Two Associate Professor positions in Speech Communication at KTH.
The positions are placed in the School of Computer Science and
Communication, Department of  Speech, Music and Hearing.
Further information is available on:
http://www.kth.se/om/work-at-kth/vacancies/associate-professor-in-speech-communication-1.61450?l=en_UK
and
http://www.kth.se/om/work-at-kth/vacancies/associate-professor-in-speech-communication-with-specialization-in-multimodal-embodied-systems-1.61437?l=en_UK
Deadline for applications is June 28, 2010 

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The Applied Informatics Group, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University is looking for PhD
candidates for a project position within the EU Initial Training Network ?RobotDoc“ in the area of Social
Learning and Interaction.

We are looking for a PhD candidate for the following project:
Development of dialogical rules. The verbal and cognitive development of infants is rooted
in dialog with other people (e.g. parents, peers). However, there is little research on how
infants develop the capability for dialogue. We hypothesize that contingency is a fundamental
mechanism that may help infants to develop their basic interactive capabilities such as turntaking
(Masataka 2003). These capabilities guide their attention to opening phases of a
dialogue, and even regulate their emotions. This project proposes to use the mechanism of
contingency to build a system that can learn dialogical rules through interaction by analyzing
the effects of its own dialogue contributions. In this project, experimental studies on children’s
dialogical capabilities are planned.

We invite applications from motivated young scientists coming from the areas of computer science,
linguistics, psychology, robotics, mathematics, cognitive science or similar, that are willing to contribute
to the cross-disciplinary research agenda of our research group. Research and development are
directed towards understanding the processes and functional constituents of cognitive interaction, and
establishing cognitive interfaces and robots that facilitate the use of complex technical systems.
Bielefeld University provides a unique environment for research in cognitive and intelligent systems by
bringing together researchers from all over the world in a variety of relevant disciplines under the roof
of central institutions such as the Excellence Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) or
the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab).

Successful candidates should hold an academic degree (MSc/Diploma) in a related discipline and
have a background in experimental work (because of planned experimental studies with children) as
well as have a strong interest in social robotics. All applications should include: a short cover letter
indicating the motivation and research interests of the candidate, a CV including a list of publications,
and relevant certificates of academic qualification.

Bielefeld University is an equal opportunity employer. Women are especially encouraged to apply and
in the case of comparable competences and qualification, will be given preference. Bielefeld University
explicitly encourages disabled people to apply. Bielefeld University offers a family friendly environment
and special arrangements for child care and double carrier opportunities.

Please send your application with reference to the offered position (RobotDoc) no later than
15.7.2009 to Ms Susanne H?ke (shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de).

Contact:
Susanne H?ke
AG Applied Informatics
Faculty of Technology
Universit?tsstr. 21-23
33615 Bielefeld
Germany
Email: shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

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Unsupervised paradigms for domain-independent video structure analysis

Post-Doc

DeadLine: 31/06/2011

guillaume.gravier@irisa.fr, mathieu.ben@irisa.fr

http://www.irisa.fr/metiss/emploi/postdoc/postdoc_unsupervised

 
Video structure analysis consists in dividing a video into elementary structural units such as anchor shots or interviews. Most approaches to the problem of structure analysis follow a supervised train/detect paradigm. For example, machine learning techniques have widely been used for the detection of anchor shots, specific actions, etc. Such paradigms have proven highly efficient on specific contents but lack domain and genre independence. To overcome the limitation of current techniques, we will investigate unsupervised paradigms for robust video structure analysis.

In recent years, we have been working on discovery algorithms to find out in a totally unsupervised fashion coherent or repeating elements in audio and video streams. In a very general way, the problem of unsupervised discovery can be seen as a particular case of a clustering problem. For instance, in audio contents, we have proposed variability tolerant pattern matching techniques to discover repeating chunks of signals corresponding to word-like units [1]. In video contents, we have used audiovisual consistency between audio and visual clusters to discover structural elements such as anchor persons or guest's shots in games and talkshows.

