Woon-Seng Gan

Woon-Seng Gan Woon-Seng Gan is a Professor of Audio Engineering and the Director of the Smart Nation TRANS Lab at Nanyang Technological University's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in Singapore. He earned his BEng (1st Class Hons) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Strathclyde in the UK in 1989 and 1993, respectively. He has held several leadership positions at Nanyang Technological University, including serving as the Head of the Information Engineering Division from 2011 to 2014 and as the Director of the Centre for Info-comm Technology from 2016 to 2019.

His research focuses on the interconnection between the physical world, signal processing, and sound control, leading to the development and licensing of spatial audio algorithms, directional sound beams, and active noise control solutions. He has published over 400 papers in international refereed journals and conferences and holds six granted patents. He is also the co-author of three books on subband adaptive filtering (Wiley, 2009), embedded signal processing (Wiley-IEEE, 2007), and digital signal processors (Prentice Hall, 2005). He has received recognition for his work, including the 2017 APSIPA Sadaoki Furui Prize Paper Award, and the DCASE 2021 Challenge Judges’ Award for Sound Event Localization and Detection.

Professor Gan is a highly accomplished individual with numerous accolades and accomplishments in his field of audio engineering and signal processing. He holds the prestigious title of Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), as well as being a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has been selected as the IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024 and has served as an Associate Editor for several leading journals, including the IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and the Journal of Audio Engineering Society. He is currently a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and serving in the editorial board on APSIPA Transaction on Signal and Information Processing.

In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Professor Gan has been listed among the 0 "World's Top 2% Scientists 2021 and 2022" by Stanford University in the field of Acoustics. He has been elected as the President-elect of the Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association for 2023-2024 and has held several other leadership positions within the organization. He actively participated in the IEEE Signal Processing Industry DSP committee and the IEEE IoT special interest group and has served on the IEEE SPS Technical Directions Board and Education Board. He also served as the General Conference Chair of the APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference in 2017, and was the Technical Program Chair for the first hybrid IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing held in Singapore in May 2022.

Professor Gan's contributions to the field have been widely recognized and he has been featured in several leading press articles, including the IEEE Spectrum, New Scientist Magazine, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. He has also been interviewed by media outlets, such as CNN Tech for Good (USA), CBS Innovation Nation (USA), Nas Daily (Singapore), Galileo TV (Germany), and Channel News Asia (Singapore), among others.

Academic Positions

  • Present

    Director of Smart Nation lab

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

  • Present

    Professor of Audio Engineering

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

  • 2019 2017

    Director of INFINITUS, Centre for Infocomm Technology

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering


    2014 2011

    Head of Information Engineering Division

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

  • 2011 2007

    Deputy Director, Centre for Signal Processing

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

  • 1999 1998

    Senior Lecturer

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

  • 1998 1993

    Lecturer

    Nanyang Technological University, School of Electrical Electronic Engineering

Government Committees

  • Present

    Member of the Committee of Advisory Panel on Neighbourhood Noise

  • Present

    Member of the IoT Standard Interoperability for Smart Nation

PhD Thesis Examination

Australian National University, Australia

University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Aalto University, Finland

Curtin University, Australia

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Auckland University, New Zealand

Industry Experience and Consultancy

Analog Devices

DaimlerChrysler

National Instruments

Panasonic

ST Electronics

ST Kinetics

Texas Instruments

Huawei Technology

Amazon Science

Research Funding

    Ministry of Education, Singapore

    Ministry of National Development (Land and Liveability National Innovation Challenge)

    National Environment Agency

    National Research Foundation (Proof-of-Concept)

    National Research Foundation (Interactive Digital Media)

    National Healthcare Group

    Singapore Millennium Foundation