Dr Banu Gunel, is an Assistant Professor in Department of Information Systems at Informatics Institute, METU, Ankara, Turkey. She received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from METU, in 2000, M.Sc. degree in communication systems and signal processing from the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K., in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast, U.K., in 2004. She has held research positions at University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K between 2004–2011. Her research interests include microphone array signal processing, 3-D audio and psychoacoustics, multimedia services, and human–computer interaction. Dr Gunel will give a lecture on spatial audio object coding (SAOC).