In parallel, we have been working on topic segmentation of TV programs based on their automatic transcription, developing domain-independent methods robust to transcription errors, where no prior knowledge on topics is required [2]. In particular, robustness can be obtained relying on sources of information other than the transcribed speech material, such as audio events (pauses, speaker changes, etc.) or visual events (shot changes, anchor shots, etc.).

The goal of this post-doctoral position is to experiment further unsupervised discovery paradigms for robust structure analysis. The post-doctoral researcher will lead research in the following topics:

1. Unsupervised discovery paradigms in audio and video contents: (a) Improve current algorithms, both in performance and in computational burden; For example, one can rely on automatically built discriminative models from the result of an initial discovery step to improve performance. (b) Propose innovative solutions to define amapping of discovered elements to semantically meaningful events.

2. Apply discovery paradigms for video segmentation, and, in particular, for topic segmentation (accouting for structural elements,  transcript-free segmentation, etc.).

The work will be carried out jointly in the Multimedia group and in the Speech and Audio Processing group at INRIA Rennes, France, in the framework of the OSEO-funded project QUAERO. The position is to be filled as soon as possible and for a duration of 1 year, renewable once. Prospective candidates should have a strong background in at least one of the following domains: pattern recognition preferably applied to speech or video processing, machine learning, multimedia, data mining. Salary depending on experience.


Contacts:

  Guillaume Gravier (guillaume.gravier@irisa.fr)

  Mathieu Ben (mathieu.ben@irisa.fr)


  For applications, please send a resume, a short summary of previous work and contacts for recommendation.


Links:

  INRIA Rennes: http://www.inria.fr/rennes

  Multimedia Group Texmex, http://www.irisa.fr/texmex

  Speech and Audio Processing Group Metiss, http://www.irisa.fr/metiss

  Quaero project: http://www.quaero.org


References:

 
[1] Armando Muscariello, Guillaume Gravier and Frédéric Bimbot. Audio keyword extraction by unsupervised word discovery. In Proc. Conf. of the Intl. Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2009.

[2] Camille Guinaudeau, Guillaume Gravier and Pascale Sébillot. Improving ASR-based topic segmentation of TV programs with confidence measures and semantic relations. Submitted to Intl. Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), 2010.
 
http://gdr-isis.org/rilk/gdr/Kiosque/poste.php?jobid=3853

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Technical Director

Working under the supervision of the Managing Director, he/she will be responsible of the development and management of technical projects related to language technologies, as well as partnerships, guaranteeing the timely and cost effectiveness of the execution of those projects.

He/she will be responsible for the management of project teams and the steering of all technical aspects.

He/she will organise, supervise and coordinate the technical activities, guaranteeing of the good scheduling of tasks. He/she will be in charge of the establishment of new contacts, in order to ensure the development of the firm and negotiate business activities in collaboration with our Business Development Manager. Thus, he/she will help setting up all necessary means such as new competences, in order to develop the activity of the firm. Most part of the activity is taking place within international R&D projects co-funded by the European Commission, the French ANR or private partners.

 Skills required:

• Engineer/PhD degree, with a minimum of 5 years’ experience as a project manager in the field of information technologies (human language technologies)
• Experience and/or excellent knowledge of European cooperation programmes in the field of human language technologies, as well as international programmes
• Experience in project management, including the management of European projects
• Experience and/or good knowledge of issues related to Language Resources and tools of natural language processing in general.
• Service-, customer- and business-minded, he/she has ability to work with a team and to listen. Excellent communication, as well as good social skills, written and oral ability will be a plus. Knowledge of market strategic orientations of human language technologies.
• Proficiency in French and English

Candidates should have the citizenship (or residency papers) of a European Union country.

Salary: Commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Applicants should send (preferably via email) a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to:

Khalid Choukri
ELRA / ELDA
55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris
FRANCE
Fax : 01 43 13 33 30
Courriel : job@elda.org

For more information on ELRA/ELDA, visit the following web sites:

http://www.elda.org

http://www.elra.info

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TITLE : SOFTWARE ENGINEER AT HONDA RESEARCH INSTITUTE USA (MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA)
We are seeking applications for a software engineering position to support research and development in the area of AI and Machine Learning at our Mountain View California office. The project goals are to design and develop our software system for spoken dialog systems and machine learning. The candidate will be involved in re-architecting and extending the existing software, closely collaborating with researchers.

Depending on interests and skills, the candidate will also have an opportunity to participate in our research projects on spoken dialog systems, probabilistic and symbolic reasoning, and decision making.

The candidate must have familiarity with AI/machine learning, and strong skills in software development in Java/C++. Desirable experience includes probabilistic and/or symbolic reasoning.
 
This position will last till March 2011 with possibility of further extensions at company discretion. To apply for this position, please send a cover letter and your resume to: career2010@honda-ri.com.

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PhD (3 years) position available at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Job description

The FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network 'BBfor2' (Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics) provides an opportunity for young researchers to study several biometric technologies in a forensic context.  The Network consists of 9 European research institutes and 3 associated partners.  The Network will provide regular workshops and Summer Schools, so that the 15 PhD students (Early Stage Researchers - ESRs) and PostDocs (Experienced Researchers - ERs) and senior researchers can exchange research experience, insights and ideas.   The main areas of research are Speaker Recognition, Face Recognition, Fingerprint Recognition, but also combinations of these techniques are studied.  The challenge of applying biometric techniques in a forensic context is to be able to deal with the uncontrolled quality of the evidence, and to provide calibrated likelihood scores.  The researchers in this Network will have the opportunity during their assignment to stay for some period at another Network institute and to get experience in an industrial or forensic laboratory. 

The PhD student will investigate automatic speaker recognition in the forensic environment.  The research will include theoretical aspects such as developing a general framework for evidence evaluation and reporting, and experimental aspects by conducting studies with automatic speaker recognition systems.   The candidate will collaborate with other PhD students and senior researchers in the Network, in a highly interdisciplinary environment.  Successful candidates have a Master Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or other relevant disciplines with a strong background in pattern recognition and / or signal processing, and excellent communication and writing skills in English. 

Requirements

Candidates should comply with the rules set forward by the FP7 Marie Curie ITNs:  Candidates should

-       be transferring from another country, i.e., not be of Dutch nationality, and not have resided more than 12 months in the last 3 years in The Netherlands.

-       be willing to work in at least one other country in the BBfor2 network.

-       have less than 4 years of research experience since their master degree, and not hold a PhD.

Organization

The project will be carried out within the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST), a research unit within the Faculty of Arts of the Radboud University Nijmegen.  The CLST hosts a large international group of senior researchers and PhD students who do research at the frontier of science and develop innovative applications. 

Conditions of employment

The duration of the contract is 3 years. The PostDoc will receive an initial contract for the duration of one year, with the possibility of prolongation for another 2 years.  The salary is in accordance with the rules of the Marie Curie ITNs. The annual gross salary is EUR 25,000 in the first year and will grow to EUR 30,000 in the third year. In addition to the salary, travel allowances and career exploratory allowances are foreseen according to generous Marie Curie ITN provisions. The Radboud University is an equal opportunity employer. Female researchers are strongly encouraged to apply for this vacancy. 

Additional information

For further information about the position, please contact David van Leeuwen, d.vanleeuwen@let.ru.nl. 

Application

Letters of application, including extensive CVs, (with reference to the vacancy number 23.02.10 and preferably by e-mail) can be sent to: vacatures@let.ru.nl. Candiates can apply until August 15th, 2010.

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PhD POSITION in PERSON RECOGNTION IN AUDIOVISUAL BROADCASTS (36
months; starting Sept./Oct. 2010) IN GRENOBLE (France)
===================================================================
Key words: video information retrieval, spoken language processing, cross-modal fusion

The ANR QCOMPERE project is one the three consortiums that will participate to the REPERE
challenge. REPERE is a multimedia challenge for person recognition within audiovisual
broadcasts. Its general goals are to improve the state-of-the-heart in automatic processing of
multimedia documents and to create collaborations between specialists of the different modalities
involved in the challenge. More precisely, the participants to the REPERE challenge are expected
to build a system for identifying the persons in audiovisual broadcasts, relying on different
possible information sources: the image of the person, his/her voice and the name written on the
image or pronounced. In order to participate to the call, each consortium needs to address these
four questions: who is seen (person identification in videos), who is speaking (speaker
identification in audio), whose name is written on screen (name identification in video using
OCR), whose name is pronounced (name spotting or name identification in ASR), and be able to
fuse the answers in a single system.

