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SUMMARY:Engineering Advances in Measuring and Using Speech Production Info
 rmation -  Shrikanth Narayanan\, University of Southern California
DTSTART:20110411T120000Z
DTEND:20110411T133000Z
UID:TALK30653@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Bill Byrne
DESCRIPTION:The human speech signal carries crucial information not only a
 bout communication intent but also affect and emotions.  From a basic scie
 ntific perspective\, understanding how such rich information is encoded in
  human speech can shed light on the underlying communication mechanisms. F
 rom a technological perspective\, finding ways for automatically processin
 g and decoding this complex information in speech and spoken language cont
 inues to be of interest for a variety of applications.  Both are vastly ch
 allenging and\, inherently interdisciplinary endeavors.  One line of work 
 in this realm aims to connect these perspectives by creating technological
  advances to obtain insights about basic speech communication mechanisms a
 nd in utilizing direct information about human speech processing to inform
  technology development. Both these engineering problems will be considere
 d in this talk.\nA longstanding challenge in speech production has been th
 e ability to examine real-time changes in the shaping of the vocal tract\;
  a goal that has been furthered by imaging techniques such as ultrasound\,
  movement tracking and magnetic resonance imaging. The spatial and tempora
 l resolution afforded by these techniques\, however\, has limited the scop
 e of the investigations that could be carried out.    In this talk\, we wi
 ll highlight recent advances that allow us to perform near real-time inves
 tigations on the dynamics of vocal tract shaping during speech. We will al
 so use examples from recent and ongoing research to describe some of the m
 ethods and outcomes of processing such data\, especially toward facilitati
 ng speech analysis and modeling\, including speech technology development.
  [Work supported by NIH\, ONR\, and NSF].\n\nBiography of the Speaker:\nSh
 rikanth (Shri) Narayanan is the Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering
  at the University of Southern California (USC)\, where he holds appointme
 nts as Professor of Electrical Engineering\, Computer Science\, Linguistic
 s and Psychology\, and as Director of the USC Ming Hsieh Institute. Prior 
 to USC he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His research focuses 
 on human-centered information processing and communication technologies.  
 Shri Narayanan is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America\, IEEE\, a
 nd the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  He is 
 an Editor for the Computer Speech and Language Journal and an Associate Ed
 itor for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia\, IEEE Transactions on Affect
 ive Computing and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He is 
 a recipient of several awards including Best Paper awards from the IEEE Si
 gnal Processing society in 2005 (with Alex Potamianos) and in 2009 (with C
 hul Min Lee) and selection as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Signal
  Processing society for 2010-11. He has published over 400 papers\, and ha
 s eight patents.\n
LOCATION: Cambridge University Engineering Department\, Lecture Room 6
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