Chris Mitchell

Director of Audio Research | Reality Labs Research | Meta

Chris Mitchell, who is currently the Director of Audio Research at Meta's Reality Labs Research, has a distinguished career in the field of sound information systems and signal processing.

Background and Education

Chris Mitchell holds a BSc (Hons) in Audio & Music Technology, Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Anglia Ruskin University, which he completed between 2000 and 2004. He also earned a PhD in Sound Information Retrieval from the same university, focusing on music genre recognition from 2004 to 2007.1 2

Career

Before joining Meta, Chris Mitchell was the CEO and Founder of Audio Analytic, a company he founded in 2010. Audio Analytic is a global leader in intelligent sound recognition, utilizing cloudless AI to provide consumer technology with advanced sound recognition capabilities. The company developed key technologies such as Alexandria™, a large audio dataset for machine learning, and AuditoryNET™, a deep neural network for sound recognition. During his tenure, Audio Analytic successfully licensed its technology to major brands and raised over $25 million in funding.1 2 3
Prior to founding Audio Analytic, Chris Mitchell held various roles, including an associate lecturer and researcher at Anglia Ruskin University from 2004 to 2014, and a brief stint at Cisco Systems in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007.1
He was also a recipient of the prestigious Kauffman/NCGE Fellowship, which involved attending Harvard Business School and other US universities to learn about commercializing high-tech ideas.1 2

Achievements and Recognition

Chris Mitchell is an inventor of 31 patents and has been recognized as one of the top technologists globally in voice/sound by Voicebot.ai in 2019 and 2020.2
He is an accomplished public speaker and internationally published author in his field.2

Current Role at Meta

In October 2022, Meta acquired Audio Analytic, and Chris Mitchell transitioned to his current role as the Director of Audio Research at Meta's Reality Labs Research. This role is part of Meta's efforts to enhance its virtual and augmented reality technologies, particularly focusing on making virtual sounds and speech more realistic within the metaverse.1 3 4