Newsletter – volume 8 – June 2019

Reminder: Don’t forget to get a ticket for the ENRICH/UKAN event at the ICA: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ica-early-career-opportunities-in-hearing-and-spoken-language-industry-tickets-61226923376

Anna: was selected as a finalist and presented her work at the Research Presentation Day of the British Federation of University Women (BFWG) on 8 June. A range of topics from literature to bio-engineering were presented, and Anna gave her talk on ‘neural language processing, listening effort and hearing impairment’.

Katherine: received an IPA student award for her conference paper for the International Congress of Phonetic Science (ICPhS). She is looking forward to seeing a number of familiar faces from ENRICH in Australia in August!

Max: Is finishing up an exploratory study, using pupillometry to measure the cognitive aspects of informational and energetic masking for speech production in noise.

Valerie: recently, she was delighted to hear that she had been named as ISCA Fellow. Together with other new Fellow Yannis, she will receive her award at Interspeech in Graz. She also recently heard that a project led by Mary Rudner, with Inga Holube, Elisabeth Ingo and her as co-investigators, had been funded in Sweden. The title of the project is ‘Good auditory ecology for active and healthy aging‘. In other news, she am now only working half-time and loving her new found semi-freedom!

Avashna: is at her secondment at Voxygen in Rennes that started at the beginning of June. She will be learning sequence-to-sequence models and learning how to make TTS more expressive! She is really excited to be there and looks forward to learning as much as possible in the 2 months she is there.

Dipjyoti: has been working in Voxygen, France for his Secondment and will be finishing this month. He worked on state-of-the-art speech recognition and speech synthesis approaches (such as Deepspeech, Tacotron and WaveRNN) with both English and French speech data using machine learning techniques, especially deep learning. “I learned a lot working closely with Olivier, Kevin, Paul and Sofiane – many thanks to them and Voxygen for accommodating me. I am really looking forward to continue this collaboration in the future.” Dipjyoti was also given the opportunity to learn about Voxygen TTS system.

Elif and Amy: are having a great time in Edinburgh, learning a lot. “Thanks to Carol and Avashna for making us so welcome and being patient with our programming skills!”

Katherine: spent a month at UPV/EHU testing Spanish participants on two experiments: one on accentedness and one on the intelligibility of native and non-native Lombard speech.

Max: will be preparing a listening effort experiment with hearing impaired listeners over the summer. The study will be run at Sonova starting this autumn and is looking into the effects of time-compression.

Sneha: had the chance to dip her feet into the cold waters of Electroencephalography during her secondment at Fraunhofer IDMT! It did feel a bit warmer towards the end. She performed an EEG-based listening effort measurement experiment with Spanish speaking participants in Oldenburg (thought it would be hard to find them, but it was not in the end). The aim was to learn how to record and analyse EEG data and to investigate whether impaired speech demanded more listening effort compared to healthy speech. It was her first ever experience conducting listening experiments with participants and it was a good opportunity to tackle some new challenges and to get some new skill sets (some human resource management, EEG cap setup, meticulous experiment set up, EEG data analysis, behavioural tests etc. ). She benefited from the change of working environment too. It was a good chance to observe and adopt new working styles from a different country.