Chiori Hori
- Phone: 617-621-7568
- Email:
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Position:
Research / Technical Staff
Senior Principal Research Scientist -
Education:
Ph.D., Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2002 -
Research Areas:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Speech & Audio
- Computer Vision
- Machine Learning
- Robotics
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Signal Processing
External Links:
Chiori's Quick Links
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Biography
Chiori has been a member of MERL's research team since 2015. Her work is focused on spoken dialog and audio visual scene-aware dialog technologies toward human-robot communications. She's on the editorial board of "Computer Speech and Language" and is a technical committee member of "Speech and Language Processing Group" of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Prior to joining MERL, Chiori spent 8 years at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), where she held the position of Research Manager of the Spoken Language Communication Laboratory. She also spent time researching at Carnegie Mellon and the NTT Communication Science Laboratories, prior to NICT.
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Recent News & Events
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EVENT MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025 Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
Location: Hyderabad, India
MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; François Germain; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
Sponsorship
MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.
MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.
Technical Program
MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.
MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.
Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".
About ICASSP
ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
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NEWS MERL at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024 Date: May 13, 2024 - May 17, 2024
Where: Yokohama, Japan
MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Jonathan Le Roux; Diego Romeres; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, which was held in Yokohama, Japan from May 13th to May 17th.
MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and exhibited a live robotic demonstration, which attracted a large audience. The demonstration showcased an Autonomous Robotic Assembly technology executed on MELCO's Assista robot arm and was the collaborative effort of the Optimization and Robotics Team together with the Advanced Technology department at Mitsubishi Electric.
MERL researchers from the Optimization and Robotics, Speech & Audio, and Control for Autonomy teams also presented 8 papers and 2 invited talks covering topics on robotic assembly, applications of LLMs to robotics, human robot interaction, safe and robust path planning for autonomous drones, transfer learning, perception and tactile sensing.
- MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, which was held in Yokohama, Japan from May 13th to May 17th.
See All News & Events for Chiori -
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Awards
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AWARD Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop Date: December 15, 2023
Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
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AWARD MERL team wins the Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement (AVSE) 2023 Challenge Date: December 16, 2023
Awarded to: Zexu Pan, Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux
MERL Contacts: François Germain; Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern; Yoshiki Masuyama
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL's Speech & Audio team ranked 1st out of 12 teams in the 2nd COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge (AVSE). The team was led by Zexu Pan, and also included Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux.
The AVSE challenge aims to design better speech enhancement systems by harnessing the visual aspects of speech (such as lip movements and gestures) in a manner similar to the brain’s multi-modal integration strategies. MERL’s system was a scenario-aware audio-visual TF-GridNet, that incorporates the face recording of a target speaker as a conditioning factor and also recognizes whether the predominant interference signal is speech or background noise. In addition to outperforming all competing systems in terms of objective metrics by a wide margin, in a listening test, MERL’s model achieved the best overall word intelligibility score of 84.54%, compared to 57.56% for the baseline and 80.41% for the next best team. The Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) was 2.14%, indicating that our model offered statistically significant speech intelligibility improvements compared to all other systems.
- MERL's Speech & Audio team ranked 1st out of 12 teams in the 2nd COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge (AVSE). The team was led by Zexu Pan, and also included Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux.
