer internship at Apple Inc. headquarters in California.

This is an exciting opportunity for Fahim who works with the ANU Acoustic Signal Processing Group supervised by Professor Thushara Abhayapala and Dr Prasanga Samarasinghe. 

Fahim’s research centres on spatial audio and in particular, soundfield and sound source separation. Soundfield separation can create isolated sound zones in a large and mixed acoustic environment to capture desired group conversation. Source separation can differentiate individual sound sources from a sound mixture, e.g., separating individual voices in a scenario with multiple speakers talking simultaneously.

This work has the potential to influence the advancements in virtual home assistance, smart devices, telepresence, entertainment, hearing aids, and telecommunications.

Fahim is thrilled at the opportunity to work with Apple researchers and share his knowledge.

‘I felt out of this world when I got the call. I always fancied working for Apple but the screening process is complex and lengthy so I didn’t think that it might actually happen” Fahim said.

“I’m looking forward to linking my research with an industry need, and a practical product. My hope is that my work and knowledge has an impact and isn’t just a research paper - it could actually form part of an Apple product too!”

The six month internship will be based at Apple Park, the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. The internship opportunity came after Fahim presented his work on a spatial coherence-based source separation technique at the 2017 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) in New York.

Learn more about the Acoustic Signal Processing Group at ANU