Cumhur Erkut, Dr. Sc. (Tech)

Associate Professor, Aalborg University Copenhagen

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Room: 2.0.013a

Aalborg University

A.C. Meyers Vænge 15

DK-2450 Copenhagen SV, Denmark

Edge AI, Active and Perceptual Inference, Quantum Computing (QC) and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) will have a huge transformative potential and impact in the immediate future. My mission is to bridge X-verse, AI, and QC/QML through Active and Perceptual Inference and academic/industrial ML / AI engineering practices within the Spatial Web Standard, developed by the Spatial Web Foundation and the IEEE P2874 Spatial Web, Architecture and Governance Working Group. I work towards this mission within my lab through scientific projects.

I have a PhD on acoustics and audio signal processing from Aalto University, Finland, with minor studies on Information Systems (Machine Learning) and general studies on Extended Reality. I have participated in national (Finland, Denmark, and Turkey) and international projects (EU Framework Programs 5-7, and Horizon programs). Between 2007 and 2012, I conducted independent research as an Academy Research Fellow on sonic interaction design (Schema-SID, #120583, Academy of Finland), together with the FP7 IC601 SID project on the same theme. At Aalborg University, I worked on embodied interaction, neural sound and motion synthesis. and AI Engineering.

I am affiliated with the Pioneer Center for AI, served at Danish Data Science Academy as a mentor in 2023, participate to the steering commitee of Movement and Computing (MOCO) and to the program commitee of EAAI Mentored Undergraduate Research Challenge.

news

Sep 11, 2025 🎓 Two MSc’s defended, read more at cuer lab page (Microsoft Login required).
  1. How to MakeGuides? Media technologies for regenerative creativity by Mateusz Jerzy Mieciek
  2. Pose Poet AI: Human AI collaboration in pose-based poem generation by Borislav Georgiev
Sep 10, 2025 A belated gratitude to CLAAUDIA for empowering my graduate students with HPC training last year. Read more at LinkedIn.
Sep 09, 2025 🚀 Autumn 2025 updates: stay tuned for more It’s been an exciting season! We started with two new interns at cuer. At ISAAR 2025 we presented our work on AI-enabled AV AVATAR (Active Inference and Emotions), attended a satelite communication workshop just before ISAAAR, and the kick-off meeting of GIRAFFE project. We also had many papers accepted (AES AIMLA, APSIPA, IWAI) and submitted even more (CHI’26, ICASSP’25. AI in Science Summit). I’ll post all of them to the publications page. Much more is happening at the moment, stay tuned as we grow toward our next milestones in 2026!

selected publications

  1. AES
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    Real-time Voice Conversion with Online Speaker Adaptation for Creative Audio Processing
    Anders R. Bargum, Stefania Serafin, and Cumhur Erkut
    In Proc. 2025 AES International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Audio, Late Breaking, Sep 2025
  2. ISAAR
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    Towards Human–Avatar Communication: Training Hearing Impaired Via Emotionally Adaptive Voice Synthesis
    Anders R. Bargum, Stefania Serafin, and Cumhur Erkut
    Aug 2025
    Poster at Intl. Symp. Auditory and Audiological Research (ISAAR)
  3. IEEE
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    Exploring the Impact of AI-Generated Speech on Avatar Perception and Realism in Virtual Reality Environments
    Anders R. Bargum, Emil Sønderskov Hansen, Cumhur Erkut, and Stefania Serafin
    In IEEE Conf. Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces - Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). Video, audio, and data can be found at the html link , Mar 2025
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    Reimagining speech: a scoping review of deep learning-based methods for non-parallel voice conversion
    Anders R. Bargum, Stefania Serafin, and Cumhur Erkut
    Frontiers in Signal Processing, Mar 2024