Hi! I'm Aurora!

a DALLE-3 generated image of a research engineer coding on her computer on a couch with her black cat sitting next to her

Aurora Cramer (they/them) currently works at Zoox as an ML & Audio Signal Processing Engineer, developing audio perception systems for autonomous vehicles. Aurora obtained Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from New York University under the direction of Juan Pablo Bello, having defended doctoral dissertation "Incorporating Natural Structure Into Transfer Learning Methods for Machine Listening" during Summer 2023 (presentation slides).

Aurora started graduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Masters program at New York University as a Samuel Morse Fellow, before transferring to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D program in 2018. involved in the NSF-funded SONYC and BirdVox projects, both of which have been successfully completed. Before that, obtained B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from U.C. Berkeley in 2015, where completed the EECS Honors program with a focus in Music/Audio.

Before joining Zoox, Aurora has had industry experience developing signal processing and machine learning methods for audio across a variety of domains, such as environmental sounds, speech, and music. an intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories during the Fall of 2020 working on environmental source separation. Previously, an intern on the Applied Deep Learning Research team at NVIDIA during the summer of 2018 working on audio inpainting. a research engineer on the Applied Research team at Gracenote from 2015-2017 where developed audio classification systems for music. In 2014, a media engineering intern at BlueJeans Network, where worked on refactoring, testing, and improving noise suppression systems for video conferencing platforms.

Outside of academic interests, :

  • - playing piano and synths (sometimes I make little ditties)
  • - bullet journaling
  • - listening to music
  • - cuteness, wholesomeness, and whimsy
  • - LGBTQ+, disability, and racial representation & justice
  • - cats, dogs, and other adorable animals
  • - playing rhythm games, rogue-lites and platformers (especially Celeste 💖)
  • - absurdity, surrealism, and goofiness
  • - cute clothes, tattoos, and piercings
  • - abstractions, wordplay and puns, lore, random facts
  • - cuddly plushies, cute mascots/characters
  • - arts and crafts