Y. Cem Subakan

Y. Cem Subakan, Assistant Professor, Laval University, Computer Science and Software Engineering Department Affiliate Assistant Professor, Concordia University, Computer Science and Software Engineering Department Associate Academic Member, Mila

I obtained my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Bogazici University EE department, respectively in 2011 and 2013. In Bogazici, I worked with A. Taylan Cemgil and Bulent Sankur. I got my PhD from Computer Science Department of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My PhD advisor was Paris Smaragdis. In Mila, I did a postdoc with Laurent Charlin. I am one of the core contributors to the Speechbrain project. I have co-organized ICASSP 2024 workshop XAI-SA, and I was the lead general chair of IEEE Workshop of Machine Learning for Signal Processing 2025. I am an elected member of the IEEE MLSP Technical Committee. You can see my google scholar here.

Students / Collaborators

• Francesco Paissan

• Eleonora Mancini

• Firat Oncel

• Shubham Gupta

• Maab Elrashid

• Luca Della Libera

• Pooneh Mousavi

• Jacob Comeau

• Jihoon Jeong(Huni)

Alumni

• Anthony Deschenes (Postdoc)

• Mathis Rezzouk (Masters 2024-2026, now PhD student at ULaval)

We currently do not have open calls. But shoot me an email if you have experience in speech and audio, or methodological machine learning research.

Research Interests

• Time series modeling

• Interpretable Machine Learning, Explainability, Posthoc Interpretations

• Audio Source separation / Speech Enhancement

• Deep Generative Models

• Machine Learning, Statistical Learning

• Bayesian inference

• Non-convex optimization

• Method of Moments based learning algorithms for Latent Variable Models

Representative papers

• Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers

• REAL-M: Towards Speech Separation on Real Mixtures

• Attention is All You Need in Speech Separation

• Learning the Base Distribution in Implicit Generative Models

• Generative Adversarial Source Separation

• Spectral Learning of Mixture of HMMs

Teaching

• Machine Learning for Signal Processing (Fall 2026)

Notes from my timeline

• Two of our are papers are accepted to NeurIPS 2026!

• Four of our papers are accepted to Interspeech 2026!

• Three of our papers are accepted to ICASSP 2026!

• Our paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2025!

• Two of our papers and one workshop paper are accepted to ICASSP 2025!

• Our paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2024!

• Our paper is accepted to EMNLP 2024!

• Three of our papers are accepted to Interspeech 2024!

• Our paper Listenable Maps for Audio Classifiers is accepted to ICML 2024 as an oral presentation.

• We organized XAI-SA 2024, an IEEE ICASSP 2024 sattelite workshop.

• Our paper REAL-M: Towards Speech Separation on Real Mixtures is accepted to ICASSP 2022.

• Our paper Attention is All You Need in Speech Separation is accepted to ICASSP 2021.

• Our paper ‘On the Effectiveness of Two-Step Learning for Latent-Variable Models‘, is accepted to MLSP 2020.

• Our paper is accepted to MICCAI 2020.

• Our paper won the best student paper award in MLSP 2017.

• I have visited Columbia in Fall 2015.

• I have done an internship at Analog Devices/Lyric Labs in Summer 2015.

• I am visiting Daniel Hsu at Columbia U. in Spring 2015.

• I am a qualified PhD student! (passed qual) Here's my qual presentation.

• Our paper ‘‘Spectral Learning of Mixture of Hidden Markov Models’’ is accepted to NIPS 2014!

• Our DSP paper got accepted!

• We have presented a paper in NIPS2013 spectral learning workshop.

• I have successfully defended my M.Sc. thesis.

Contact

email: