IBM Watson "Emerging leaders in Multimedia" Workshop 2009
SAIL member Selina Chu was invited to attend the IBM Watson "Emerging leaders in Multimedia" Workshop through a competitive selection process. She presented her work on "Recognition and Characterization of Unstructured Environmental Audio". This was held on October 8 and 9, 2009 at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY to recognize outstanding student researchers in the field of multimedia. She was joined by 9 other students from leading research groups in institutions around the country.
September 2009
SAIL was awarded a $2.2M NSF grant to advance speech translation research
SAIL was awarded a 4-year $2.2M NSF grant to advance context enriched speech translation research. The specific application focus is
on cross language interactions in health care settings.
From USC News, September 22, 2009:
Now, USC computer scientists, communication specialists and health professionals hope to create a cheap, robust and effective speech-to-speech translation system for clinics, emergency rooms and ambulances
...Link
Also from USC Daily Trojan, September 27, 2009:
A million-dollar grant awarded to a team of USC researchers could make communication with doctors across language barriers a lot easier, thanks to a new advanced translation system
...Link
Awards
Members from SAIL's emotions research group led by Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee have the won the "INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge Award", under the classifier challenge category for their paper entitled,
Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee, Emily Mower, Carlos Busso, Sungbok Lee and Shrikanth S. Narayanan, "Emotion recognition using a hierarchical binary decision tree approach." Interspeech 2009, Brighton, U.K., September 2009.
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From the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering News, November 05, 2009:
A team of USC researchers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), directed by Professor Shri Narayanan, the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering won the Interspeech 2009 Emotion Challenge Award
...Link
[People in the photo, from left to right: Carlos Busso, Jeremy Lee, Emily Mower, Shri Narayanan].
Jeremy Lee, a USC BS-EE'07 graduate, and co-author Emily Mower are PhD students in EE at SAIL.
Carlos Busso, a PhD graduate of USC, is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Sungbok Lee and Shrikanth Narayanan are faculty members at SAIL.
June 2009
Awards
SAIL members Ming Li, Viktor Rozgic and Shri Narayanan part of the KNOWME body sensing networks team that
won a Best Paper award at IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2009).
The full paper can be found at:
Gautam Thatte, Viktor Rozgic, Ming Li, Sabyasachi Ghosh, Urbashi Mitra, Shri Narayanan, Murali Annavaram, Donna Spruijt-Metz. "Optimal Allocation of Time-Resources for Multihypothesis Activity-Level Detection." IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2009), Marina Del Rey, June 2009.
{pdf}
May 2009
Awards
Jorge Silva wins the Best Viterbi Thesis Award under the theoretical work category for his 2008 PhD dissertation entitled
"On Optimal Signal Representation for Statistical Learning and Pattern Recognition."
Jorge is presently a faculty member in the EE department at the University of Chile, Santiago.
Jorge Silva's homepage
April 2009
Awards
Prasanta Ghosh wins a Best Teaching Assistant Award from the EE Department for a second time in a row.
Andreas Tsiartas also wins a Best Teaching Assistant Award from the EE Department.
March 2009
Awards
Erik Bresch was awarded the USC Phi Kappa Phi Student Research Award
Fellowships
Matt Black was awarded the Simon Ramo Fellowship for 2009-2010
Angeliki Metallinou was awarded the Myronis Endowed Fellowship for 2009-2010
January 2009
Shri elected IEEE Fellow
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, January 20, 2009:
Three faculty members from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering -- Shri Narayanan, Timothy Pinkston and USC President Steven B. Sample -- were recently elected Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellows
...Link
Also from USC News, January 27, 2009:
IEEE Elects Three New Fellows From USC -- President Sample, Shri Narayanan and Timothy Pinkston earn the distinction among the nation's top engineers
...Link
Nov 2008
Translating Research into Action
From USC College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences News, November 2008:
Housed in the USC College Department of Psychology, a new research-based
center has been created to benefit urban youth...Link
August 2008
Shri Wins the IBM Faculty Award
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, August 19, 2008:
Four Viterbi School engineering faculty in computer science and electrical engineering have won 2008 IBM Faculty Awards.
...Link
Shri Wins the Okawa Research Award
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, August 15, 2008:
Two Viterbi School engineering faculty — Shri Narayanan of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and Laurent Itti of the Computer Science Department — have won 2008 Okawa Foundation research grants to support their research in human-machine speech processing and neuroscience-inspired robotic vision systems, respectively
...Link
Summer 2008
Featured in the New Yorker
From the New Yorker, June 23, 2008:
Hello, Hal. Will we ever get a computer we can really talk to?
...Link
Mind Your Language
From USC College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences News, May, 2008:
In 2005 and 2006 the National Institutes of Health awarded two grants totaling over $4.5 million to support the research of Dani Byrd, professor of linguistics, and Shri Narayanan, Andrew J. Viterbi Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, who has joint appointments in linguistics, psychology and computer science
...Link
Seven SAILers Graduate!
Pictures to follow, congrats to: Jorge Silva, Chuping Liu, Carlos Busso, Erdem Unal, Vivek Rangarajan, Shankar Ananthakrishnan, Shiva Sundaram
Internships
Abe Kazemzadeh is spending the summer of 2008 interning at AT&T Research.
Ozlem Kalinli is spending the summer of 2008 interning at Microsoft Research.
SAIL hosts Summer Interns (Summer 2008 - Fall 2008)
Carlos Molina, PhD student, University of Chile (CONICYT Fellowship)
Awards
Prasanta Ghosh was awarded Best TA for the Department of Electrical Engineering.
Fellowships
Emily Mower was awarded the Intel Fellowship.
October 2007
Jump-Starting New Directions in Research
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, October 30, 2007:
Thirteen USC engineers with full or joint appointments in the Viterbi School of Engineering have been awarded 2007 Zumberge interdisciplinary research grants by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Advancement ...Link
Awards
JongHo Shin has been awarded best student paper at IEEE MMSP 2007 for the paper:
Jong Ho Shin, Panayiotis Georgiou, and Shrikanth Narayanan. Analyzing
the multimodal behaviors of users of a speech-to-speech translation
device by using concept matching scores. In Proceedings of IEEE
Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, Chania, Greece, October 2007.
Summer 2007
Internships
Matt Black is spending the summer at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, doing research under Gerasimos Potamianos on acoustic event detection. They are working with the CHIL corpus, consisting of multiple channels of far-field audio recordings from multi-person meeting scenarios. Their goal is to detect specific non-speech acoustic events (door knocks, paper noises, applause, etc.), the majority of which are temporally overlapped with speech and/or other unknown acoustic events. The research has numerous applications, from improved speaker segmentation in smart rooms, to environment sensing in an elderly person's house.
SAIL student Joseph Tepperman is spending the summer of 2007 doing an internship with Rosetta Stone Labs in Boulder, Colorado. Under the supervision of Bryan Pellom and Kadri Hacioglu (developers of the SONIC speech recognizer), his summer research is in automatic pronunciation evaluation for the world's #1 language-learning software.
Emil Ettelaie is spending the summer of 2007 interning at AT&T Research.
Fellowships
Carlos Busso was awarded with a Graduate School Fellowship in Digital
Scholarship for the academic year 2007-2008. Graduate School Fellowships in Digital Scholarship are designed to foster innovative multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media.
Emily Mower was awarded the Herbert Kunzel Engineering Fellowship for the academic year 2007-2008.
In the News
Emily Mower has been interviewed for the USC Graduate School's new webpage. She is this month's Featured Graduate Student.
October 2006
Shiva Sundaram and Shrikanth Narayanan receive "Best Student Paper" award from 2006 IEEE MMSP (Multimedia Signal Processing)
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, October 17, 2006:
The paper entitled An Attribute-Based Approach to Audio Description Applied to Segmenting Vocal Sections In Popular Music Songs...Link
SAIL Student Makes Hat Rack Speak
October 2006 marked Joe Tepperman's second speech recognition art installation for Long Beach's annual Soundwalk event. This year's piece, entitled "Say Please", was a collaboration with musician Laura Steenberge. It consisted of a comically argumentative hat rack that would respond in collage to recognized speech.