This PhD position focus on the fusion of information for cross-(multi-)modal person
recognition in videos, as well as name identification in videos using OCR.
The PhD will take place in the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble (LIG) that was created on
January 1, 2007. This laboratory gathers 500 researchers, lecturers-researchers, students and
post-docs, technical and administrative staff members. Research activities are structured around
24 autonomous research groups. Due to its multimodal dimension, this PhD would take place
between two different teams of the laboratory: MRIM and GETALP. The Multimedia
information indexing and retrieval (MRIM) group is specialized (as it is shown in its name) with
multimedia indexing. The GETALP group is specialized in spoken and written natural language
processing. More details on the groups can be found on http://mrim.imag.fr/en/ and
http://getalp.imag.fr/

Applicants should hold a Master Thesis in Computer Science and show a strong academic
background. They should be fluent in English. Competence in French is optional, though
applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during the PhD.

For further information, please contact Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr) and
Georges Quénot (Georges.Quenot at imag.fr)

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Doctoral and postdoctoral opportunities in Forensic Voice Comparison

Doctoral students are sought in connection with the three-year half-million-dollar Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP100200142) 'Making demonstrably valid and reliable forensic voice comparison a practical everyday reality in Australia'. This is a unique opportunity to obtain multidisciplinary training in both acoustic-phonetic and automatic approaches to forensic voice comparison and evaluation of forensic evidence within the new paradigm for forensic science – likelihood-ratio framework with testing of validity and reliability.

The project will be centred at the to-be-formed Forensic Voice Comparison Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia http://www.ee.unsw.edu.au/. The University of New South Wales is one of Australia's major research institutions, attracting top national competitive research grants and with extensive international research links.

The lead investigator on this project is Dr. Geoffrey Stewart Morrison http://geoff-morrison.net/. More details about the project can be found at http://forensic-voice-comparison.net/.

 
Doctoral students


We are looking for two types of candidates:

1.      The ideal candidate would have a strong background in acoustic phonetics and also be (or have the potential to quickly become) knowledgeable and skilful in forensic science (especially the likelihood-ratio framework), programming (especially Matlab), statistics (especially Bayesian) and pattern recognition, and signal processing (especially speech processing).

2.      The ideal candidate would have a strong background in signal processing, especially speech processing, pattern recognition, and programming (especially Matlab), and also be (or have the potential to quickly become) knowledgeable and skilful in forensic science (especially the likelihood-ratio framework), acoustic phonetics, and statistics (especially Bayesian).

A candidate with a Masters degree specialising in forensic voice comparison within the likelihood-ratio framework would be highly favoured. An excellent command of spoken and written English is essential, and fluency in Spanish and/or Standard Chinese would be advantageous.
 
The start date is flexible but is likely to be early 2011. In some cases this may be dictated by scholarship rules. Applicants should initially submit a curriculum vitae with cover letter as soon as possible, both documents should be submitted as a single pdf to geoff-morrison@forensic-voice-comparison.net

If a suitable international candidate is found by 10 July 2010, we will make a decision at that time in order to facilitate Endeavour award application, see below (the deadline is tight because of the Australian Research Council's late announcement of Linkage Project funding). Otherwise positions will remain open until filled. The number of positions is flexible depending on the ability of candidates to obtain external funding.

We have a small amount of money (AU$10k per year) within the project allocated to supporting PhD students. This is envisaged as a top up to a more substantial scholarship. Potential students will have to apply for such a scholarship, but we will render all assistance possible to assist in making that application.

