The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

CSTR Old News

December 2012

Best Paper Award. Congratulations to Pawel Swietojanski who won the IBM Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Spoken Language Technology workshop (held in Miami) for his paper Unsupervised Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer in DNN-based LVCSR co-authored with Arnab Ghoshal and Steve Renals.

December 2012

UK and Ireland Speech Meeting. About 10 people from CSTR attended the UK and Ireland Speech Conference in Birmingham.

November 2012

SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Prof Mari Ostendorf, from the University of Washington, visited for 2 two weeks. She gave a number of seminars and a half-day masterclass on Extraction of Social Meaning from Language.

November 2012

New PhD Student. Welcome to Tom Merritt, who is a new PhD student. He will be part of the NST project, working with Simon King on speech synthesis.

November 2012

SICSA DemoFest. CSTR people demoed speech synthesis, speech recognition and speech translation at the DemoFest.

October 2012

New PhD Student. Welcome to Siva Reddy, who is a new PhD student. He will be part of the uDialogue project, working with Steve Renals and Junichi Yamagishi on distributed and neural network language modelling for speech recognition.

October 2012

Visiting researcher. Welcome to Maria Astrinaki, a PhD student in Thierry Dutoit's group in Mons, who will be working on speech synthesis.

September 2012

Interspeech-2012. Twelve CSTR researchers attended Interspeech-2012 in Portland, Oregon, presenting a total of eighteen papers. There were also papers from CSTR at the SAPA-SCALE and Blizzard workshops.

September 2012

New PhD Student. Welcome to Rasmus Dall, who is a new PhD student. He will be part of the uDialogue project, working with Simon King and Junichi Yamagishi on speech synthesis.

September 2012

New PhD Student. Welcome to Qiong Hu, who is a new PhD student. She will be working with Junichi Yamagishi on speech synthesis.

September 2012

New Research Fellow. Welcome to Joris Driesen, who joins us from KU Leuven. He'll be working part of the EU-Bridge project, working on speech recognition.

September 2012

Farewell. Farewell to Mike Lincoln, who has spun out Quorate Technology which focuses on audio search.

August 2012

Visiting researcher. Welcome to Pierre Lanchantin, visiting CSTR for a week from Cambridge University, part of the NST project. He will be working on speech synthesis.

July 2012

New project. Spoken Interaction with Interpretation in Switzerland (SIWIS) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia programme during 2012-2015, with Idiap, ETH Zürich, and the University of Geneva.

July 2012

New project. Speech synthesis for the blind (SALB - Sprachsynthese von Auditiven Lehrbüchern für Blinde SchülerInnen), funded by the Sparkling Science programme of the Federal Ministry of Science and Research (BMWF), Austria during 2013-2014, with ftw.

July 2012

Visiting researcher. Welcome to Yoshitaka Mamiya, visiting CSTR from the Japan Patent Office. He will be working on speech synthesis.

June 2012

Visiting researcher. Welcome to Sayaka Shiota, research fellow (PD) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), who is visiting CSTR for five months from Nagoya Institute of Technology. She will be working on speaker diarization and nonparametric Bayesian approaches.

June 2012

New Book. Multimodal Signal Processing: Human Interactions in Meetings, edited by Steve Renals, Hervé Bourlard, Jean Carletta, and Andrei Popescu-Belis, has been published by Cambridge University Press. Including chapters co-authored by five current or former CSTR researchers, the book presents the most important achievements of the past decade in the field of audio, video and multimodal processing, with an application to meeting recordings. Many of these advances happened in the AMI and AMIDA projects.

June 2012

CSTR Interns. Welcome to three summer intern students: Chris Bryant working on listening tests and speech analysis with Cassie Mayo and Luisa Garcia Lecumberri; Clemens Wolff working with Hiroshi Shimodaira on head motion synthesis from text for animated social agents; and Mona Paun working with Simon King on an Android App for personalised speech synthesis.

May 2012

Oliver Watts' PhD viva. Congratulations to Oliver Watts who successfully defended his thesis, Unsupervised Learning for Text-to-Speech Synthesis at his PhD viva.

May 2012

Visiting researchers. Welcome to Ikerbasque Research Professor Martin Cooke and Dr Luisa Garcia Lecumberri from the Language and Speech Laboratory at the UPV-EHU in Vitoria, who will be visiting for a few months. Martin is coordinator of the LISTA project.

May 2012

The Listening Talker Workshop. CSTR hosts the Listening Talker workshop, bringing together linguistics, psychologists, neuroscientists, engineers and others working on human and machine speech perception and production, to explore new approaches to context-sensitive speech generation.

