Ira A. Fulton School
of Engineering

Herberger College
of Fine Arts

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 Harvey Thornburg

  Office: BYE 394/GWC 456
  Phone: 480-544-0166
  Ph.D.: Stanford University, 2005

  Assistant Professor
  Arts, Media and Engineering Program

Dr. Harvey Thornburg joined the ASU faculty in August 2005 with a joint appointment in AME/EE. He obtained his Ph.D./EE at Stanford/CCRMA in 2005. His current research activities comprise a) audio sensing, b) multimodal human activity analysis, c) continuous archival and retrieval of multimedia events, and d) signal processing for human-computer interaction. Thornburg serves as Co-Director of the K-12 Mediated Education Project (with Dr. Birchfield) which has developed the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Laboratory (SMALLab), a new, multimodal, computationally mediated platform for K-12 education. SMALLab has positively impacted hundreds of students in local schools and programs in the Phoenix metropolitan area and has received extensive press coverage. Other projects include Enactive Arts (in collaboration with Profs. Ingalls, James, Campana and Qian) and SIRENS (Segmentation, Indexing, and Retrieval of Environmental and Natural Sound).

Specific topics relevant to recent and forthcoming publications include

• Continuous capture and archival of everyday sound environments (CBMI’07, WASPAA’07)
• Revealing affordances of everyday spaces through spatial, temporal, and semantic mapping of sound activity (forthcoming)
• Jointly inferring temporal structure and segmenting multimedia events (MMSP’06; ICMC’07)
• Inferring Laban Movement Analysis qualities from full-body human movement (forthcoming)
• Designing new activity-based interactions for a mediated constructive learning environment (ICMC’06, SIGGRAPH ’06, ICASSP’06, EMME’07)
• Infer note onsets in musical audio by exploiting prior knowledge of musical structure (IEEE-TASL ’07)

Selected Recent Publications

Tu, K., H. Thornburg, E. Campana, M. Fulmer, D. Birchfield, and
A. Spanias, 2007. Interaction and reflection via 3D path shape qualities in a mediated learning environment. To appear, 2007 ACM/IEEE Conference on Educational Multimedia and Multimedia Education (EMME-07), Augsburg, Germany.

Wichern, G. J. Xue, H. Thornburg, and A. Spanias. Distortion-aware query-by-example for environmental sounds, 2007.  To appear, 2007 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA-07), New Paltz, NY.

Swaminathan, D., H. Thornburg, J. James, T. Ingalls, S. Rajko, and K. Afanador, 2007. A new gestural control paradigm: real-time conducting analysis via temporal expectancy models. To appear, 2007 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC-07), Copenhagen.

Wichern, G., H. Thornburg, B. Mechtley, A. Fink, and A. Spanias, 2007.
Robust multifeature segmentation and indexing for natural sound environments.
5th International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI-07),
Bordeaux, France.

Thornburg, H., R. Leistikow, and J. Berger, 2007. Melody extraction and musical onset detection via probabilistic models of STFT peak data. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 15(4): 1257-1272, May 2007

Thornburg, H., D. Swaminathan, T. Ingalls, and R. Leistikow, 2006.
Joint segmentation and temporal structure inference for partially-observed
event sequences. 8th IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP-06), Victoria, BC, Canada.

Birchfield, D., T. Ciufo, H. Thornburg, and W. Savenye, 2006. 
Sound and interaction in  K-12 mediated education. 2006 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC-06), New Orleans, LA.

Birchfield, D., T. Ciufo, G. Minyard, G. Qian, W. Savenye,
H. Sundaram, H. Thornburg, and C. Todd, 2006. SMALLab: a mediated platform for education. 
33rd International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH 2006), Boston, MA.

Thornburg, H., and R.J. Leistikow, 2005. A new probabilistic spectral
pitch estimator: exact and MCMC-approximate strategies.
In \textit{Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 
\#3310: Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval}, ed. U. Kock Wiil,
ISBN 3-540-24458-1.

Leistikow, R.J., H. Thornburg, J.O. Smith III, and J. Berger, 2004.
Bayesian identification of closely-spaced chords from single-frame STFT peaks.
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects
(DAFx-04): Naples, Italy.

Thornburg, H., and R.J. Leistikow, 2003. Analysis and resynthesis
of quasi-harmonic sounds: an iterative filterbank approach. Proceedings
of the 6th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx-03):
London.

Thornburg, H., and R.J. Leistikow, 2003. An iterative filterbank
approach for extracting sinusoidal parameters from quasiharmonic sounds.
Proceedings of 2003 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to
Audio and Acoustics, New Paltz, New York.

S. Serafin, J. O. Smith III, H. Thornburg, F. Mazzella, A. Tellier, and G. Thonier, ?Data driven identification and computer animation of a bowed string model?, Proceedings of the 2001 International Computer Music Conference, Havana, Cuba 2001