Citizens and permanent residents of Australia and New Zealand should apply for:

1. Australian Postgraduate Award and other scholarships

        http://www.grs.unsw.edu.au/scholarships/localschols/unswlocalschols.html

        The application closing date for a 2011 start will probably be mid-October 2010 (check the link regularly for updates).

International students should apply for:

1. Endeavour Awards

        http://www.deewr.gov.au/International/EndeavourAwards/Pages/Home.aspx

        The Australian Government's internationally competitive, merit-based scholarship program providing opportunities for citizens of the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Europe and Americas to undertake study, research and professional development in Australia. The UNSW internal deadline for the next round of applications is 19 July 2010 (the following deadline will be January 2011).

2. UNSW International Research Scholarships

        http://www.grs.unsw.edu.au/scholarships/intschols/unswintschols.html

        These scholarships include full fees and some living allowance and are typically very competitive.  Please contact us before applying.

3. Any scholarships available from the student's home country (we have experience with applying for SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships). See also http://www.grs.unsw.edu.au/scholarships/homecountryschols.html

Postdoctoral Researchers

 We would also welcome applications from postdoctoral researchers who have external funding (e.g., SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship) and wish to join our team. We will assist with preparing applications for external funding.

Visiting Students/Researchers

We would also welcome applications for externally-funded shorter research visits from PhD students and researchers from other universities. We will assist with preparing applications for external funding (e.g., Endeavour Research Fellowships).

Enquiries should be addressed to geoff-morrison@forensic-voice-comparison.net

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Two positions are currently available at ELDA.

Engineer in HLT Evaluation Department

• Engineer/Master degree (preference for a PhD) in computer science, electrical engineering, computational linguistics, information science, knowledge management or similar fields.

• Experience and/or good knowledge of the information retrieval/information extraction programmes in Europe, the US and Japan.

• Experience in project management, including the management of European projects.

• Experience and/or good knowledge of issues related to Language Resources.

• Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular the ability to supervise members of a multidisciplinary team.

• Proficiency in English.

Programmer

ELDA offers a position for its Language Resource Production and Evaluation activities working in the framework of European projects. The position is related to a number of NLP activities within ELDA, with a focus on the development of web-service architectures for the automatic production and distribution of language resources. The candidate may also be involved in the creation of LR repositories, NLP applications development and/or evaluation, etc.

Profile :

• Degree or MSc in computer science, computational linguistics, natural language processing or similar fields (preference for a PhD)

• Good programming skills in C, C++, Perl and/or Java

• Experience and/or knowledge of web services

• Good knowledge of Linux and open source software

• Experience and/or knowledge of NLP is a plus

• Experience and/or knowledge of Machine Translation, Information Retrieval and related areas is a plus

• Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular to collaborate with members of a multidisciplinary and multilingual team

• Proficiency in French and English

Applicants should send (preferably via email) a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to :

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Sujet de these

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PhD POSITION in PERSON SEGMENTATION AND CLUSTERING IN AUDIO-VIDEO STREAMS,
36 MONTHS STARTING IN OCTOBER 2010,
in IDIAP (MARTIGNY, SUISSE) AND LIUM (LE MANS, FRANCE),
NET SALARY: 1700€ + INDEMNITY
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Research areas: 
Audio/video segmentation and clustering, speaker recognition, face recognition, pattern recognition, machine learning, audio and image processing.

---
Description: 
The objective of the thesis is to investigate novel algorithms for the automatic segmentation and clustering of people in audio-visual documents. More precisely, the goal is to detect the people who appear in the documents, when they appear or/and when they speak, with whom they speak, and who they are. The work will rely on and improve previous knowledge of the LIUM and IDIAP in speaker diarization, names recognition from automatic speech transcripts, person detection, tracking and recognition, and will be expanded to address the audio-visual identity association and the recognition of the roles of people in the Tv shows. The work will be evaluated in the framework of the REPERE evaluation campaign, which is a challenge for audio and video person detection and recognition in TV broadcasts (journal debates, sitcoms) and will focus on segmentation and clustering targeting well-known people (anchors, journalists, known or introduced persons).