May 2012

New Research Fellow. Welcome to Catherine Lai, who joins us from University of Pennsylvania. She'll be working on the InEvent project.

April 2012

DMMA.3. Version 3 of the Digital MEMS Microphone Array has been constructed and is under test. Based on the USBPAL from Rigisystems and using eight Analog Devices digital MEMS microphones ADMP441, the DMMA.3 is a circular microphone array with a diameter of 4 cm (ideal to fit onto your pocket size mobile device).

April 2012

NST Annual Meeting. CSTR hosted the annual meeting of the Natural Speech Technology programme grant with the user group and advisory board.

April 2012

New Research Fellow. Welcome to Atef Ben Youssef, who joins us from Grenoble Institute of Technology. He'll be working on SSPNet.

April 2012

JST CREST Symposium on Human-Harmonized Information Technology. Steve Renals gave an invited talk, Natural Speech Technology, at the JST CREST Symposium on Human-Harmonized Information Technology in Kyoto.

March 2012

March 2012

Summer internships. We have a number of paid internships available during summer 2012. Further details...

March 2012

Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology. Steve Renals (keynote, "Natural Speech Technology"), Christophe Veaux (talk on Voice Reconstruction), and Matthew Aylett (talk on Personification using affective speech synthesis) presenting at Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology, Dublin.

March 2012

Inaugural Lecture Online. Simon King's inaugural lecture now on University of Edinburgh YouTube channel: Using Speech Synthesis To Give Everyone Their Own Voice.

February 2012

PhD studentships in Speech Technology. We have a number of fully-funded PhD positions available for September 2012 start (details). For funding reasons, we are particularly interested in strong applicants from the EU.

February 2012

Open Research Positions. CSTR is recruiting - Two postdoctoral researchers in speech technology (details) and a senior researcher in speech technology (details). We are looking for people with experience in statistical modelling or machine learning for speech recognition or synthesis.

February 2012

Inaugural Lecture. Simon King's inaugural lecture on 6 Feb 2012, Using Speech Synthesis To Give Everyone Their Own Voice.

February 2012

New project - INSPIRE. INSPIRE is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network, concerned with investigating speech processing in realistic environments.

February 2012

Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Orange/France Telecom. The aim of this KTP is to improve automatic voice building through development/integration of novel automatic speech recognition techniques and build commercial-grade systems for bringing personalised speech technology to Orange customers.

February 2012

New project - EU-Bridge. EU-Bridge is a three year project which will develop automatic transcription and translation technology to enable innovative multimedia captioning and translation services of audiovisual documents between European and non-European languages. The project will provide streaming technology that can convert speech from lectures, meetings, and telephone conversations into the text in another language. Within Edinburgh CSTR will work closely with the Statistical Machine Translation Group.

January 2012

Royal Society Industry Fellowship for Matthew Aylett. Matthew Aylett has been awarded a 4-year Royal Society Industry Fellowship, on Personification of embodied conversational agents with regards to expressive voice quality.

January 2012

December 2011

ASRU 2011. Arnab Ghoshal and Liang Lu presenting at ASRU 2011in Hawaii (Kaldi toolkit presentation, poster on SGMMs for cross-lingual ASR).

December 2011

Workshop on Image and Speech Processing. Steve Renals (invited talk, "Natural Speech Technology") presenting at WISP-2011, Hyderabad.

December 2011

Roberto Barra-Chicote's PhD defence. Congratulations to former CSTR visitor Roberto Barra-Chicote who successfully defended his PhD thesis.

November 2011

New research fellows. Welcome to Arnab Ghoshal who joins us from University of the Saarland and Heng Lu who joins us from USTC. They will be working on the Natural Speech Technology programme grant.

November 2011

EPSRC Fellowship for Junichi Yamagishi. Junichi Yamagishi has been awarded a 5-year EPSRC Career Advancement Fellowship, Deep architectures for statistical speech synthesis.

November 2011

New project - Simple4All. Coordinated by CSTR, Simple4All is a three-year EU project concerned with creating multilingual speech synthesis technology that learns from data with little or no expert supervision and continually improves itself, simply by being used.

November 2011

New project - InEvent. InEvent is a three year project whose main goal is to develop new means to structure, retrieve, and share large archives of networked, and dynamically changing, multimedia recordings, mainly consisting of meetings, video-conferences, and lectures.

October 2011

New project - uDialogue. Joint with Nagoya Institute of Technology, this is a five year project concerned with crowdsourcing multimodal dialogue systems, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.

