Josh McDermott
Associate Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Josh McDermott is an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where he heads the Laboratory for Computational Audition. His research addresses human and machine audition using tools from experimental psychology, engineering, and neuroscience. The longterm goals of the lab are to understand how humans derive information from sound, to improve treatments for those whose hearing is impaired and to enable the design of systems that mirror human abilities to interpret sound.
McDermott has received a Troland Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and a McDonnell Scholar Award. He earned a BA in brain and cognitive science from Harvard University, an MPhil in computational neuroscience from University College London, and a PhD in brain and cognitive science from MIT. He did his postdoctoral training in psychoacoustics at the University of Minnesota and in computational neuroscience at NYU.
Selected Publications
- Bhandwaldar, A., Torralba, A., Gan, C., Gutfreund, D., Yamins, D., DiCarlo, J., Schwartz, J., McDermott, J., Alter, S., Zhou, S., Tenenbaum, J.(2022). The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark Towards Physically Realistic Embodied AI. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
- Gan, C., Gutfreund, D., Schwartz, J., McDermott, J., Tenenbaum, J., Alter, S., Zhou, S., Torralba, A., Gu, Y., Traer, J. (2022). Finding Fallen Objects Via Asynchronous Audio-Visual Integration. Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
- Saddler, M., Francl, JA., Feather, J., Qian, K., Zhang, Y., McDermott, J. (2021). Speech Denoising with Auditory Models. Interspeech.
- Dapello, J., Chung, S., Marques, T. G., Feather, J., Le, H., McDermott, J., Cox, D., DiCarlo, J. (2021). Neural Population Geometry Reveals the Role of Stochasticity in Robust Perception. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
Media
- September 19, 2019: MIT News, Perception of musical pitch varies across cultures.
- April 19, 2018: MIT News, Machine-learning system processes sounds like humans do.
- January 17, 2018: MIT News, Josh McDermott receives NAS Troland Research Award.
- January 5, 2017: MIT News, How the brain perceives rhythm.
- July 13, 2016: MIT News, Why we like the music we do.
Videos