James Traer

I am professor at the University of Iowa and Principle Investigator of the Laboratory for Ecological Inference. My research focusses on how humans infer properties of their physical environment from complex sensory stimuli. But I am broadly interested in the messy collision of psychology, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and philosophy that accompanies any attempt to explain the interaction of minds, brains, and environments. I am comfortable in a state of confusion.

In former lives I was a professional oceanographer, a half-decent musician, and a terrible-but-enthusiastic surfer. These days I mostly just read. But occasionally I am an aspiring gardener and naturalist, a curmudgeonly-proponent of free software, and a terrible-but-enthusiastic cross-country skier.

The Laboratory for Ecological Inference is hiring graduate students and post-docs. Email me for more information.

In the Laboratory for Ecological Inference we study how humans infer the physical properties of their world from sensory information, with a particular focus on hearing. We all make such inferences - when we hear the sound of a coin falling on the ground, or something rattling inside a box (or the sickening feeling when we set down something expensive with a little too much force and hear a "crack") - but it is not obvious how the pattern of vibrations arriving at our ears maps to the physical structure of the sound source. In general there are many physical variables which affect the sound, and so attributing part of the sound to any one cause is an ill-posed problem. Although the physics of how sounds are generated is well-known, the inverse problem, which humans must solve, is poorly understood. I seek to reverse engineer how the brain and mind infer and represent the world by studying human perception, and building inference models that "perceive the world like a human".

A more up-to-date list.

• MJ Bianco, P Gerstoft, J Traer, E Ozanich, MA Roch, S Gannot, C Deledalle, Machine learning in acoustics: Theory and applications, JASA, 2019
  
• J Traer, M Cusimano, JH McDermott, A Perceptually Inspired Generative Model of Rigid-Body Contact Sounds, Digital Audio Effects (DAFx), 2019
  
• Z Zhang, J Wu, Q Li, Z Huang, J Traer, JH McDermott, JB Tenenbaum, WT Freeman, Generative Modeling of Audible Shapes for Object Perception, ICCV, 2017
  
• KJP Woods, MH Siegel, J Traer, JH McDermott, Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments, Atten., Percep., Psych., 2017
  
• J Traer, JH Mcdermott, Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space, PNAS, 2016
  
• JQ Taylor, P Kovacik, J Traer, P Zakahi, C Oslowski, AS Widge, CA Glorioso, Point of View: Avoiding a lost generation of scientists, eLife, 2016
  
• J Traer, P Gerstoft, A unified theory of microseisms and hum, J. GeoPhys. Res.: Solid Earth, 2014
  
• C Yardim, P Gerstoft, WS Hodgkiss, J Traer, Compressive geoacoustic inversion using ambient noise, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 2014
  
• J Traer, P Gerstoft, PD Bromirski, PM Shearer, Microseisms and hum from ocean surface gravity waves, J. GeoPhys. Res: Solid Earth, 2012
  
• J Traer, P Gerstoft, WS Hodgkiss, Ocean bottom profiling with ambient noise: A model for the passive fathometer, J. Acoust. Soc. A,m. 2011