News & Events

TALK Zero-Resource Speech Pattern and Sub-Word Unit Discovery
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:10 AM
Speaker: Prof. Jim Glass and Chia-ying Lee, MIT CSAIL
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Factorial Hidden Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Noise Robust Speech Recognition
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 3:20 PM
Speaker: Dr. Steven J. Rennie, IBM Research
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Self-Organizing Units (SOUs): Training Speech Recognizers Without Any Transcribed Audio
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 2:15 PM
Speaker: Dr. Herb Gish, BBN - Raytheon
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Recognizing and Classifying Environmental Sounds
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Prof. Dan Ellis, Columbia University
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Understanding Audition via Sound Analysis and Synthesis
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 11:45 AM
Speaker: Josh McDermott, MIT, BCS
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Advances in Acoustic Modeling at IBM Research: Deep Belief Networks, Sparse Representations
Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:55 AM
Speaker: Dr. Tara Sainath, IBM Research
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
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).
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).
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).
TALK Learning Intermediate-Level Representations of Form and Motion from Natural Movies
Date & Time: Wednesday, February 22, 2012; 11:00 AM
Speaker: Dr. Charles Cadieu, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Abstract
- The human visual system processes complex patterns of light into a rich visual representation where the objects and motions of our world are made explicit. This remarkable feat is performed through a hierarchically arranged series of cortical areas. Little is known about the details of the representations in the intermediate visual areas. Therefore, we ask the question: can we predict the detailed structure of the representations we might find in intermediate visual areas?
  
  In pursuit of this question, I will present a model of intermediate-level visual representation that is based on learning invariances from movies of the natural environment and produces predictions about intermediate visual areas. The model is composed of two stages of processing: an early feature representation layer, and a second layer in which invariances are explicitly represented. Invariances are learned as the result of factoring apart the temporally stable and dynamic components embedded in the early feature representation. The structure contained in these components is made explicit in the activities of second-layer units that capture invariances in both form and motion. When trained on natural movies, the first-layer produces a factorization, or separation, of image content into a temporally persistent part representing local edge structure and a dynamic part representing local motion structure. The second-layer units are split into two populations according to the factorization in the first-layer. The form-selective units receive their input from the temporally persistent part (local edge structure) and after training result in a diverse set of higher-order shape features consisting of extended contours, multi-scale edges, textures, and texture boundaries. The motion-selective units receive their input from the dynamic part (local motion structure) and after training result in a representation of image translation over different spatial scales and directions, in addition to more complex deformations. These representations provide a rich description of dynamic natural images, provide testable hypotheses regarding intermediate-level representation in visual cortex, and may be useful representations for artificial visual systems.
TALK Itakura-Saito nonnegative matrix factorization and friends for music signal decomposition
Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 3:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Cedric Fevotte, CNRS - Telecom ParisTech, Paris
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Auxiliary Function Approach to Source Localization and Separation
Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 3:40 PM
Speaker: Prof. Nobutaka Ono, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
TALK Analysing Digital Music
Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 2:20 PM
Speaker: Prof. Mark Plumbley, Queen Mary, London
MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
EVENT Audio and Music Signal Processing Mini-Symposium
Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 2:00 PM -5:00 PM
Location: MERL
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief
- MERL is hosting a mini-symposium on audio and music signal processing, with three talks by eminent researchers in the field: Prof. Mark Plumbley, Dr. Cedric Fevotte and Prof. Nobutaka Ono.