Oldenburg, August 28, 2018. In the framework of an interesting programme and together with invited guests, the Fraunhofer IDMT will be celebrating its successful work over the past years and looking ahead to the future.

Festivities will begin at 2:30 p.m. at the House of Hearing, Marie-Curie-Strasse 2, D-26129 Oldenburg. The welcome addresses and keynote speeches will start at 3:00 p.m. and end at about 5:40 p.m., followed by time for discussion, networking and a barbecue. From 2:30 to 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 to 4:30 p.m., IDMT scientists will demonstrate successful examples from practice with the help of exhibits and there will be an opportunity for group photographs and interviews with the press.

Guest speakers include Björn Thümler, Lower Saxony’s Minister for Science and Culture, Jürgen Krogmann, Mayor of the City of Oldenburg, and Stephan Albani, member of the German parliament, as well as Dr. Hans-Otto Feldhütter, Director of Business Models at Fraunhofer. Bernd Müller of Deutsche Telekom will report on his company’s close collaboration with the Fraunhofer IDMT on the development of the acoustics for its smart speaker. In addition, Professor Jörg Sennheiser will be looking back on the joint success story in the development of headset technology. The event will be chaired by Lars Reckermann, editor-in-chief of the Nordwest-Zeitung newspaper.


"The Fraunhofer IDMT-HSA in Oldenburg received € 3.3 million from the Federal State of Lower Saxony as start-up finance and since then has developed very successfully and far beyond the original expectations. That funding had a tremendous leverage effect:  After 10 years, the Institute now raises more than the total sum of its start-up funding every year in the shape of contracts from industry and publicly funded projects, finances about 40 staff and enables some 30 students to get to grips with important topics for the future and application-oriented research. With our work, we here in hearing research in Oldenburg have opened doors into new markets", says Dr. Jens-E. Appell, Head of Department of the Branch Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology at the Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg.

"From purely audiological and medical research in the area of hearing back then, we now have clients in the areas of industry 4.0, the automotive sector, consumer electronics, transport, safety, telecommunications and healthcare. Research in Oldenburg reflects these clients’ requirements and enriches the basic research conducted by our university partners," explains Professor Birger Kollmeier, Head of the Branch Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology at the Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg.

"Hearing, speech and audio technology at Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg is both an important field for the future and has for a long time been a driver of digital transformation. In the course of its development, it has managed the leap from medical research in the field of hearing to other attractive areas of application and in so doing always keeps abreast of the times. Machine learning processes were used practically from the very outset for detecting acoustic events or for speech recognition in the context of man-machine interaction. This is digitization in its purest form. That is why, for example, the “hearing car” is not just a vision but consistent use of the acoustic recognition of approaching emergency vehicles and a major contribution towards autonomous driving," underlines Dr. Hans-Otto Feldhütter, Director of Business Models at Fraunhofer.


About the Branch Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Oldenburg

The objective of the Branch Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology of the Fraunhofer IDMT is to transpose scientific findings related to hearing perception into technological applications. Its applied research priorities are the enhancement of sound and speech intelligibility, personalized audio reproduction, and acoustic speech and event detection. Through scientific partnerships, it has close links with the Carl von Ossietzky University, Jade University and other institutions in Oldenburg engaged in hearing research. It is also a partner in the »Hearing4all« Cluster of Excellence.

WE MAKE IT LISTEN! "We teach your devices to hear."

With the speech recognizers developed at the Fraunhofer IDMT, enterprises can operate their machines reliably even in a loud environment and, if wanted, without transferring data to the internet. Or they can incorporate the speech recognizers in their own products and in this way create unique selling points as well as generate new value added for their customers. In the area of industry 4.0, amongst others, the Fraunhofer IDMT is using acoustic event monitoring processes to detect conspicuous noises in machines or in the context of product quality control. In this way, damage can be avoided and downtimes kept to a minimum.