SPHEAR TMR Network Partners

6.5 IDIAP

Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptive Artificial Intelligence, Martigny, Switzerland

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6.5.1 Experience and competence

IDIAP is a non profit research institute funded in 1991 and affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Geneva. Initiated, and initially funded, by the Dalle Molle Foundation, IDIAP is now funded for about 50% by the members of the IDIAP Foundation (including the Swiss Confederation, the canton of Valais, the city of Martigny and the Swiss Telecom PTT) and for 50% by research grants (from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Office for Science and Education for European projects). The IDIAP research activities primarily concentrate on automatic speech and speaker recognition, vision and machine learning. In terms of speech research, IDIAP is currently involved in several European projects such as CAVE (caller verification), ACTS M2VTS (multimodal verification) and THISL (LTR 23495 on speech recognition for thematic indexing). Furthermore, IDIAP has very strong links with the University of California at Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute of Berkeley where there is active multi-disciplinary work complementary to the current proposal.

6.5.2 Role in the project

Dr. Herve Bourlard will manage the IDIAP effort in the proposed SPHEAR network. IDIAP's technical contributions to this project are in state-of-the-art speech recognition systems (both HMM and HMM/ANN-based systems) and in multi-band/multi-stream speech recognition techniques (as initially introduced by Dr. Bourlard), one of the key issues of Theme 3. IDIAP, being strongly concerned by the industrial relevance of their work, will also be heavily involved in the application work of Theme 4. IDIAP cannot apply for EU funding but will participate under the `project-by-project' provision. Swiss funding will be obtained if the SPHEAR bid is successful.

6.5.3 Research linkages

IDIAP already works with Sheffield on the THISL ESPRIT project mentioned above and much informal collaboration and information exchange has already taken place between the two partners on some of the issues addressed in the current proposal (missing data and multi-stream). Being used to collaborate with experts in psycho-acoustics (e.g., in the framework of their collaboration with Steve Greenberg from Berkeley), IDIAP expect to have much interaction with the other SPHEAR partners. Finally, IDIAP will also work with Ericsson on the development and testing of some industrial applications.

6.5.4 Principal research personnel, expertise and involvement

In addition to 36 months of post-doc placement, 3 permanent researchers will be partly involved in this project:

6.5.5 Recent publications