Wednesday, May 24, 2017 - 7:00am to 8:00am

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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV

ABSTRACT In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV, Laboratorio de Procesamiento y Transmision de Voz) over the last 17 years. The LPTV is located at the Universidad de Chile and was founded in 2000.1 will discuss our seminal work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved, which we believe to be the first use of uncertainty modeling in HMMs. I will also talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second-language learning, and discuss some relevant work on stochastic weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) and voice over IP (VoIP).  Finally, I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction.  In this context, we will describe locally-normalized features that address the time-varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based human-robot interaction. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research in signal processing.

BIO Nestor Becerra Yoma received the PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), São Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively.  From 2000 he has been a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, where he is currently a Full Professor lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. During the 2016-2017 academic year he has been a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At  the Universidad de Chile he launched the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interests also include multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of more than 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers, and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma is a former Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.