---
Supervision and organization: 
The proposed position is funded by the ANR in the SODA project. It is a joint PhD position within both IDIAP and LIUM, under academic co-supervision by Profs. Paul Deléglise (LIUM), Jean-Marc Odobez (IDIAP) and Sylvain Meignier (LIUM). He will work closely with a post-doctoral fellow working for the same project.

The candidate will be registered as a student at the University of Le Mans. He will share this time between Le Mans and Martigny depending on the need. The position will start in October 2010 and the net salary will be between €1700 a month. 18 months of indemnity (€500 per month) will be provided to support the extra cost of working at two different sites, as well as the higher cost of life in Martigny.

---
Requirement: 
Applicants should hold a strong university degree entitling them to start a doctorate (Master’s degree or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, etc).

Applicants for this full-time 3 year PhD position should be fluent in English or in French. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during training.

Very strong software skills are required, especially in Java, C, C++, Unix/Linux, and at least one scripting language such as Perl or Python.

---
Contact: 
Please send a curriculum vitae to Jean-Marc Odobez odobez@idiap.ch AND sylvain.meignier@lium.univ-lemans.fr

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Post Doctoral Speech Synthesis Research Associate Position

The Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory at Northeastern University is pleased to announce the availability of a postdoctoral research associate position, funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Computer and Information Systems. This project aims to build a personalized speech synthesizer for individuals with severe speech impairments by mining their residual source characteristics and morphing these vocal qualities with filter properties of a healthy talker. An initial prototype has been designed and implemented in MATLAB. Further work is required to refine the voice morphing and speech synthesis algorithms, to develop a front-end user interface and to assess system usability. The successful candidate will work on an interdisciplinary team toward the project goals.

Required Skills:

                        PhD in computer science or electrical engineering or related field

                        Strong knowledge in machine learning and digital signal processing

                        Extensive experience with MATLAB and C/C++ programming

Experience with building graphical user interfaces

Knowledge of, and experience with, concatenative and/or model-based     speech synthesis

This position is available immediately. Funding is available for up to two years on this project. Additional funding may be available for work on related projects. Interested candidates should email and/or send the following to Rupal Patel, Director, Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115; r.patel@neu.edu; 617-373-5842: A cover letter stating your research interests and career goals, CV, two letters of recommendation, official transcripts of all postsecondary education.

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Speech Synthesis Post Doctoral Research Associate Position

The Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory at Northeastern University is pleased to announce the availability of a postdoctoral research associate position, funded by the National Science Foundation Division of Computer and Information Systems. This project aims to build a personalized speech synthesizer for individuals with severe speech impairments by mining their residual source characteristics and morphing these vocal qualities with filter properties of a healthy talker. An initial prototype has been designed and implemented in MATLAB. Further work is required to refine the voice morphing and speech synthesis algorithms, to develop a front-end user interface and to assess system usability. The successful candidate will work on an interdisciplinary team toward the project goals.

Required Skills:

                        PhD in computer science or electrical engineering or related field

                        Strong knowledge in machine learning and digital signal processing

                        Extensive experience with MATLAB and C/C++ programming

Experience with building graphical user interfaces

Knowledge of, and experience with, concatenative and/or model-based     speech synthesis

This position is available immediately. Funding is available for up to two years on this project. Additional funding may be available for work on related projects. Interested candidates should email and/or send the following to Rupal Patel, Director, Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115; r.patel@neu.edu; 617-373-5842: A cover letter stating your research interests and career goals, CV, two letters of recommendation, official transcripts of all postsecondary education.

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PhD Student Positions:
2-4 positions in Speech Communication
and
1 position in Music Communication
is open for application at Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden

Deadline for application: October 15, 2010

see: http://www.speech.kth.se/vacancies/

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Two positions are currently available at ELDA (reminder).

1) Engineer in HLT Evaluation Department

He/she will be in charge of managing the evaluation activities in relation with the collection of Language Resources for evaluation, the
evaluation of technology components, and in general, the setting up of an HLT evaluation infrastructure. As part of the HLT Evaluation
Department, he/she will be working on European projects and will be involved in the evaluation of technology components related to
information retrieval, information extraction, machine translation, etc.