Link
February 2006
Shri Narayanan and Alex Potamianos to receive "Best Paper" award from IEEE Signal Processing Society
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, February 02, 2006:
Creating a system that lets children use computers using speech instead of conventional mouse or keyboard controls...Link
December 2005
Future Tech: Shrikanth Narayanan
From USC Viterbi Engineer, Fall/Winter 2005, Volume 4, Issue 1, page 9:
Shrikanth Narayan has set remarkable goals - and made remarkable progress in realizing them...
Breaking the Language Barrier
From namak, Fall/Winter 2005, page 39:
At the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, an interdisciplinary team...
A Fellow Winner
From USC Chronicle, December 5, Volume 25, Number 13, page 2:
Shrikanth Narayan has been elected a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America...
Collaborative Success
From USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, Volume 6, Number 2, page 30:
The U.S. office of Naval Research awarded a five-year, $5-million multidisciplinary grant...
November 2005
Shri Narayanan elected Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, November 17, 2005:
Professor Shrikanth Narayanan, who holds appointments in the USC Viterbi School departments of...Link
October 2005
Fox TV
From Fox 5 News (nationally televised), October 18: Also, in November and December SAIL was featured in CNN, KCAL/KCBS...
Link
August 2005
Dialogue not lost in translation
From Daily Trojan, August 17, 2005:
Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a two-way voice translation system that...
The Silent Project at Soundwalk 2005
SAIL student Joe Tepperman and Professor Shri Narayanan have collaborated with Long Beach-based artists/linguists Ron Saunders
and Mackenzie Bristow for a piece to be debuted at Long Beach's 2nd Annual Soundwalk, "an evening of indoor and outdoor site-specific
sound installations." Entitled the Silent Project, the piece is conceptually rooted in Caleb Gattegno’s color-based Silent Method of
second language acquisition, and incorporates interactive speech recognition technology into visual art.
Soundwalk is on Saturday, August 20th from 5-10 pm, in Downtown Long Beach's East Village Arts District. Admission is free.
This particular installation can be seen at Koo's Art Center (530 E. Broadway, Long Beach CA, 90802 - www.koos.org) and will
be there through September 7th.
Link
Developments to Watch Business Week
From SciTech, August 15, 2005:
Engineers at the University of Southern California are perfecting translation technology designed to...
July 2005
Overcoming Telephone Hell
From CNN Paula Zahn Now:
Aired July 27, 2005 - 20:00 ETLink
English/Persian Voice-to-Voice Translation Tool
From Persian Journal, July 25, 2005:
Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created...
Medicine in two languages
From KCET Life & Times, July 20, 2005:
While the need for medical interpreters is obvious, researchers here at USC are taking medical translation...Link
USC team working on dialog-translation device
From Ventura County Star, July 11, 2005:
Doctors in the immediate future could be able to carry on conversations with their patients, even if...
From Clinical Window Journal, June 30, 2005:
Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created a rudimentary but working two-way voice translation system...
Spoken English to Spoken Persian, and Back Again
From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, June 22, 2005:
An interdisciplinary team led by Shri Narayanan has created a
rudimentary system to translate spoken English to spoken Persian, and
vice versa, allowing doctors and patients to communicate. The system
could be used in two years.
Link
May 2005
Emotion Recognition on “Talk of the City”
From KPCC, May 26, 2005:
Everyone knows the frustration of trying to communicate with a company that refuses to put a live person on the phone...Link
Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative to explore Human-like Speech Processing
The Office of Naval Research has awarded its 5-year 5 million dollar Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant
to a collaboration among USC (Shri Narayanan [EE] & Dani Byrd [LAS]), Stanford (D. Jurafsky, C. Manning), and University of Washington
(J. Bilmes, K. Kirchoff) for a project entitled “Human-like Speech Processing”, in response to its call for “radically new approaches
to speech-to-text conversion.” This was the only award made for this announced MURI topic. The project will last May 2005-April 2010.
New Grant from NIH to study speech production
The National Institutes of Health NIDCD has awarded Shri Narayanan (PI) (EE, Ling, CS)... Link
The USC Electrical Engineering Department gave its first Northrop-Grumman High Visibility Research Award to Shri Narayanan on May 5,
2005 during a departmental ceremony.
