College of Engineering 50th Anniversary

To celebrate the College of Engineering’s Golden 50th Anniversary in 2012, a series of events are planned on the Davis campus and in the Bay Area. Exhibitions at UC Davis, website features, and special events will celebrate the first 50 years of the College of Engineering, and enlarge the vision for our success in the next half-century.

College of Engineering Notable Biographies

 

RALPH ALGAZI

Just as a two-dimensional film image falls far short of the spatial depth we experience in the real world, sound recordings — and the traditional methods of listening to them — are a pale shadow of a live performance ... even if the "performance" is nothing more than a conversation with a person standing in front of us. We move while talking, or when attending a concert; this affects how sound reaches us.

"Conventional audio playback doesn't reflect how we hear in real life," noted Ralph Algazi, during a 2004 interview. "Your body, the shape of your head and the room acoustics all affect how you hear."

Algazi and his colleagues have been investigating audio and psychoacoustics for years, with breakthroughs made at the UC Davis Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing (CIPIC); Algazi was the founding director of this interdisciplinary research facility in 1989. In 2004, Algazi, Richard Duda and Dennis Thompson developed motion-tracked binaural sound, which — for a listener — simulates the real-world experience of listening to invisible people talking, playing music or making any other set of sounds, while being able to turn around and "focus" from one to the next. It's an audiophile's dream come true.

Algazi joined the UC Davis faculty in 1965, following a sting at MIT; prior to that, he served in the French Air Force from 1952 to '54, and then worked for five years as a development engineer in the electronics industry. He maintained a high profile at UC Davis, serving as chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department from 1975 to 1986; in 1976, he founded the campus' Image Processing Facility.

Although he technically retired in 1994, Algazi has remained quite busy as an appointed Research Professor, both with CIPIC and other projects. One such collaboration — with Makoto Miyahara, of the Japan Advanced Institute of Technology — explored perception-based image distortion measures. It sounds fancy, but it's merely another application of Algazi's fascination with coupling engineering with perception, by exploiting the complex cues that contribute to the human immersive experience in real life.

For now, Algazi wants to rock our audio world, and future equipment will get much of its pizzazz from his efforts at UC Davis and CIPIC.

For more information on the College of Engineering's 50th Anniversary Celebration, please email Oliver Ramsey.