His Laboratory for Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio (LabROSA) is concerned with all aspects of extracting high-level information from audio, including speech recognition, music description, and environmental sound processing. Ellis has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where he was a research assistant at the Media Lab, and he spent several years as a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. He also runs the AUDITORY email list of 1700 worldwide researchers in perception and cognition of sound.