Krátké zprávy

BUT Speech@FIT sponsored by Technology Agency of the Czech Republic

Submitted by cernocky on 22. February 2011 - 15:02

From the beginning of 2011, BUT Speech@FIT is supported by the newly established Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TACR), more specifically by its “Alfa” program. BUT has created a consortium with 3 companies:

Dr. Igi

Submitted by cernocky on 26. October 2010 - 13:00

On October 19, 2010 Igor Szöke defended his thesis „Hybrid word-subword spoken term detection“. The thesis investigates into keyword spotting and spoken term detection (STD). It deals with two-phase approaches where speech is first processed by speech recognizer, and the search for queries is performed in the output of this recognizer. The most important contribution is the creation of a hybrid spoken term detection system combining both word and subword parts in one recognition network.

Renata - Speech@FIT's new Research Project Manager

Submitted by cernocky on 4. February 2010 - 15:35

Renata Kohlova became a member of the Speech @FIT research team on Feb 1st, 2010. She was recruited as a Research Project Manager and her tasks and duties will be to:
• Participate in and coordinate submissions of research projects
• Co-ordinate running projects
• Ensure reporting of the group (especially publications) in faculty, national and European databases
• Be involved in group’s public relations
• Participate in organization of group’s events (conferences, workshops, summer schools)

Dr. Petr, Dr. Martin and speech@FIT day

Submitted by cernocky on 3. July 2009 - 15:01

Thursday 28.5.2009 was a remarkable day for the group: 2 PhD defenses and 2 seminars by interesting guys.

We have begun with the defense of Martin Karafiat's thesis "STUDY OF LINEAR TRANSFORMATIONS APPLIED TO TRAINING OF CROSS-DOMAIN ADAPTED LARGE VOCABULARY CONTINUOUS SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEMS". The reviews from Andreas Stolkcke (SRI, USA) and Petr Pollak (Milos Cernak, IBM Prague, Czech Republic) were positive, the defense went OK, so Martin is now a PhD.

Dr. Paja

Submitted by cernocky on 14. April 2009 - 12:34

On Thursday 9th April, Pavel "Paja" Matejka successfully defended is PhD thesis "PHONOTACTIC AND ACOUSTIC LANGUAGE RECOGNITION". Paja was registered at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication (FEEC BUT) and defended at the Institute of Radioelectronics (the original place of the Speech@FIT group, before it moved to the Faculty of Information Technology in 2002).

He obtained very nice reviews from Doug Reynolds (MIT Lincoln Lab) and Petr Pollak (Czech Technical University in Prague) and the committee was happy with his presentation accessible even to non-speech guys.

Niko Brummer and Albert Strasheim in Brno

Submitted by cernocky on 10. April 2009 - 18:18

From 19.3.-3.4., Niko Brummer and Albert Strasheim from Agnitio were visiting Speech@FIT. Agnitio and BUT are preparing common submission to NIST 2009 language recognition evaluation, and preparation (and good calibration!) of the system was exactly what the two guys worked on with Speech@FITters (especially Ondra Glembek). Niko also did 2 excellent seminars.

Some photos from improvised farewel party:
http://speech.fit.vutbr.cz/en/gallery/speech-fit-group/niko-and-albert-a...
Niko's seminar #1: http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/events/view_event.php?id=1584

Marijn Huijbregts helping Speech@FITters with NIST RT 2009 evaluations

Submitted by cernocky on 18. March 2009 - 19:06

From 16 to 26 Februray 2009, Marijn Huijbregts from University of Twente visited the group to help us with diarization for NIST Rich Transcription 2009 evaluation. Marijn previously visited ICSI in Berkeley and has lots of experience in diarization. As in several past years, Speech@FIT participates in the AMIDA team building an LVCSR system for meeting data.

Some links:
Marijn: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~huijbreg/phd
The seminar he had at FIT (including video): https://wis.fit.vutbr.cz/FIT/db/vav/view_event.php.en?id=1590

First round of MOBIO recordings finished at BUT

Submitted by cernocky on 20. October 2008 - 18:45

Last week, we have finished the BUT portion of recording bi-modal speaker authentication data for the MOBIO database: http://www.mobioproject.org/. Chris McCool from IDIAP was here and helped start the recordings, then Speech@FIT's data manager Kamil Chalupnicek took over. More than 30 volunteers were recorded and they will be recorded another 5 times to study session variability. Similar amounts of volunteers are being recorded at other MOBIO partners.

New DCGM coffee machine

Submitted by cernocky on 20. October 2008 - 10:33

On Oct 14th, new coffee machine was delivered to the Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia of FIT, which is Speech@FIT's base. It is "Rancilio Set of Silvia Coffee Machine, Rocky No Doser Coffee Grinder on Inox Base"

everything needs to be done by hand, but the espresso is ... simply excellent ! Some guys consider it much more important than victories in NIST evaluations or big grants, and have proposed 14th October as DCGM state holiday.

Speech@FIT received an EOARD grant for research in language recognition

Submitted by cernocky on 17. October 2008 - 17:55

The group was granted a 80kUS$ grant from US Air Force European Office of Aerospace Research & Development (EOARD). The goal of the project is to improve the capacity of language recognition systems to handle rare languages using radio broadcast data. For more information, see http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/research/view_project.php.en?id=437