Profile :

 * Engineer/Master degree (preference for a PhD) in computer science, electrical engineering, computational linguistics, information
   science, knowledge management or similar fields.

 * Experience and/or good knowledge of the information retrieval/information extraction programmes in Europe, the US and
   Japan.

 * Experience in project management, including the management of European projects.

 * Experience and/or good knowledge of issues related to Language Resources.

 * Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular the ability to supervise members of a multidisciplinary team.

 * Proficiency in English.

2) Programmer

ELDA offers a position for its Language Resource Production and Evaluation activities working in the framework of European projects.
The position is related to a number of NLP activities within ELDA, with a focus on the development of web-service architectures for
the automatic production and distribution of language resources. The candidate may also be involved in the creation of LR repositories, NLP
applications development and/or evaluation, etc.

Profile :

 * Degree or MSc in computer science, computational linguistics, natural language processing or similar fields (preference for a
   PhD)

 * Good programming skills in C, C++, Perl and/or Java

 * Experience and/or knowledge of web services

 * Good knowledge of Linux and open source software

 * Experience and/or knowledge of NLP is a plus

 * Experience and/or knowledge of Machine Translation, Information Retrieval and related areas is a plus

 * Ability to work independently and as part of a team, in particular to collaborate with members of a multidisciplinary and
   multilingual team

 * Proficiency in French and English


Applicants should send (preferably via email) a cover letter addressing the points listed above together with a curriculum vitae to:

Khalid Choukri
ELRA / ELDA
55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris
FRANCE
Fax : 01 43 13 33 30
Courriel :job@elda.org

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Reconnaissance automatique de la parole des personnes âgées pour les,services d’assistance aux personnes à domicile
Type de Poste: Ingénieur / doctorat
Échéance: 01/11/2010
Durée : 36 mois
Contact: Michel.Vacher@imag.fr ; francois.portet@imag.fr
http://www-clips.imag.fr/geod/User/michel.vacher/Pdf/profil_getalp_cirdo.pdf

Dans le cadre  du projet CIRDO (ANR-TECSAN) qui a pour objectif de mettre au point un 'Compagnon Intelligent Réagissant au Doigt et à l’Oeil' qui représente un produit de télélien social augmenté et automatisé par l’intégration de services innovants (reconnaissance automatique de la parole, analyse de situations -scènes- dans un environnement complexe non contrôlé), visant à favoriser l’autonomie et la prise en charge par les aidants, des patients atteints de maladies chroniques ou de la maladie Alzheimer ou apparentées. De plus, ce projet permettra la validation de technologies génériques, une évaluation psychologique et ergonomique portant sur les usages des services développés mais aussi des enquêtes critiques des connaissances acquises par les professionnels des services à la personne (SAP) qui seront ensuite transférées à l’ensemble du secteur.
L’objectif visé par le projet est la réalisation d’un système de reconnaissance vocale adapté à une population de personnes âgées. Les sorties de ce système seront utilisées pour déterminer si la personne est dans une situation anormale. La reconnaissance de la parole adaptée à la voix des personnes âgées est un domaine encore peu exploré. L’étude proposée nécessitera l’enregistrement de corpus de parole lue par des personnes âgées volontaires. En complément des enregistrements de sons et de paroles spontanées (onomatopées,hésitations, jurons...) permettront de compléter les modèles acoustiques du système et traiter les évènements audio non langagiers. L’aspect éthique sera pris en compte lors des enregistrements ou des évaluations.
Le programme de travail peut être résumé comme suit :
– réalisation d’un logiciel adapté permettant d’enregistrer la parole lue de personnes âgées ;
– collecte d’une base de signaux de parole de personnes âgées ;
– comparaison des performances du système de reconnaissance GETALP sur cette nouvelle base et sur une base témoin de locuteurs plus jeunes ; cette comparaison s’effectuera selon deux axes : reconnaissance de mots clés ou parole spontanée ;
– réalisation d’un système de reconnaissance automatique de la parole et de mots clefs adapté aux « personnes âgées ».
L’activité sera menée en collaboration avec les équipes de recherche (LIRIS-SAARA et GRePS) et les industriels impliqués dans le projet (CATEL, ISARP, Technosens, FSI).

