CCNR People

Aisha Thorn - Alumna

	Phone Location Email Webpage Supervisor:	++44 (1273) 87-2949 JMS 3D8 aishat@sussex.ac.uk http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/aishat/ Karen McComb, David Young
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Research Interests

I'm a DPhil student investigating the use of neural networks and related statistical methods in the analysis of animal vocalisations. In particular I am developing a general methodolgy that can be used to evaluate the size of a vocal repertoire and discreteness of the call-types. The model is designed to be applicable to any vocal repertoire and so enables comparisons to be made between different species. I am using collections of recordings of various species, including Barbary macaque, black and white ruffed lemur, killer whale, African elephant and human.

Broadly, my interests are in: structure and function of animal vocalisations; ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes in development of repertoires; vocal production; the auditory pathway, mainly auditory cortex; correlates between acoustic and visual (or other sensory) processing in cortical structures; neural network techniques for pattern recognition; DSP; speech and voice recognition.

I am supervised by Karen McComb who uses acoustic playback experiments to study animal vocal communication, and David Young who researches computational and biological aspects of vision.