ECE Graduate Student Jarin Tasnim Wins Best Student Paper Award at the 2026 Asilomar Conference

Jarin Tasnim, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, has received a Best Student Paper Award at the 60th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, held October 25–28, 2026, in Pacific Grove, California.

Tasnim received the recognition for her paper titled “A Traveling Wave Model for In-Working Memory Auditory Scene Analysis via the Temporal Coherence Principle,” co-authored with her Ph.D. advisor, Professor Behtash Babadi. The award recognizes Tasnim's research addressing a fundamental problem in auditory neuroscience: how the brain organizes complex acoustic environments into meaningful perceptual objects. In everyday listening, the auditory system must distinguish and track multiple sound sources, such as different speakers in a crowded room, while maintaining relevant information in working memory. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying this remarkable computational ability is an important challenge at the intersection of neuroscience, signal processing, and artificial intelligence.

The research investigates a traveling-wave-based computational framework for auditory scene analysis, drawing on the temporal coherence principle. This principle suggests that sensory features that exhibit coordinated temporal activity are likely to originate from the same underlying source. By incorporating traveling-wave dynamics and working-memory mechanisms, the study explores how neural population activity can support the organization and maintenance of auditory information over time. The work contributes to a broader effort to
understand how principles of biological information processing can inspire new computational approaches to complex signal analysis and intelligent systems.

The Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers is one of the longest standing international conferences on advances in signal processing, communications, machine learning, biomedical signal processing, and related fields. Its annual Student Paper Contest recognizes outstanding contributions by student researchers. This year, the awardees were selected out of more than a hundred qualifying submissions (with the first author being a student). The top eight papers selected by the technical program committee to participate in the contest as finalists were presented by the student authors to a panel of faculty judges. Finalists are evaluated on the
technical quality and significance of their research, the clarity of their presentations, and their ability to respond to questions from the judging committee. The panel selects the top 3 finalists to receive an award. Tasnim secured the third place in the Student Paper Contest.

Published November 11, 2026