Walter Etter

Biography

Walter Etter is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. In 1987 he founded Audissimo High-End Audio, a company dedicated to audiophile products. During his PhD program in 1990, he collaborated with the Biomedical Engineering Lab at the University of Illinois on noise reduction for hearing aids. In 1993, he joined Bell Labs to pursue research in speech processing with emphasis on noise reduction, noise-adaptive compression, and noise estimation. His algorithms were implemented in a number of Lucent's Echo Canceller and Voice Enhancement Systems (Cadenza, Symphony, Sonata) as key features of Studio Sound™. As a DSP expert, he has been engaged in a wide range of fields, including speech coding, digital control (for optical amplifiers in LambdaXtreme), and video processing. He collaborated with Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise Group in areas of noise reduction, acoustic echo cancellation, and spatial audio. His current research interests center on multi-modal spatial audio acquisition and rendering of uncompromised speech, as well as cloud-based spatial audio processing. Focusing on the remote participant of a conference, he strives to provide a compelling auditory experience with detailed spatial resolution combined with a highly intelligible and pleasing sound quality. He has authored several papers and holds over fifteen patents.