compétences requises:
Le (la) candidat(e) recherché est un ingénieur ayant un haut niveau en informatique, des compétences en traitement du signal seraient un plus. Les travaux de développement nécessitent une bonne connaissance des langages C et C++. Enfin, la capacité de travailler en équipe et de manière autonome est primordiale.
La connaissance du domaine de la reconnaissance automatique de la parole n’est pas requise, la formation nécessaire sera assurée au sein de l’équipe de recherche.

Il est aussi possible d’effectuer une thèse dans le cadre de ce projet.

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The  Human  Language  Technology  research unit  at  Fondazione  Bruno
Kessler (Trento, Italy,  http://hlt.fbk.eu)
invites applications for a  research internship on automatic speech
recognition.

The internship is aimed at graduate students and may have a duration of
6-9 months. The internship is   intended research unit  at  Fondazione  Bruno
Kessler (Trento, Italy, 
to   provide  a strong theoretical and experimental background to a
student  interested  in pursuing later PhD studies.

Candidates should meet the following requirements:
- Degree  in  Computer  Science,  Electrical Engineering,  Physics  or
Mathematics.
- Studies should have been completed efficiently, recently and with an
above of average mark.
- Advanced  knowledge  in  either Machine Learning, Statistics, Pattern
Recognition, or Speech Recognition.
- Programming  experience in C/C++ and Perl in Unix environment.
- Good English knowledge.

Interested     candidates     should     visit    the     web     page
http://hlt.fbk.eu/openpositions/internship-ict and  to  get
in  contact  with  Diego  Giuliani (http://hlt.fbk.eu/people/giuliani)
to know more about the proposed  research project.

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JHU Summer Workshops
CALL FOR TEAM RESEARCH PROPOSALS (revised)
Deadline: Tuesday, November 9, 2010.

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/ws11/CFP

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins
University invites one-page research proposals for a
Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held
in Baltimore, MD, USA, July 11 to August 19, 2011.

An interactive peer-review meeting will refine and select proposals
to be funded for a six-week residential team exploration. Proposals
should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various
fields of Human Language Technology (HLT).  This year, proposals in
related areas of Machine Intelligence that share techniques with
HLT, such as Computer Vision (CV), are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and
technically related areas.  For example, proposals may address
novel topics or long-standing problems in one of the following
areas.

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY:  Proposals are welcomed that address any
  aspect of information extraction from speech signal (message,
  speaker identity, language,...). Of particular interest are
  proposals for techniques whose performance would be minimally
  degraded by input signal variations, or which require minimal
  amounts of training data.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Proposals for knowledge discovery
  from text are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional
  fields such as parsing, machine translation, information
  extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, and question
  answering.  Proposals may aim to improve the accuracy or enrich
  the output of such systems, or extend their reach by improving
  their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres.

* VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to
  parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an
  image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies
  may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g.,
  generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned
  image features that have recently become popular for object
  detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search
  for the best analysis.

* UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques
  that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data
  to address any of the challenges above could potentially make
  large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater
  robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and
  unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV
  are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in
past workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal
(http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals
for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated
no later than November 12, 2010. Authors passing this initial
screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas
to a peer-review panel on December 3-5, 2010.  It is expected
that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any
outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and
the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2011 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop
to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.
Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.
Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and
students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry
and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with
the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated
performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a
national search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing
outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2011 Summer
Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for
consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your
proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join
us for the December 3-5 meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for
further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area
of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued
next summer, we expect you to be available for participation
in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad
commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding
that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will
actively pursue it.  We in turn will make a good faith effort to
accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week
participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp@jhu.edu by
4PM EST on Tue, November 9, 2010.

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