Newsletter – volume 7 – December 2018

Monica: The Periodic Report 1 (Technical and Financial sections) was submitted on 30 November 2018. Thanks to all for your contributions! Subject to its approval by the REA, ENRICH will receive the Interim Payment within 90 days. Deliverable D8.5-MTR Meeting also uploaded on the same day.

Clara: has received an ERC consolidator grant! Congratulations Clara! Looking forward to many interesting projects and collaborations.

Martin: and his colleagues have a new article out (online) in Computer Speech and Language: ”Combining spectral and temporal modification techniques for speech intelligibility enhancement” which shows that spectral and temporal modification techniques produce near-complementary intelligibility gains link

Carol: has been a speaker for ChatSci, a fortnightly science communication event. Carol’s talk was about the problems that users of hearing prosthetics face daily, and what science can do in order to help them. She played samples from simulations of hearing impairment and cochlear implants, much to the shock of her audience. Carol also wore an assistive wireless microphone (which was provided by a user) throughout the talk, which garnered attention and prompted questions. Carol believes that raising awareness is the first step towards improving accessibility for all, while (hopefully) diminishing the stigma associated with the use of prosthetic devices.

Anna: has attended a meeting organised by the Royal Society on “Attention to sound”. It was very informative and a great way to exchange ideas with people doing research on auditory attention.

Gerard: presented a paper in a workshop of ACM Multimedia and had a great time in Korea! Gerard is also getting his journal paper ready to submit (We will of course provide a link once it comes out!).

Amy: is in the midst of testing EEG and will have her first results by Christmas.

Olina: The ESR group that works on pupillometry has organized a one-week training meeting in Groningen (5-9 Nov). The purpose of this meeting is to augment our knowledge with the statistical techniques useful for analyzing pupil data. We are eager to learn as much as we can from Dr. Anita Wagner and Dr. Paolo Toffanin who kindly took the time to teach us and help us with practicing these techniques using our own pupil data.

The Newsletter Team: congratulates you all again for the great performance at the MTR and the subsequent brilliant feedback we have received as a network. We wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

The Informatics Forum, UoE: 1) Upon your arrival, you’ll become part of a “student family”: the School will assign you to a group of random students and give you a little sum to spend on a group activity. Just go and get to know each other! 2) Every second Friday we have a talk from one junior and one senior academic in our cozy meeting room on level 4. At the end of the talk there is pizza and drinks for all. 3) On each floor of the Forum there are multiple lounge areas where people can prepare their meals and eat together. We have special water taps with two buttons: chilled and hot – so you can brew your tea in a heartbeat.