Research Associate, Dialogue Systems Group

Applications are invited for a Research Associate position, working on automatic 
speech recognition. The project will be based in the Dialogue Systems Group, in
the machine intelligence lab at the Cambridge University Engineering Department 
with an anticipated start date of May 1st, 2011 or soon after.

The aim of the project is to build a server-based robust spoken dialogue system 
providing tourist information for in-car users. The research associate will be 
involved in building the system's real-time conversational speech recognition 
engine. Tasks will include acoustic/language model training, implementing noise 
robustness techniques, decoder optimization, silence detection and turn taking 
research. ATK and HTK will be used as the speech recognition platform. The successful 
candidate will have a PhD in a relevant area, such as speech recognition or computer 
science, and be familiar with HMM based speech recognition techniques. Preference 
will be given to candidates with experience in noise robustness research, end-to-end 
implementation of speech recognition systems, and those familiar with the ATK/HTK 
platforms.

The Dialogue Systems Group is a world-leading research group working on robust 
statistical spoken dialogue systems. During the project, there will be good 
opportunities to attend international conferences and workshops.  Interested 
candidates should send their CV as soon as possible to Dr Kai Yu (ky219@cam.ac.uk) 
or Prof. Steve Young (sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk). Salary will be in the range £27319 to 
£35646 and the closing date is 14th April 2011.  

More information on the Dialogue Systems Group can be found at 
http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/dialogue.