October 2011

Demo service - PodCastle. CSTR speech recognition used to power the English language version of the AIST PodCastle service which enables searching of speech data such as podcasts, individual audio or video files on the web, and video clips on video sharing services (e.g. YouTube).

September 2011

New PhD students. Welcome to Pawel Swietojanski who will be working on the Natural Speech Technology programme grant, and Benigno Uría working with ANC and CSTR, supported by an EPSRC CASE studentship with Novauris.

August 2011

Radio 4 Word of Mouth. Steve Renals discusses the Natural Speech Technology programme grant on the BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth

July 2011

John Niekrasz's PhD viva. Congratulations to John Niekrasz successfully defending his thesis at his PhD viva.

June 2011

Partha Lal's PhD viva. Congratulations to Partha Lal successfully defending his thesis at his PhD viva.

June 2011

CSTR hosts HSCMA-2011 . The Third Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays was held from 30 May to 1 June 2011 in the Informatics Forum.

May 2011

Best paper award. Z. Ling, K. Richmond, J. Yamagishi, and R. Wang. Integrating articulatory features into HMM-based parametric speech synthesis. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 17(6):1171-1185, August 2009, DOI:10.1109/TASL.2009.2014796. Awarded IEEE Signal Processing Society 2010 Young Author Best Paper Award at ICASSP-2011.

May 2011

EPSRC Programme Grant - Natural Speech Technology. Natural Speech Technology (NST) is a 5-year EPSRC Programme Grant with the aim of significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in speech technology by making it more natural, approaching human levels of reliability, adaptability and conversational richness. NST is a collaboration between the CSTR, the Speech Group at the University of Cambridge and the Speech and Hearing Research Group (SpandH), University of Sheffield.

April 2011

Science Festival. Mike Lincoln and Jean Carletta present their work on automatic meeting analysis at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

April 2011

Ravichander Vipperla's PhD viva. Congratulations to Ravichander Vipperla successfully defending his thesis at his PhD viva.

March 2011

John Logie Baird Award. Congratulations to Speech Graphics, a CSTR spinout company in the area of audio-driven animation for high fidelty lip-sync, who have won the 2011 John Logie Baird Award for knowledge transfer.

February 2011

EPSRC Healthcare Partnership Grant - Ultrax. Ultrax aims to develop current Ultrasound technology into a viable tool for giving visual feedback of what is happening inside a user's mouth as they talk. One of the major intended uses of this is for speech therapy for children. Ultrax is a collaboration between CSTR, the Clinical Audiology, Speech and Language (CASL) Research Centre at Queen Margaret University, and Edinburgh-based SME Articulate Instruments.

January 2011

New project - RSE/NSFC travel grant. The Royal Society of Edinburgh / National Science Foundation China travel grant has been awarded to CSTR and USTC for further joint and linked research on our novel framework for speech synthesis. Junichi Yamagishi and Korin Richmond will visit USTC in China.

January 2011

New Research Fellow. Welcome to Christophe Veaux, who joins us from IRCAM. He'll be working on a new voice reconstruction project.

January 2011

ISCA Advisory Council. Steve Renals, elected to the ISCA Advisory Council.

2009

CSTR research features in Where Tomorrow Begins, an exhibition reflecting on Scottish Innovation.

October 2009

Welcome to new PhD students Karl Isaac, Liang Lu, Angeliki-Spyridoula Vlachostergiou, Cassia Valentini and Erich Zwyssig.

June 2009

CSTR is organising a one-day workshop on Facial Analysis and Animation, sponsored by The British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition.

2009

Congratulations to Heriberto Cuayáhuitl, Alfred Dielmann, Giulia Garau, Fiona Couper Kenney, Zhang Le, Tim Mills and Gabriel Murray for finishing their PhD.

1 March 2008

The EC funded EMIME project starts: Effective Multilingual Interaction for Mobile Environments.

29 February 2008

Congratulations to Gabriel Murray on a successful PhD viva!

February 2008

Congratulations to Jochen Ehnes awarded a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship to work at CSTR on Natural Interaction with Projected User Interfaces.

February 2008

Welcome to back to: EdSST short-term fellow Ingmar Steiner, visiting from University of the Saarland and working on speech synthesis; AMIDA trainee Javier Tejedor visiting from UAM and working on spoken term detection; and Simon King, back from five months visiting Nagoya Institute of Technology.

January 2008

Welcome to Blaise Potard, visiting for eight months from LORIA (Nancy, France), working on the articulatory-acoustic mapping.

