Newsletter – volume 4 – August 2018

Monica: The Project Officer has approved the addition of FORTH (Crete, Greece) as a new ENRICH Partner Organisation. Dr Yannis Pantazis will be their Principal Investigator within ENRICH. Further details were sent to all ENRICH members by email on 24th July.

Monica: The MTR agenda has already been agreed by the Project Officer (available here)

Monica: The E8 draft programme can be found here

Gerard: Submitted a paper to ACM Multimedia Workshop on Audio-Visual Scene Understanding for Immersive Multimedia, 22-26 Oct in Seoul, Korea. The paper is an overview on how to capture and reproduce immersive audiovisual scenes for hearing research.

Amy: Photos from the MAPS poster sessions

Avashna: Did her first secondment at the University of Crete in July where she learned all about generating high quality speech using Wavenet as a vocoder. “It was fantastic to work closely with Dip and Sneha during this time – I have really learnt a lot from them. A huge thank you to both of them and George for accommodating me!”

Avashna: The summer school (SPCC2018) has been very useful. It was about state-of-the-art approaches to speech synthesis such as parallel Wavenet, end-to-end speech synthesis, GANS and voice conversion. Avashna was given the opportunity to lead the hands-on-session for Unit Selection and DNNs on behalf of Simon King. “It was a scary yet fulfilling experience! It has certainly helped me build confidence in my communication skills.”

Carol: Is currently running an experiment on the intelligibility of speech in realistic noise conditions. She has designed two representative environments – a household room and a public space – that will serve as the soundscapes for her future experiments. The mockups do not only include recordings of real noise, but also reverberation. “Why am I doing this? The technologies we use to enhance speech signals are often tested in controlled environments, but real life scenarios are much less controllable”

Carol: Has presented her first poster of her study at UK Speech 2018 in Dublin.

Gerard: Received the first videos from the other ESRs, but there is a lot of work still to be done. He will be recording and starting to mount the video in late August.

Gerard: Short trip with Max to the island of Norderney in the north see in Germany, which was great! Picture

Monica: The ESRs have been running some sessions, lead by Monica, in preparation for their meeting (60-90mins) with the Project Officer at the Mid-Term Review. The material (usually 1-3 underlined pdfs) is sent every two Mondays by email, followed by a 2-week open discussion on Slack -the idea is not to interfere with the ESRs’ daily routine, as Slack can be followed easily any time. After each session, the ESRs complete an anonymous survey (2-3 mins) to make sure the main points are clear. So far, the topics have been: MTR guidelines; ESRs’ rights and obligations/type of costs/allowances; Training; Dissemination/Open Access/Visibility of EU funding; IPR.

Avashna: 1) Got to see all 5 of our big 5 in South Africa (lion, elephant,buffalo, rhinoceros, leopard) in their natural habitats all in a proximity of less than 10m. Also petted baby cubs! 2) As a child she dreamed of becoming a doctor, but can’t stand the sight of blood, so of course a Doctorate was the next best option. 3) Her favourite colour is Pink.

Axel: 1) Once ate deep-fried ants in Laos. 2) Was stuck for 48 hours inside Moscow Airport. 3) Had tickets to the 1994 World Cup match Germany vs. Belgium but missed

Carol: 1) When she was 14 she worked as a barmaid the whole summer long, in order to buy her first electric guitar. She still holds on to it dearly – a beautiful Fender Stratocaster. 2) Used to be a woodworker in her spare time. She built pieces of furniture for her house in Italy – and lots of presents for her friends! 3) Ran her interview for ENRICH over her phone connected to a spare battery. The night before there was a huge rainstorm that cut the power off in her area.