[hts-users:03398] PhD and post-doc opportunities in TTS
SIWIS: Spoken Interaction with Interpretation in Switzerland.
Three PhD and two post-doctoral opportunities in translation, speech
recognition and synthesis.
About SIWIS
The SIWIS project is about speech to speech translation. It will allow
a person to speak to a machine in their native language and have it
automatically recognised, translated and spoken in a different
language. One characteristic of recent technology to achieve this is
that the spoken synthetic voice can sound like the original speaker
instead of a generic speaker or robot.
SIWIS has two broad goals. The first is to customise the current state
of the art to the Swiss language scenario. This entails constructing
recognition, translation and synthesis modules in the main Swiss
languages. The second goal is to advance this state of the art,
focussing especially on prosody. Prosody describes aspects of speech
such as volume, rhythm and pitch; these are the parts that carry
emotion and emphasis, adding extra nuance and personality to the
words.
In order to do this, SIWIS brings together four partners. These
partners possess world leading expertise in each of the component
parts of a translation system. Further, three of the partners are
physically located in cities representing the major language groups of
Switzerland; this includes English, represented by the University of
Edinburgh. The location will be important not only for data collection
(ensuring we have the tools to enable the project), but also for
evaluation, providing native listeners to ensure our results are as
good as can be hoped.
Open Positions
Positions are available at the Universities of Geneva and Edinburgh,
ETH Zurich, and Idiap Research Institute. For details, please see the
project web page at
http://www.idiap.ch/project/siwis
The start dates are expected to be November 2012 - January 2013. All
positions are funded for three years, and will remain open until
filled.
--
Phil Garner
http://www.idiap.ch/~pgarner