Publications and Research

Papers

2026 Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
March 2026. Nature Human Behavior.

2025 Training Transformers with Enforced Lipschitz Bounds

Laker Newhouse*, R. Preston Hess*, Franz Cesista*, Andrii Zahorodnii, Jeremy Bernstein, Phillip Isola
July 2025. arXiv:2507.13338. *Equal Contribution.

Conference Presentations & Posters

2026 Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
49th MidWinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. February 2026. Poster Presentation.

2025 Human-like feature attention emerges in task-optimized models of the cocktail party problem

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
48th MidWinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. February 2025. Podium Talk.

2025 Cross-cultural influences of beating on music perception

Josh H. McDermott, Bryan Medina, R. Preston Hess, Malinda McPherson, Eduardo Undurraga, Ricardo Godoy
48th MidWinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. February 2025. Poster Presentation.

2024 Human-like feature attention emerges in task-optimized models of the cocktail party problem

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
Advances and Perspectives in Auditory Neuroscience 2024. October 2024. Poster Presentation.

2024 Human-like feature attention emerges in task-optimized models of the cocktail party problem

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
7th annual conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. August 2024. Poster Presentation.

2024 Modeling auditory attention with machine learning

Ian M. Griffith, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
47th MidWinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. February 2024. Poster Presentation.

2023 Measuring and modeling real-world sound localization

Sagarika Alavilli, Andrew Francl, R. Preston Hess, Josh H. McDermott
Advances and Perspectives in Auditory Neuroscience 2023. November 2023. Poster Presentation.

Music

2025 Form and Void, techno radio show hosted with Isabella Dobrinov, mixed by me. Due to the free tier of SoundCloud, only three episodes are currently up.

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 6

2024 Creative demos for Interactive Music Systems. These were a chance to show creativity using techniques we learned during a particular problem set. Audio and visuals programmed by me.

1: Programmed a Simple Synth
2: Programmed a Drum Machine for Practicing
3: Musical Version of Conway’s Game of Life (personal favorite)
4: Click and Drag “Smart Soloist” with 3 Different Modes
5: Hand-Tracking Controlled Digital String Instrument
6: Guitar Hero!

2023 5-Minute Untitled Ambient Track

Design

2023 Class Portfolio , Design Studio: Design Techniques and Technologies

Miscellaneous

2023 Blog Post for Phillip Isola’s graduate course, Deep Learning

2022 Podcast Episode for Simply Neuroscience, where I talk about my experience as a neuro undergraduate at MIT.

Writing