Mark Adams

Senior Staff Engineer

Qualcomm

About Me

Mark Adams is a Senior Staff Engineer with 30 years of industry experience in digital signal processing (DSP) and heterogeneous computing. Mark’s career has spanned audio, multimedia, and embedded systems, including supporting wireless and multimedia DSP solutions at Texas Instruments and optimizing Windows Media Video codecs for target hardware at Microsoft Windows Media Technology. At Sorenson Communications, Mark designed the audio signal-processing pipelines for the CaptionCall telephone, serving the hard-of-hearing community.
Mark’s current work at Qualcomm focuses on supporting the AudioReach open source project, a developer-focused audio software framework designed to enable scalable, cross-platform audio development across heterogeneous compute resources. Beyond engineering, Mark is an avid musician who enjoys playing guitar and piano, bringing a musician’s perspective to a career devoted to audio and signal processing.

Sessions

  • AudioReach: Design for the Modern SoC
    12:20 - 12:50 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Bristol 2
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    Modern SoCs offer audio developers an extraordinary array of specialized compute resources — Hexagon DSP, dedicated NPUs, and ultra-low-power aDSP — but unlocking these resources traditionally requires deep expertise in inter-process communication, shared memory management, interrupt handling, and multi-core scheduling that has nothing to do with audio development. This talk introduces AudioReach, Qualcomm's open-source SDK, and explains how its graph-based architecture abstracts this systems complexity so that audio developers can focus on what they do best. We will cover AudioReach's practical development workflow — from designing and simulating algorithms in MATLAB, through Hexagon DSP simulation and off-target graph construction in […]

  • From Algorithm to Silicon

    Audio Development with AudioReachTM on Qualcomm Hardware
    14:00 - 17:00 UTC | Monday 9th November 2026 | Conservatory
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced
    In-Person & Online

    The rapid integration of AI into audio processing has created a new class of challenges for audio developers. Modern Qualcomm System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms offer powerful heterogeneous compute resources — including the Hexagon DSP, CPU cores, and a dedicated embedded Neural Processing Unit — capable of running sophisticated AI-powered audio algorithms at remarkable power efficiency. However, harnessing these resources traditionally requires deep expertise in inter-process communication, shared memory management, interrupt handling, multi-core scheduling, and power state optimization — a skillset far removed from the audio signal processing domain where most audio developers live. AudioReach, Qualcomm's open-source SDK, bridges this gap. By […]