University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

New App Warns Users of Potential Hazards

David Tcheng, co-founder of the start-up One Llama, was recently interviewed by MIT Online Review  regarding the development of  smartphone technology to alert people of audible threats.  The new app is called Audio Aware and it alerts users wearing headphones to potential hazards  that they might otherwise not hear.  In his interview, Tcheng explains:

“It will work by listening through your smartphone’s microphone … constantly comparing what it hears to stored templates of alert sounds it needs to recognize. When a sufficient match, such as a car horn, is detected, it will cancel any audio you’re hearing and pipe in an amplified version of the sound it’s picking up, or perhaps a cartoon-like version of that sound that is easier to recognize.”

David is a research scientist in the Illinois Informatics Institute, and a graduate student in the Informatics PhD program.  To read more about Audio Aware see the linked MIT Review article, or one of the following:

Share:

More Posts

Cliff Shin Defends Dissertation

Doctoral Candidate Cliff Shin successfully defended his dissertation, “INTERDEPENDENCY BETWEEN COMPLEXITY AND LONGEVITY THROUGH THE LENS OF THE DESIGNER” on June 14th and will graduate

Ryan Chandler Defends Dissertation

Doctoral Candidate Ryan Chandler successfully defended his dissertation, “SEMANTIC-PROSODIC CORRELATES OF BACKCHANNEL UTTERANCES IN HUMAN-COMPUTER DIALOG” on March 28th and will graduate May 2023. Program