Chris Ick
Hey there! You found my website! My name is Christopher-Thomas Abaya Ick, but my friends and colleagues usually just call me Chris. I’m a 6th year PhD student at NYU’s Center for Data Science doing research at the Music and Audio Research Lab, advised by Prof. Brian McFee.
I’m near the end of my PhD, and currently looking for full-time employment opportunities, feel free to reach out to me at chris(dot)ick(at)nyu(dot)edu. Here’s my CV!
I’m always happy to chat over zoom, but if you want to meet me in person, I’m mostly at the Manhattan/Brooklyn campuses of NYU. I’m currently focusing on wrapping up my PhD and writing my dissertation, but I’m submitting some work to a few audio conferences late summer/early fall of 2025 and will hopefully get to see you in attendance.
Recent News
- I presented Spatially-Aware Losses for Enhanced Neural Acoustic Fields at the Audio Imagination Workshop at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver (and got some skiing in at Cypress Mountain!)
- Our work Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization won the LAP 2024 challenge and was accepted for publication in the proceedings of ICASSP 2025
- Our late-breaking demo Zero-Shot Structure Labeling with Audio And Language Model Embeddings was presented at ISMIR 2024 in San Francisco.
- Our work Vocal Call Locator Benchmark (VCL) for localizing rodent vocalization was accepted for publication in the proceedings of NeurIPS 2024
Ongoing Work
Currently, I’m doing research on spatial audio, acoustic simulation, and event localization. I’m pushing the limits of how well we can teach machines to learn space from sound, and broadly, how well we can develop applied deep neural networks in the face of limited data. I’ve got a few ongoing projects on continuous multichannel RIR learning, and disentangling factors of variability within RIRs; if you’re interested or have your own ideas, feel free to reach out for collaboration opportunities!
Background
Before my PhD, I was examining how to estimate the periodicity of oscillations in solar flare light curves as a researcher at NYU’s Department of Physics, where I did my undergraduate degree. I have Professors David Hogg and Kyle Cranmer to thank for encouraging me to branch out into the data sciences, and for giving me the opportunity to develop some projects with them prior to beginning my work at CDS.
Personal
Outside of work, I’m an avid cyclist; I race road and cyclocross for KruisCX, and also enjoy bikepacking, touring, and bike advocacy. I recently biked from Busan to Seoul after attending ICASSP 2024! I’m also into snowboarding, scuba diving, and rock climbing. I love living in Brooklyn, and going to live music/dance parties, ask me about my favorite spots to dance! Finally, I’m into a lot of tech hobbies: I’m a recovering mechanical keyboard addict (let me know if you want to buy some parts), and I’m currently working on a home server for home automation, media hosting, network management, and a few other tasks. I can probably beat you in Super Smash Bros Melee.