The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance announces that Hao-Wen (Herman) Dong will join the Department of Performing Arts Technology as an assistant professor in the fall of 2024. Dong’s research aims to empower music and audio creation with machine learning.
Dong’s long-term goal is to lower the barrier of entry for music composition and democratize audio content creation. He is broadly interested in music generation, audio synthesis, multimodal machine learning, and music information retrieval.
“I am beyond thrilled to join the Performing Arts Technology department and start my academic career at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance,” said Dong. “I am excited to continue my work on the intersection of music and technology, exploring creative applications of AI in music. I look forward to working with other faculty members and students at Michigan.”
Dong’s research has been recognized by the KAUST Rising Stars in AI, University of Chicago and University of California San Diego (UCSD) Rising Stars in Data Science, ICASSP Rising Stars in Signal Processing, and UCSD GPSA Interdisciplinary Research Award. His research has been supported by IEEE SPS Scholarship, Taiwan Government Scholarship to Study Abroad, J. Yang Scholarship, and UCSD ECE Department Fellowship. Dong has collaborated with researchers at NVIDIA, Adobe, Dolby, Amazon, Sony, and Yamaha through internships.
“We are excited to welcome Herman to the Department of Performing Arts Technology,” said Sile O’Modhrain, associate professor and chair of the department. “Herman is our first hire in the emerging area of artificial intelligence for computational creativity. This is a new area of research and teaching for PAT and for SMTD, and Herman’s arrival is greatly anticipated by our undergraduate and graduate student cohorts anxious to gain expertise as they prepare to enter a workforce where AI will pervade every aspect of music recording, production, and research.”
Dong earned a BS in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University and an MS and PhD in computer science from UCSD.