News & Events

36 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.


  •  NEWS    MERL Researcher named co-chair of GlobalSIP 2014 Symposium on Machine Learning Applications in Speech Processing
    Date: May 1, 2014
    Where: IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP)
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • John R. Hershey is Co-Chair of the GlobalSIP 2014 Symposium on Machine Learning.
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  •  AWARD    Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award
    Date: March 11, 2014
    Awarded to: Yuuki Tachioka
    Awarded for: "Effectiveness of discriminative approaches for speech recognition under noisy environments on the 2nd CHiME Challenge"
    Awarded by: Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka received the Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award from the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ) for "effectiveness of discriminative approaches for speech recognition under noisy environments on the 2nd CHiME Challenge", which was based on joint work with MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey.
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  •  NEWS    Guest Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Signal Processing Techniques for Assisted Listening
    Date: March 1, 2014
    Where: IEEE Signal Processing Society
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • John R. Hershey is Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Signal Processing Techniques for Assisted Listening of the IEEE Signal Processing.
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  •  NEWS    Members of the Speech & Audio team elected to IEEE Technical Committees
    Date: January 1, 2014
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • Jonathan Le Roux, Shinji Watanabe and John R. Hershey have been elected for 3-year terms to Technical Committees of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Jonathan has been elected to the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (AASP-TC), and Shinji and John to the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SL-TC). Members of the Speech & Audio team now together hold four TC positions, as John also serves on the AASP-TC.
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  •  NEWS    Prediction algorithms developed by MERL showcased for automotive HMI
    Date: February 10, 2014
    MERL Contacts: Jonathan Le Roux; Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Corporation demonstrated an ultra-simple HMI for in-car device operation using algorithms developed by MERL to predict user actions and destinations.
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2013 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 24, 2013; 8:45 AM - 5:00 PM
    Location: Columbia University
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2013, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the Northeast of the American continent, will be held on Thursday October 24, 2013 at Columbia University, in New York City.

      A follow-up to SANE 2012 held in October 2012 at MERL in Cambridge, MA, this year's SANE will be held in conjunction with the WASPAA workshop, held October 20-23 in upstate New York. WASPAA attendees are welcome and encouraged to attend SANE.

      SANE 2013 will feature invited speakers from the Northeast, as well as from the international community. It will also feature a lively poster session during lunch time, open to both students and researchers.

      SANE 2013 is organized by Prof. Dan Ellis (Columbia University), Jonathan Le Roux (MERL) and John R. Hershey (MERL).
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  •  NEWS    MERL obtains best results in the 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
    Date: June 1, 2013
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The results of the 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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  •  AWARD    CHiME 2012 Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge Best Performance
    Date: June 1, 2013
    Awarded to: Yuuki Tachioka, Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey
    Awarded for: "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark"
    Awarded by: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The results of the 2nd 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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  •  NEWS    International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME) 2013: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey, Shinji Watanabe and others
    Date: June 1, 2013
    Where: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME).
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2013: 9 publications by Jonathan Le Roux, Dehong Liu, Robert A. Cohen, Dong Tian, Shantanu D. Rane, Jianlin Guo, John R. Hershey, Shinji Watanabe, Petros T. Boufounos, Zafer Sahinoglu and Anthony Vetro
    Date: May 26, 2013
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jianlin Guo; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Brief
    • The papers "Stereo-based Feature Enhancement Using Dictionary Learning" by Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Effectiveness of Discriminative Training and Feature Transformation for Reverberated and Noisy Speech" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Non-negative Dynamical System with Application to Speech and Audio" by Fevotte, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "Source Localization in Reverberant Environments using Sparse Optimization" by Le Roux, J., Boufounos, P.T., Kang, K. and Hershey, J.R., "A Keypoint Descriptor for Alignment-Free Fingerprint Matching" by Garg, R. and Rane, S., "Transient Disturbance Detection for Power Systems with a General Likelihood Ratio Test" by Song, JX., Sahinoglu, Z. and Guo, J., "Disparity Estimation of Misaligned Images in a Scanline Optimization Framework" by Rzeszutek, R., Tian, D. and Vetro, A., "Screen Content Coding for HEVC Using Edge Modes" by Hu, S., Cohen, R.A., Vetro, A. and Kuo, C.C.J. and "Random Steerable Arrays for Synthetic Aperture Imaging" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey and others
    Date: November 28, 2012
    Where: Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The article "Factorial Models for Noise Robust Speech Recognition" by Hershey, J.R., Rennie, S.J. and Le Roux, J. was published in the book Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition.
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  •  TALK    Non-negative Hidden Markov Modeling of Audio
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 11, 2012; 2:30 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Gautham J. Mysore, Adobe
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Non-negative spectrogram factorization techniques have become quite popular in the last decade as they are effective in modeling the spectral structure of audio. They have been extensively used for applications such as source separation and denoising. These techniques however fail to account for non-stationarity and temporal dynamics, which are two important properties of audio. In this talk, I will introduce the non-negative hidden Markov model (N-HMM) and the non-negative factorial hidden Markov model (N-FHMM) to model single sound sources and sound mixtures respectively. They jointly model the spectral structure and temporal dynamics of sound sources, while accounting for non-stationarity. I will also discuss the application of these models to various applications such as source separation, denoising, and content based audio processing, showing why they yield improved performance when compared to non-negative spectrogram factorization techniques.
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  •  NEWS    IWSML 2012: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey and others
    Date: March 31, 2012
    Where: International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Latent Dirichlet Reallocation for Term Swapping" by Heaukulani, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML).
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2012: 8 publications by Petros T. Boufounos, Dehong Liu, John R. Hershey, Jonathan Le Roux and Zafer Sahinoglu
    Date: March 25, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jonathan Le Roux; Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The papers "Dictionary Learning Based Pan-Sharpening" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T., "Multiple Dictionary Learning for Blocking Artifacts Reduction" by Wang, Y. and Porikli, F., "A Compressive Phase-Locked Loop" by Schnelle, S.R., Slavinsky, J.P., Boufounos, P.T., Davenport, M.A. and Baraniuk, R.G., "Indirect Model-based Speech Enhancement" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "A Clustering Approach to Optimize Online Dictionary Learning" by Rao, N. and Porikli, F., "Parametric Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection: Exploiting Persymmetric Structure" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H., "Additive Noise Removal by Sparse Reconstruction on Image Affinity Nets" by Sundaresan, R. and Porikli, F. and "Depth Sensing Using Active Coherent Illumination" by Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    ASJ 2012: publication by Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey
    Date: March 13, 2012
    Where: Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Speech Enhancement by Indirect VTS" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ).
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  •  NEWS    IROS 2011: publication by Yuichi Taguchi, John R. Hershey and Tim K. Marks
    Date: September 25, 2011
    Where: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
    MERL Contact: Tim K. Marks
    Brief
    • The paper "Entropy-Based Motion Selection for Touch-Based Registration Using Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filtering" by Taguchi, Y., Marks, T.K. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
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