[hts-users:01083] job opening at Nagoya Institute of Technology
Hi All,
I would like to announce a job opening at Nagoya Institute of
Technology.
I would appreciate it if you would forward this email to anyone who
would be interested and/or post the following announcement on
speech-related mailing lists or groups.
Regards,
Keiichi Tokuda
tokuda@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/
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Research Position in Speech Processing at Nagoya Institute of
Technology, Japan
Nagoya Institute of Technology is seeking a researcher for a
post-doctoral position in a new European Commission-funded project
EMIME ("Efficient multilingual interaction in mobile environment")
involving Nagoya Institute of Technology and other five European
partners, starting in March 2008 (see the project summary below).
The earliest starting date of the position is March 2007. The initial
duration of the contract will be one year, with a possibility for
prolongation (year-by-year basis, maximum of three years). The
position provides opportunities to collaborate with other researchers
in a variety of national and international projects. The competitive
salary is calculated according to qualifications based on NIT scales.
The candidate should have a strong background in speech signal
processing and some experience with speech synthesis and recognition.
Desired skills include familiarity with latest spectrum of technology
including HTK, HTS, and Festival at the source code level.
For more information, please contact Keiichi Tokuda
(http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/).
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About us
Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT), founded on 1905, is situated in
the world-quality manufacturing area of Central Japan (about one hour
and 40 minetes from Tokyo, and 36 minites from Kyoto by Shinkansen).
NIT is a highest-level educational institution of technology and is
one of the leaders of such institutions in Japan. EMIME will be
carried at the Speech Processing Laboratory (SPL) in the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering of NIT. SPL is known for its
outstanding, continuous contribution of developing high-performance,
high-quality opensource software: the HMM-based Speech Synthesis
System "HTS" (http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp), the large vocabulary
continuous speech recognition engine "Julius"
(http://julius.sourceforge.jp/), and the Speech Signal Processing
Toolkit "SPTK" (http://sp-tk.sourceforge.net). The laboratory is
involved in numerous national and international collaborative
projects. SPL also has close partnerships with many industrial
companies, in order to transfer its research into commercial
applications, including Toyota, Nissan, Panasonic, Brother Inc.,
Funai, Asahi-Kasei, ATR.
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Project summary of EMIME
The EMIME project will help to overcome the language barrier by
developing a mobile device that performs personalized speech-to-speech
translation, such that a user's spoken input in one language is used
to produce spoken output in another language, while continuing to
sound like the user's voice. Personalization of systems for
cross-lingual spoken communication is an important, but little
explored, topic. It is essential for providing more natural
interaction and making the computing device a less obtrusive element
when assisting human-human interactions.
We will build on recent developments in speech synthesis using hidden
Markov models, which is the same technology used for automatic speech
recognition. Using a common statistical modeling framework for
automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis will enable the use
of common techniques for adaptation and multilinguality.
Significant progress will be made towards a unified approach for
speech recognition and speech synthesis: this is a very powerful
concept, and will open up many new areas of research. In this
project, we will explore the use of speaker adaptation across
languages so that, by performing automatic speech recognition, we can
learn the characteristics of an individual speaker, and then use those
characteristics when producing output speech in another language.
Our objectives are to:
1. Personalize speech processing systems by learning individual
characteristics of a user's speech and reproducing them in
synthesized speech.
2. Introduce a cross-lingual capability such that personal
characteristics can be reproduced in a second language not spoken
by the user.
3. Develop and better understand the mathematical and theoretical
relationship between speech recognition and synthesis.
4. Eliminate the need for human intervention in the process of
cross-lingual personalization.
5. Evaluate our research against state-of-the art techniques and in a
practical mobile application.
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