Rate My Professor Alan Kan

Dr. Alan Kan serves as a Lecturer in the School of Engineering at Macquarie University. His research lies in the intersections of hearing technology, signal processing, spatial hearing, psychoacoustics, auditory neuroscience, and cochlear implants. Kan's work particularly emphasizes improving binaural hearing capabilities for users of bilateral cochlear implants through investigations into interaural timing cues, sound source localization patterns, envelope encoding, and innovative sound coding strategies such as mixed-rate approaches and temporal limits encoders to enhance performance in complex auditory scenes.

Kan obtained his Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunications in 2002 and PhD in Engineering in 2010, both from the University of Sydney. From 2010 to 2019, he worked as a Scientist and Assistant Scientist in the Binaural Hearing and Speech Laboratory at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, contributing to numerous studies on electric hearing, binaural sensitivity, and spatial auditory processing. Since 2019, he has been at Macquarie University, teaching courses like Embedded Systems (ELEC3042) and System on Chip Design (ELEC4250), and serving as unit convenor and demonstrator. Key publications encompass 'Hearing with cochlear implants and hearing aids in complex auditory scenes' (Litovsky et al., 2017), 'Mapping procedures can produce non-centered auditory images in bilateral cochlear implantees' (Goupell et al., 2013), 'Sound source localization patterns and bilateral cochlear implants: age at onset of deafness predicts performance' (Anderson et al., 2022), 'A mixed-rate strategy on a bilaterally-synchronized cochlear implant processor' (Dennison et al., 2024), 'Best cochlear locations for delivering interaural timing cues in electric hearing' (Borjigin et al., 2025), 'Asymmetric temporal envelope encoding: Lateralization with varying envelope shape and spectral mismatch' (Anderson et al., 2025), and 'A systematic methodology for time-multiplexing algorithms on a reconfigurable system-on-chip' (Vu et al., 2025). With an h-index of 19 and 1,385 citations on the Macquarie University research portal, alongside approximately 2,029 citations on Google Scholar, his contributions advance signal processing applications in auditory prosthetics. Kan has received research grants from Cochlear Ltd. and participates in initiatives like the PRISM project on predicting interaction difficulty using sensors and microphones.