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Research Highlights
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MERL Publications
- , "Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-034 PDF
- @inproceedings{Hori2025mar,
- author = {Hori, Chiori and Kambara, Motonari and Sugiura, Komei and Ota, Kei and Khurana, Sameer and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
- year = 2025,
- month = mar,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-034}
- }
- , "ZeroST: Zero-Shot Speech Translation", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1088, September 2024, pp. 392-396.BibTeX TR2024-122 PDF
- @inproceedings{Khurana2024sep,
- author = {Khurana, Sameer and Hori, Chiori and Laurent, Antoine and Wichern, Gordon and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{ZeroST: Zero-Shot Speech Translation}},
- booktitle = {Interspeech},
- year = 2024,
- pages = {392--396},
- month = sep,
- doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1088},
- issn = {2958-1796},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-122}
- }
- , "Human Action Understanding-based Robot Planning using Multimodal LLM", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2024.BibTeX TR2024-066 PDF
- @inproceedings{Kambara2024jun,
- author = {Kambara, Motonari and Hori, Chiori and Sugiura, Komei and Ota, Kei and Jha, Devesh K. and Khurana, Sameer and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{Human Action Understanding-based Robot Planning using Multimodal LLM}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop},
- year = 2024,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-066}
- }
- , "Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotic Tasks", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), DOI: 10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610981, May 2024, pp. 14054-14061.BibTeX TR2024-052 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Sun2024may,
- author = {Sun, Lingfeng and Jha, Devesh K. and Hori, Chiori and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Zhu, Xinghao and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Interactive Planning Using Large Language Models for Partially Observable Robotic Tasks}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2024,
- pages = {14054--14061},
- month = may,
- publisher = {IEEE},
- doi = {10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610981},
- isbn = {979-8-3503-8457-4},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-052}
- }
- , "NIIRF: Neural IIR Filter Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10448477, March 2024, pp. 1016-1020.BibTeX TR2024-026 PDF Software
- @inproceedings{Masuyama2024mar,
- author = {Masuyama, Yoshiki and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Pan, Zexu and Khurana, Sameer and Hori, Chiori and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{NIIRF: Neural IIR Filter Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
- year = 2024,
- pages = {1016--1020},
- month = mar,
- doi = {10.1109/ICASSP48485.2024.10448477},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-026}
- }
- , "Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2025.
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Software & Data Downloads
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Videos
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MERL Issued Patents
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Title: "Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition System"
Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Moritz, Niko; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan
Patent No.: 11,978,435
Issue Date: May 7, 2024 -
Title: "System and Method for Using Human Relationship Structures for Email Classification"
Inventors: Harsham, Bret A.; Hori, Chiori
Patent No.: 11,651,222
Issue Date: May 16, 2023 -
Title: "Method and System for Scene-Aware Interaction"
Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Cherian, Anoop; Chen, Siheng; Marks, Tim; Le Roux, Jonathan; Hori, Takaaki; Harsham, Bret A.; Vetro, Anthony; Sullivan, Alan
Patent No.: 11,635,299
Issue Date: Apr 25, 2023 -
Title: "Scene-Aware Video Encoder System and Method"
Inventors: Cherian, Anoop; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan; Marks, Tim; Sullivan, Alan
Patent No.: 11,582,485
Issue Date: Feb 14, 2023 -
Title: "Low-latency Captioning System"
Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Cherian, Anoop; Marks, Tim; Le Roux, Jonathan
Patent No.: 11,445,267
Issue Date: Sep 13, 2022 -
Title: "System and Method for a Dialogue Response Generation System"
Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Cherian, Anoop; Marks, Tim; Hori, Takaaki
Patent No.: 11,264,009
Issue Date: Mar 1, 2022 -
Title: "Scene-Aware Video Dialog"
Inventors: Geng, Shijie; Gao, Peng; Cherian, Anoop; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan
Patent No.: 11,210,523
Issue Date: Dec 28, 2021 -
Title: "Method and System for Multi-Label Classification"
Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Hori, Chiori; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.; Harsham, Bret A.; Le Roux, Jonathan
Patent No.: 11,086,918
Issue Date: Aug 10, 2021 -
Title: "Position Estimation Under Multipath Transmission"
Inventors: Kim, Kyeong-Jin; Orlik, Philip V.; Hori, Chiori
Patent No.: 11,079,495
Issue Date: Aug 3, 2021 -
Title: "Method and System for Multi-Modal Fusion Model"
Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Hershey, John R.; Marks, Tim
Patent No.: 10,417,498
Issue Date: Sep 17, 2019 -
Title: "Method and System for Training Language Models to Reduce Recognition Errors"
Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Hori, Chiori; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.
Patent No.: 10,176,799
Issue Date: Jan 8, 2019 -
Title: "Method and System for Role Dependent Context Sensitive Spoken and Textual Language Understanding with Neural Networks"
Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.
Patent No.: 9,842,106
Issue Date: Dec 12, 2017
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Title: "Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition System"
