Newsletter – volume 3 – July 2018

Monica: ENRICH E8 (Speech Modifications) will be held on Saturday and Sunday 29/30 September 2018, preceding the MTR on Monday 1st October (all day). Both E8 and the MTR will take place at a single conference/hotel venue in The Hague (Netherlands). More details of the venue and the content will be confirmed shortly.

Amy: Will be giving a departmental seminar on Friday 29th of July where she will present her project. Everything is set and ready to go for her experiment. “Looking forward to seeing several of you in Groningen soon!”

Elif: Will be presenting two posters at the International Conference on Music Cognition and Perception, in Graz, Austria, in July. She also has a proceedings paper at the same conference.

Sneha: Will be on her secondment at UoC in July. During the secondment, she will work on training a Wavenet vocoder for Spanish and will perform voice restoration for oesophageal voice using the wavenet vocoder. She will work closely with Dipjyoti, who has already created a voice conversion suite for healthy voices using wavenet as a vocoder. She will also be attending the summer school there.

Anna: Has completed testing a group of hearing impaired adults at SONOVA in Switzerland.

Valerie: Her paper entitled “How do aging and age-related hearing loss affect the ability to communicate effectively in challenging communicative conditions?” is now available online

Katherine and Mirjam: Katherine will present a poster at the 11th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon 2018; Mirjam will be a keynote speaker.

UoC1: Had the pleasure of having Gerard in Crete for 1 week (18-24 June). He gave a very interesting talk about “Future directions for hearing devices in The Gesture Lab”. Slides; photos

UoC2: Are preparing for their annual workshop Speech Processing Courses in Crete, 3-27 July 2018. This year’s title is “Towards Flexible and Intelligible End-to-End Speech synthesis systems”. Shifas and Dip are involved in the organization. More news on the workshop in the next newsletter!

Gerard: ENRICH video: he will ask 2-3 ESRs and one senior to record a part of the video. The script and storyboard will be shared soon. He created a table with the ENRICH themes of each ESR which is useful for the video, but also as general info. “ESRS that haven’t filled it in, please do so!”. Link

Chen: About her visit at UPV/EHU: “It was a highly productive week and I was very lucky to be able to attend an eye-tracking course in the mornings and learn the Glimpsing Model, among other things, from Prof. Martin Cooke in the afternoons. I have also had chances to talk to Prof. María Luisa Garcia Lecumberri and the fellow PhDs at LASLAB to brainstorm research ideas (we even had dinner together one day in a very lovely Galician restaurant). Last but not least, I also met up with our very own Olina and Sneha (both were great hosts!) and had a great time sharing research and life stories. I really enjoyed this short visit/secondment!”

Gerard: Apart from the talk he gave at UoC, he also enjoyed Shifas’ spicy chicken and rice.

Monica: 1) Worked at an Italian restaurant during her PhD in Scotland; 2) Fished piranhas in the jungle in Perú; 3) Loved travelling as a backpacker (Thailand, Brazil, Morocco,…)

Max: 1) Petted a wild wombat in the Tasmanian mountains; 2) Worked in his Dad’s company, creating planting installations for private and public spaces; 3) His family’s original Italian surname is Bearzatto