A Single-Processor Approach to Speech Processing Pipeline of Bilateral Cochlear Implants

To my grandmother To my parents To my sisters, Fatemeh and Zahra and To my brothers, Nasser and Mansour v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All the years of my PhD studies at The University of Texas at Dallas would not have been such a wonderful and enjoyable experience if it were not for all my amazing friends, colleagues, advisers and family that I have been very fortunate to always have around. I would not have been able to accomplish this dissertation work without the help and support that I received from them. Acknowledging their help is a great pleasure for me and will always remind me of their contributions to this project. I am truly grateful. Dr. Vanishree Gopalakrishna helped me get started on the PDA project and always patiently provided her feedback whenever I needed. Many thanks go to Hussnain Ali, Milad Omidi and Dr. Nima Yousefian from the Cochlear Implant Laboratory for their technical helps. Hussnain helped me a lot on programming the PDA and was always responsible for the software issues we would often face. It is nice to have colleagues of his knowledge, skills and responsibility in the team. Nima guided me to setup my experiments with dual-microphone data and design the bilateral cochlear implant experiments. Not only a knowledgeable colleague and a helpful critic on the technical aspects of the project, he has also been a great source of help during my defense and preparation of the dissertation, as well as a real assistance after leaving UTD. I owe him a lot. I am thankful to Milad whose comments and critics during the first stages of my research, made a great impact. He is a skillful engineer and researcher. I would also like to thank Masoud Farshbaf, from the Quality of Life Technology Laboratory, who was always the first person for me to ask for help at the tough times of debugging the PDA code. A bunch of thanks go to vi Mohammad, Ali, Rasoul, Masoud and all my friends who helped me a lot in my proposal and final exams. I would like to thank my fellow Signal and Image Processing Laboratory members who created a friendly environment in the lab and made working there, enjoyable and fun: Dr. Multimodal Signal Processing Laboratory who was a big help in the preparation of my dissertation despite coinciding with his busy time of working on his own dissertation. Special …