Select a calendar:
Filter September Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for September 02, 2016
-
Seminar -
Fri, Sep 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Odette Scharenborg, Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
Talk Title: Modeling and Understanding Human Spoken-Word Recognition
Abstract: The question that underlies most of my research is the question why humans are so much better at recognizing speech than computers. I have approached this question from several angles, from the field of automatic speech recognition, the field of psycholinguistics, and through the combination of the two, i.e., the computational modeling of human spoken-word recognition. In this talk, I will present results from my computational modelling and psycholinguistics work.
In the first part, I will present my computational model, which is able to recognize real speech, Fine-Tracker. Fine-Tracker was specifically developed to account for the accumulating evidence that subtle phonetic detail in the speech signal is important in human spoken-word recognition. I will explain the model and illustrate its modelling ability by presenting a simulation study investigating the role of durational information in resolving temporary ambiguity due to lexical embedding (i.e., 'ham' in the longer word 'hamster') to aid spoken-word recognition. I will start the talk by briefly discussing the value of computational modelling in spoken-word recognition.
In the second part of this talk, I will focus on the results obtained in my current project on human non-native word recognition in noise. Most people will have noticed that communication in the presence of background noise is more difficult in a non-native than in the native language - even for those who have a high proficiency in the non-native language involved. The aim of this project is to understand the effect of background noise on the processes underlying non-native spoken-word recognition. In this presentation, I will present recent results on the effect of background noise on 1) the flexibility of the perceptual system in non-native listening; 2) the multiple activation, competition and recognition processes in non-native spoken-word recognition.
Biography: Odette Scharenborg (PhD) is an associate professor at the Centre for Language Studies and a research fellow at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). Her research interests focus on narrowing the gap between automatic and human word recognition. In 2008, she co-organized the Interspeech 2008 Consonant Challenge, which aimed at promoting comparisons of human and machine speech recognition in noise in order to investigate where the human advantage in word recognition originates. She was one of the initiators of the EU funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network 'Investigating Speech Processing In Realistic Environments' (INSPIRE, 2012-2015). Her current project is funded by a fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research on
the topic of human non-native word recognition in noise, which will be investigated using a combination of listening experiments and computational modelling.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan & Prof. Panayiotis Georgiou
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
-
Surface-based Methods for Analyzing Brain Structure and Connectivity
Fri, Sep 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Boris Gutman, Ph.D., Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Surface-based Methods for Analyzing Brain Structure and Connectivity
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: In this talk I will describe several shape centric methods for analyzing brain MR image data. The first part will focus on surface-based analysis of structural MRI. I will suggest some parametric registration techniques, with particular focus on adapting traditional image registration algorithms to the spherical domain. Building on this, an alternative shape space will be proposed, extending the Ebin metric on the 2 sphere to a Riemannian product metric for simple closed surfaces.
The second part of the talk will offer a method to combine surface representations and diffusion MRI based connectivity analysis. We will propose a generative model of structural connectivity based on the Poisson point process. Treating each tractography fiber model as a point observation in the continuous brain product space, we estimate the spatially distributed Poisson parameter to represent cortical connectivity. We can then adapt traditional spatial domain tasks such as registration and segmentation based on this continuous connectivity representation. Example adaptations will be proposed.
Example applications to the study of genetics and disease will be shown throughout, with some special focus on Partial Least Squares modeling as an alternative to the traditional genome wide association study (GWAS).
Biography: Boris Gutman is a Post-doctoral Scholar at the Imaging Genetics Center within the Stevens Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics at the University of Southern California. His current research interests include biomedical shape analysis, brain connectivity and imaging genetics, with the goal of enabling new discoveries of genetic associations and disease effects in the human brain.
Host: Professor Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
-
Undergraduate Open House
Fri, Sep 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Student Activity
Are you a Electrical Engineering freshman, transfer, or undeclared undergraduate? Join us for free pizza and drinks and hear from fellow students and EE professors. Learn about Electrical Engineering, research opportunities, and some of the internships our current students have had.
Facebook Event
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Benjamin Paul
