Andrew Singer is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His primary affiliation is computational imaging. As a faculty member in the ECE department, he teach courses in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois. Courses on system design, signal processing, statistical estimation, embedded systems, and communication systems. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds a Fox Family Endowed Professorship and serves as Associate Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Grainger College of Engineering. During the academic year 1996, he was a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. From 1996 to 1998, he was a Research Scientist at Sanders, A Lockheed Martin Company in Manchester, New Hampshire. In 2000, he co-founded Intersymbol Communications, Inc., a fabless semiconductor IC company, based in Champaign, Illinois, which built digital signal processing-enhanced receivers for 10Gb/s optical communications.  In 2007, Intersymbol Communications, Inc. was acquired by Finisar Corporation (now II-VI). In 2014, Professor Singer co-founded OceanComm, a provider of ultra high-bandwidth underwater acoustic modem technology for subsea industries. Professor Singer enjoys many forms of outdoor sports, including competing in triathlons and marathons. He has competed at all distances from sprint and olympic distance triathlons to ultra-marathons and the Ironman triathlon.

Education

• Ph.D., electrical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996

• 2022: Best Student Paper Award (co-authored with PhD Advisee), POMA Student Paper Competition, Acoustical Society of America, Nashville Meeting, “Measuring and Exploiting the Locally Linear Mapping Between Relative Transfer Functions and Array deformations.”

• 2020: Microsoft AI for Accessibility Award

• 2020: Best Student Paper Presentation (co-authored with Post-Doctoral Advisee), 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (“Dynamic range compression of signal mixtures”)

• 2019: Best Student Paper Award (co-authored with PhD Advisee), Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, (“Motion-tolerant beamforming with deformable microphone arrays”)

• 2018: Amazon Alexa Innovation Fellow

• 2017: Best Student Paper Award (co-authored with PhD advisee), Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers

• 2016: Appointed as Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS) Fellow, for visitors who "have a great international reputation as scientists or engineers and who have the intention to engage in an effective collaboration with researchers in the institute,"

Research areas:

• Signal processing

• Communications

• Underwater acoustics

• Audio and machine learning

Research interests:

• Sonar/lidar/optical signal processing

• Financial modeling and algorithms, optical communications

• Wireline/wireless communications

• Decision making/aggregation systems

• Augmented listening and audio processing

• Robotics

As Head of the Innovation Leadership and Engineering Entrepreneurship degree program, Professor Singer teaches a variety of courses on technology entrepreneurship, product design and innovation. The Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) is part of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship office in the Grainger College of Engineering and oversees all entrepreneurship activities in the College of Engineering and facilitates a number of entrepreneurship programs across the University. The Technology Entrepreneur Center provides students and faculty with the skills, resources and experiences necessary to become successful innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders who tackle grand challenges and change the world. Some of his team’s new programs include Innovation Living and Learning Community (Innovation LLC) - a residential dormitory experience where students can live and learn innovation and entrepreneurship, and the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, where students can define their own curricula targeted at preparing them to tackle the worlds biggest engineering challenges.