Events Calendar

DICIT - An Example of Acoustic Scene Analysis and Distant-talking Based Spoken Dialogue System

Speaker: Maurizio OmologoAbstract:The aim of this talk is to introduce the DICIT EC project. DICIT focuses on the development of advanced
acoustic sensor based technologies and the related application to the smart-home environment. The main
foreseen application is an automatic voice interaction system, with users at a distance of up to some meters from
a set of microphones. Voice input operates in a complementary modality to the use of remote control, this way allowing one to control TV and related devices in a natural and flexible way. Due to the interference of other
coexisting active sound sources (e.g. loudspeakers, other talkers and noise sources) and to the effect of room
acoustics, both the processing and the understanding of given speech utterances become more problematic with
respect to the ideal situation tackled when using a close-talking microphone. To this regard, the talk will
provide an overview of the basic problems and technologies being developed as far as the multi-microphone
front-end are concerned. Other activities and results obtained during the first 18 months of the project will then be presented together with some video-clips showing the potential of the technologies so far developed.Bio:Maurizio Omologo was born in Padova (Italy) in 1959, and received the Laurea degree with honours in
Electrical Engineering (University of Padova) in 1984. From 1984 to 1987 he was Researcher at the Speech
Coding Department of CSELT - Torino (Italy). In 1988 he joined ITC-irst, as Senior Researcher of the Acoustic
and Speech Recognition group. Since 1998 he has been acting as head of the SHINE (Speech Interaction in
Noisy Environment) project at ITC-irst, now Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK)-irst. From January 2003 to
December 2005 he was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing journal. He
also has been teaching "Audio signal processing" at the Department of Information and Communication
Technology - University of Trento, since 2002. Currently, he acts as Coordinator of DICIT, a European Project
of the VI EC Framework Programme.Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia Veal