November 2007

Two six month Marie Curie Fellowships in quantitative analysis and modelling of articulatory data for outstanding young graduate researchers and PhD candidates as part of EdSST. Further information

November 2007

Welcome to EdSST short-term fellow Marko Liker, visiting for six months from University of Zagreb, working on lingual coarticulation index using EPG.

October 2007

Welcome to EdSST short-term fellow Zhenhua Ling, visiting for six months from USTC, working on the integration of articulatory features into HMM speech synthesis.

September 2007

Welcome to new PhD student Michael Berger, working on realistic speech animation.

September 2007

Welcome to EdSST short-term fellow Chao Qin, visiting for six months from UC Merced, working on acoustic-articulatory mapping. And congratulations to him for winning a best student paper award at Interspeech 2007.

April-Sept 2007

Welcome to visitor Javier Tejedor from UAM, who will work on spoken term detection.

April 2007

Welcome to Ivan Himawan, visiting for one year from Queensland University of Technology, supported by the AMIDA training scheme and working on ad hoc microphone arrays.

April 2007

Welcome to Jochen Ehnes, supported by the AMIDA training scheme, working on projected user interfaces.

April 2007

Welcome to Junichi Yamagishi who joins us to work on ESPRC-funded project "Automatically-determined Unit Inventories for Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis".

April 2007

New ESPRC-funded project "Automatic target cost and database design for unit-selection speech synthesis" started.

March 2007

New ESPRC-funded project "An Edinburgh Speech Production Facility" started.

16-23 February 2007

Welcome to visitor Barbara Forbes, who will work on articulatory feature detection.

January 2007

Grant awarded from British Council UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) - in collaboration with IIT Guwahati and IIIT

December 2006

New ESPRC-funded project "An Edinburgh Speech Production Facility" started.

November 2006

New ESPRC-funded project "Data-driven articulatory modelling: foundations for a new generation of speech synthesis" started.

October 2006

New EU Integrated Project AMIDA started, coordinated by CSTR and IDIAP.

September 2006

Welcome to new PhD students: Sebastian Andersson, Leonardo Badino, Joao Cabral, Vipperla Ravi Chander, Tanja Kocjancic, Martin I. Tietze and Dong Wang.

September 2006

New Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh-Stanford Link-funded project "Efficient model-level integration of novel methods into HMM speech recognition" started.

June 2006

New ESPRC-funded project "Automatically-determined Unit Inventories for Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis" started.

July-August 2006

Partha and Simon participate in JHU summer workshop on speech and language engineering on Articulatory Feature-based Speech Recognition

1 February 2006

1 February 2006

Welcome to Andreu Cabrero from UPC Barcelona visiting for 6 months (supported by the AMI Training Programme).

5 January 2006

EdSST (Edinburgh Speech Science and Technology), an interdisciplinary training programme in speech science and technology, starts today. This project is supported by the European Commission Marie Curie programme, under the Early Stage Research Training (EST) scheme, and is in collaboration with Queen Margaret University College (QMUC) Speech Science Research Centre (SSRC).

22 December 2005

Congratualtions to Yoshi Shiga on passing his PhD viva!

9 December 2005

Congratualtions to Alexander Gutkin on passing his PhD viva!

1 November 2005

MATCH (Mobilizing Advanced Technologies for Care at Home), a Scottish Funding Council Strategic Research Development Grant, starts today. MATCH is collaboration of CSTR and HCRC with the Universities of Stirling, Dundee and Glasgow. The overall aim is to develop a research base for advanced technologies in support of social and health care at home. CSTR is concerned with the development of spoken dialogue systems for home care applications (eg for elderly users) and for microphone array-based speech recognition systems that do not require users to wear microphones.

19 October 2005

Announcement of at least seven Ph.D. studentships.

3 October 2005

Welcome to Nynke Van der Vliet (working with Jean Carletta on qualitative meetings analysis) visiting from University of Twente on the AMI Training Programme

12 September 2005

Welcome to new PhD students Peter Bell, Songfang Huang and Partha Lal.

1-2 September 2005

31 August 2005

23 August 2005

Welcome to Prof. Keiichi Tokuda of the Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan visiting for two weeks (funded by EPSRC travel grant).

19 August 2005

Farewell to Simone Ashby, who is relocating to Canada, and Ferran Diego returning to UPC.

12 August 2005

Farewell to AMI trainees Arlo Faria (starting graduate study at UC Berkeley) and Naresh Bansal (returning to IIT Guwahati).

2 August 2005

MATCH - Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home - a SHEFC Strategic Research and Development Grant (SRDG) has been awarded to a consortium comprising Stirling, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The goal is to develop a research base for advanced technologies in support of social and health care at home. The Edinburgh component, involving Steve Renals, Johanna Moore and Maria Wolters, is concerned with speech communication.

