1st MONTREAL IEEE CIS MEETING

              Invited Talk                   Oct 26,2006

 October 26, 2006

 ____ Recent directions in speech processing by Prof. Douglas O'Shaughnessy INRS, Montreal

Speech processing has matured in recent years, and the general public has become much more used to hearing synthetic speech and talking to computers. We also note the widespread acceptance of coded speech in cellular telephones. This talk will examine the basics of speech analysis, focusing on what methods are commonly used to reduce the data rate in speech (while retaining its relevant information) in a useful compression for both coding and recognition purposes. We will also address recent ways to synthesize speech with greater naturalness qualities, via concatenation of variable-sized units. Links will be made throughout to aspects of human speech production and perception, as modern artificial intelligence tasks, such as automatic recognition and synthesis of speech, are often usefully modeled as emulations of human processes. We will further note the recent progress using statistical methods, rather than simple expert systems. 

Douglas O'SHAUGHNESSY 

He has been a professor at INRS (also adjunct professor at McGill University) since 1977. Educated at MIT (Ph.D. in 1976), he is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (1992) and a member of the ASA Technical Committee on Speech. He is the author of the textbook Speech Communications: Human and Machine (first in 1986, and completely revised edition in 2000, IEEE Press). In 2003, with Li Deng, he co-authored the book Speech Processing: A Dynamic and Optimization-Oriented Approach. He has presented tutorials on speech recognition at ICASSP-96 in Atlanta, ICASSP-2001 in Orlando, and at ICC-2003 in Anchorage. He is a regular presenter at the major speech conferences of Eurospeech and ICSLP, and has had papers at almost every ICASSP since 1986. IEEE Volunteer work: - elected member of the Board of Governors, 2002-2004 - Member, Conference Board, IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2000-2005 - General Chair, ICASSP-2004, Montreal - Associate Editor, IEEE Transacations on Speech, and Audio Processing (1995-1999). - Member of technical committee for speech processing of the IEEE-Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society (1981-1985). Other professional volunteer work: - Editor-in-Chief, EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing, 2005-present - Associate Editor, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, 2004-present - Associate Editor, J. Acoustical Society of America, 1998-present