Mark Plumbley

Mark Plumbley is a Professor of Signal Processing at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) within the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey. He holds an EPSRC Fellowship in 'AI for Sound' and has led major research initiatives, including the DCASE challenges. His work focuses on AI-driven analysis of acoustic scenes and events, with contributions to machine learning, audio source separation, and sparse representations. Previously, he was Director of the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London and Head of the School of Computer Science at Surrey.

Education: PhD in Neural Networks (1991). Academic roles include Professorships at King’s College London (1991–2002) and Queen Mary University of London (2002–2014). Research spans audio event detection, sound scene classification, and generative AI for audio synthesis. He leads projects like the EPSRC-funded 'Making Sense of Sounds' and 'Musical Audio Repurposing using Source Separation', and co-edited the Springer book on Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events.

Research Interests:

• AI for Sound: Machine learning applied to real-world audio analysis.
• Acoustic Scene and Event Recognition: Developing models for sound classification and localization.
• Generative Audio Models: Text-to-audio systems and diffusion models for sound synthesis.
• Healthcare Applications: Audio-based diagnostics and bioacoustic signal processing.

Grants and Awards: EPSRC Fellowships, EU-funded networks (SpaRTaN, MacSeNet), and Fellowships from IET and IEEE. Notable awards include the IEEE Young Author Best Paper Award (co-authored with students) and leadership in the DCASE community.

Labs and Collaborations: CVSSP at Surrey, collaborations with BBC R&D, and interdisciplinary projects on urban soundscapes and noise pollution (UK Acoustics Network Plus).