Audio and Media Technologies

Gender bias and bias in general play an increasing role in natural language processing. AI applications use vast amounts of data to learn associations relating to all kinds of variables or features. But in doing so, they also adopt existing prejudices and stereotypes. In this interview, Dr. Alessandra Zarcone discusses whether gender bias is also a factor in industrial natural language processing, to what extent she herself is concerned with the issue, and whether Fraunhofer IIS is addressing this problem.

Read the interview

New sound technologies make it possible to craft highly realistic audio experiences in which the sound comes from all sides – even from above. Sound engineer Daniela Rieger completed her Master of Engineering at Stuttgart Media University and is part of the team in the Media Systems and Applications department at Fraunhofer IIS, where she works to optimize these types of audio formats.

Read the article

Dr. Bernhard Grill, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, was a guest speaker at the 19th Bavarian SME Conference in December 2020. There he talked about “Erlangen’s Audio Revolution – mp3, Fraunhofer and big business with compressed file formats.”

Read the article

When Elena Burdiel talks about her work in the Audio Coding & Multimedia Software group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, you immediately notice her enthusiasm and how her eyes light up. It quickly becomes clear that her world revolves (almost) entirely around music and sound. But delving a little deeper reveals that the 29-year-old has many exciting qualities that make her a unique “innovation artist” in the Nuremberg metropolitan region.

Read the article

Audio description for video over MPEG-H audio now available in eight languages.

See the video

Speakers tell us about their experience with the webinar series at Fraunhofer IIS.

Read more

Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri and the like are becoming more and more popular, but the systems struggle when it comes to understanding complex contents and context or deriving semantic meaning. Birgit Brüggemeier knows what the problem is: »The machine lacks common sense.« Together with her project team, she is working on the European version of a voice assistant, looking at how these error messages can be communicated to the user without them getting annoyed and ending their interaction with the voice assistant.

Read more

Fraunhofer IIS has been successfully developing audio coding technologies for many years. The goal of these technologies is to store and transmit audio signals in optimum quality. But what good is having the best audio quality if devices can only reproduce it inadequately? To address this prob- lem, scientists at Fraunhofer IIS have developed the Cingo® and Symphoria® technologies to improve playback sound quality.

• Read more

Shooting is finished. During post-production, errors are discovered that had previously gone unnoticed. With light-field processing, this is no problem. The technology offers new possibilities for film production and allows scenes to be modified.

• Read more