1 August 2005

Welcome to Sue Fitt, returning to CSTR to work as a research fellow on a pronunciation lexicon for speech synthesis (Scottish Enterprise Proof of Concept).

18 July 2005

Welcome to Louis ten Bosch and Bert Cranen visiting for 2 weeks from Radboud University Nijmegen.

11-13 July 2005

CSTR and the AMI project host MLMI-05: Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interfaces, Edinburgh
MLMI-05 online proceedings

11-15 July 2005

CSTR hosts the summer school organised by the European Masters in Speech and Language

8 July 2005

Congratulations to Olga Goubanova on passing her Ph.D. viva!

14 June 2005

Welcome to Jindrich Matousek and Daniel Tihelka, visiting for 2 weeks from the Artificial Intelligence Section of the Department of Cybernetics at The University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic. (supported by the ERASMUS teacher mobility programme).

6 June 2005

Scottish Enterprise, Proof of Concept grant awarded to Rob Clark and Nick Wright. CSTR will be developing and commercialising a new pronunciation lexicon and other aspects of speech synthesis technology.

4 May 2005

Welcome to Naresh Bansal from IIT Guwahati, India, visiting for 3 months (supported by the AMI Training Programme).

24 February 2005

Welcome to Ferran Diego, visiting for 6 months (supported by the AMI Training Programme).

2 February 2005

Welcome to Bartosz Dobrzelecki, who has joined us as a part-time web-developer.

25 January 2005

Welcome to two new members of CSTR: Volker Strom working on Speech Synthesis (the Expressions project); and Arlo Faria, visiting for 6 months (supported by the AMI Training Programme).

5 January 2005

Welcome to three new members of CSTR: Cassie Mayo, working on perceptually rigorous speech synthesis evaluation methods, Simone Ashby working on the AMI project, and Gregor Hofer, starting PhD study.

6 December 2004

EPSRC grant awarded to Cassie Mayo, Rob Clark and Simon King to develop perceptually rigorous speech synthesis evaluation methods, 1 Jan 2005 - 31 Dec 2007.

1 November 2004

Welcome to Melissa Kronenthal, new member of CSTR, working on the AMI project.

29 October 2004

Research fellow in speech synthesis. Following the appointment of Rob Clark to a lectureship, we are seeking a research fellow to work on speech synthesis. More details

25 October 2004

Tunji Odejobi (Aston University) is visiting CSTR for the week, working on prosodic features for Yoruba speech synthesis.

14 October 2004

An Informatics Inaugural Lecture by Steve Renals: Speech Recognition and Understanding in Realistic Environments.

29 September 2004

"Scottish speech synthesis" makes the headlines after a visit from Jim Wallace MSP.

20 September 2004

CSTR welcomes new PhD students: Heriberto Cuayáhuitl, Zhang Le and Gabriel Murray.

16 September 2004

Congratulations to Rob Clark who has been appointed to the Lectureship in Speech Technology, starting in January.

1 September 2004

Welcome to Hiroshi Shimodaira, new member of CSTR and Lecturer in Speech Technology in the School of Informatics.

2 July 2004

Lectureship in Speech Technology - Following the appointment of Simon King to an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship at Edinburgh, applications are invited for a fixed term Lectureship in Speech Technology in the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR).

23 June 2004

Congratulations to Simon King, who has been awarded a 5-year EPSRC Advanced Fellowship!

21 June 2004

CSTR moves (phase 2): CSTR is now located in one place as the remining members move into additional refurbished accomodation in 5 Buccleuch Place.

31 May 2004

Mikko Kurimo (Helsinki University of Technology) has begun a two month visit. He will be working on language modelling for meetings within the AMI project, and is supported by a grant from the Royal Society.

15 April 2004

Hiroshi Shimodaira, currently co-director of the Intelligent Information Processing Laboratory, JAIST, has accepted a lectureship in speech technology in the School of Informatics, and will join CSTR in September 2004.

16 February 2004

Mike Lincoln has joined CSTR as a research fellow on the AMI project.

9 February 2004

CSTR moves (phase 1): about half of CSTR have moved into newly refurbished accomodation in 5 Buccleuch Place.

1 January 2004

AMI (Augmented Multi-Party Interaction), an EC Integrated Project jointly coordinated by CSTR and IDIAP. AMI is concerned with computer-enhanced multimodal interaction, in the context of meetings. Edinburgh involvement includes researchers from both CSTR and HCRC.