Congratulations to emergenCITY scientist Dr.-Ing. Michael Muma, who receives the 2021 Early Career Award from the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). The award is conferred on him “For contributions to robust signal processing and statistical learning.”

With the Early Career Award, EURASIP annually recognizes outstanding researchers under the age of 40 who have already made a major scientific contribution in their career in the field of signal, speech and image processing, and whose work has the potential to make a lasting difference to research in their field. The award ceremony is scheduled to take place at the opening ceremony of the 29th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), August 23-27, 2021. For EUSIPCO, Michael Muma is also organizing a Special Session on Recent Advances Towards Robust Data Science.

In his young research career, Michael Muma has already achieved a lot. For example, he received his PhD with distinction (summa cum laude) in 2014 at the Department of Signal Processing at TU Darmstadt. His research focused on robust signal processing and statistical learning with application in biomedicine and sensor group signal processing. In addition to working on his PhD thesis, he led the work package Robust Distributed Multi-Source Detection and Labelling from 2013-2016 as part of the HANDiCAMS project, which focuses on robust distributed signal processing techniques for wireless sensor networks. In 2015, the TU Darmstadt student team mentored by Michael Muma won the IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2015, in which more than 50 teams from around the world compete to solve a challenging problem in the field of signal processing. In 2017, Michael Muma received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award together with Abdelhak M. Zoubir, Visa Koivunen, and Yacine Chakhchoukh.

Moreover, Michael Muma was named an Athene Young Investigator of TU Darmstadt in 2017. With this project, TU Darmstadt promotes the early scientific independence of particularly qualified young scientists in order to give them the opportunity to qualify for a professorship by independently leading a junior research group. Since 2018, Michael Muma has been an adjunct lecturer for the lecture Robust Signal Processing With Biomedical Applications and the project seminar Robust and Biomedical Signal Processing. In 2020, he co-authored the paper by Aylin Tastan that received the IEEE Radar Conference Student Paper Award.

At emergenCITY, Michael Muma brings his expertise to the program area Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), where he conducts research on algorithm development for analyzing data about a potential crisis situation using Cyber-Physical Systems to assess it in real time. For example, his current research is on how radar systems can be used to detect people in need of help and even measure their vital signs, such as breathing rate and heartbeat, using radars without contact.