Professor Thushara Abhayapala

BE (Hons 1), PhD
Professor, Research School of Engineering, CECS
ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics
T: 6125 8683

Areas of expertise

  • Acoustics And Acoustical Devices; Waves 020301
  • Simulation And Modelling 080110
  • Antennas And Propagation 100501
  • Signal Processing 090609
  • Electrical And Electronic Engineering 0906
  • Acoustics And Noise Control (Excl. Architectural Acoustics) 091301

Research interests

Physically inspired signal processing problems in the areas of Acoustics and Spatial Audio and generally in signals over sapce. These include spatial sound-field recording and reconstruction, Active Noise Control (ANC) over space, broadband/ nearfield beamforming, array signal processing, room acoustics,  spatial audio for Virtual/Augmented (VR/AR) Reality systems, higher order microphone and loudspeaker arrasys, Head Relate Transfer Function (HRTF), photo-acoustics, wireless channel modelling, capacity analysis of spatial channels, wave propagation modelling, and MIMO systems.

Biography

Thushara D. Abhayapala received the B.E. degree (hons.) in engineering in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications engineering in 1999, both from Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, ACT, Australia.

He held a number of leadership positions including Deputy Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science (2015–2019), Head of the Research School of Engineering, ANU (2010–2014), and the Leader of the Wireless Signal Processing Program, National ICT Australia (NICTA) from 2005–2007. He worked with the industry for two years, before his doctoral study and has active collaboration with a number of companies.

Among many contributions, he is one of the first researchers to use spherical harmonic based eigen-decomposition in microphone arrays and to propose the concept of spherical microphone arrays; novel contributions on the multizone sound field reproduction problem; was one of the first to show the fundamental limits of spatial sound field reproduction using arrays of loudspeakers and spherical harmonics.

He has supervised 39 Ph.D. students and coauthored more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. His research interests are in the areas of spatial audio and acoustic signal processing, and multichannel signal processing. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and was a Member of the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (2011–2016) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is a Fellow of Engineers Australia (IEAust).

 

 

Publications

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Updated:  01 July 2024 / Responsible Officer:  Director (Research Services Division) / Page Contact:  Researchers