Charlie Mydlarz | Research Assistant Professor, Brooklyn

Charlie Mydlarz
Research Assistant Professor
Brooklyn

I am a Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL). My current research interests include the design, development, and deployment of advanced urban IoT devices for city scale noise monitoring.

Profile

The main focus of my work is on the development and implementation of cyber-physical systems for large-scale, high-resolution soundscape data capture from urban environments with a lean towards acoustic sensor development using digital MEMS microphone solutions. This is part of the NSF funded Sounds Of New York City (SONYC) project.

My PhD work at The University of Salford’s Acoustic Research Centre enabled public engagement in a large-scale mass participation soundscape study using smart phones for global subjective and objective data collection and analysis. The data collected can be explored at soundaroundyou.com. My past research projects also include the influences of sound environments on the attainment of 11-16-year-old school children in England. I completed my BSc in Audio Technology with first class honors at the University of Salford in 2007.

Projects

SONYC

This is how Ive spent most of my working time in NYC, working on the Sounds Of New York City or SONYC project. I designed, fabricated and deployed a network of over 60 low-cost acoustic sensor nodes across the city to provide continuous, real-time, accurate and source-specific monitoring of urban noise. This enables large-scale analysis of urban noise activity to reveal noise patterns across space and time. These tools have been used to drive a data-driven approach to noise mitigation by feeding relevant, actionable, and timely information to those tasked with reducing noise. A number of the sensor nodes have been operational since May of 2016, resulting in the accumulation of vast amounts of calibrated sound pressure level (SPL) data.

REIP

The Reconfigurable Environmental Intelligence Platform (REIP) aims to alleviate many complex aspects of remote sensing, including sensor node design, software stack implementation, privacy issues, bandwidth, and centralized compute limitations, bringing down start up times from years to weeks. REIP will be a plug-and-play remote sensing infrastructure with advanced edge processing capabilities for in-situ insight generation. At the core of REIP is a set of hardware modules that connect together to form a sensing solution. Each sensing module will come in a number of variants allowing the user to find the proper tradeoff between complexity/cost and power/features. The REIP infrastructure will expand the use of audio-visual sensing architectures beyond the highly specialized research groups that are able to design, build, and purchase all the necessary components and make it available to a wider community as a research infrastructure. REIP will be tested on real-world applications, including observation, integrated sensing transportation networks, and indoor sensing for reducing waste in HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) systems. Experts will be able to customize each application domain.

Sound Around You

My PhD project where people across the world were prompted to use their iphone (or any other audio recorder) to capture clips of around 30 seconds in length from different sound environments, or soundscapes. Anything from a family car journey to a busy shopping centre, and to upload them to our online map, along with their opinions of them and why they chose to record it. I did this to investigate how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel.

Skills

Smart Cities IoT
• Remote sensing
• Big data collection, processing and analysis
• Electrical engineering including: small-scale SMT PCB design, bring-up, and reworking
• Resilient hardware design and fabrication
• Full stack baremetal Linux systems engineering, admin, and dev-ops
• Networking technologies and implementations
• City agency and partner liaison
• Report creation and dissemination to stakeholders
• Trying not to complain about the cold

Acoustics
• Laboratory and field measurement
• Digital signal processing
• Large scale acoustic data processing and analysis
• Embedded audio system design
• MEMS microphones
• Structure-borne sound measurement
• Calibration techniques
• Acoustic ecology

Management and planning
• Planning, organization, and delivery of 8 projects of varying sizes and team compositions
• Grant proposal writing on 6 successfully funded National Science Foundation projects totaling over $8M
• Conflict resolution in various team scenarios
• Mentoring of over 50 students from high school to postdoctoral levels

Entrepreneurial
• Customer discovery
• Business model creation and analysis
• Development of evidence-based commercialization strategies

Tools and languages
• Python: num/scipy, pandas, sklearn, librosa, tornado, multiprocessing, matplotlib, jupyter notebooks
• Ansible
• Docker, including: kubernetes and compose
• Shell scripting
• Objective C, swift and android java
• C, C++, C#
• Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS
• Latex
• Matlab
• Pycharm
• Xcode
• Sublime text
• Fusion 360
• Eagle
• Adobe packages, including: photoshop, illustrator, premiere

Experience

Oct 2013 – Today

New York University

Research Assistant Professor
Senior Research Scientist
Postdoctoral Associate

Working on the development and implementation of cyberphysical systems for large scale, high resolution data capture from urban environments.

Jan 2013 – Jun 2013

University of Salford

Research Assistant

Framework for Innovation and Research in MediaCityUK (FIRM), Hyperlocal TV research project investigating hyperlocal TV services, with a particular focus on sports coverage. The project is partnered with BT, and a number of local charities and media organisations. The main aim is to gauge audience appreciation towards hyperlocal content and the ways in which they consume it.

Feb 2010 – Jul 2012

University of Salford

Research Technician

EPSRC funded project ISESS (Identifying a Sound Environment for Secondary Schools): a three year research project investigating the effects on teaching and learning of different acoustic designs within secondary schools and classrooms.

Sep 2007 – Feb 2013

University of Salford

PhD Student

Enabling public engagement in a large-scale mass participation soundscape study utilizing smart phones for global subjective and objective data collection and analysis.

Sep 2005 – Sep 2006

HHB Professional Audio Products

Service Engineer

In charge of the service and repair of professional audio equipment, including all microphones and CD burners. Ran all of the companies pro audio CD media testing and handled phone and email technical support for industry professionals.