2 PhDs in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, to start in Sept 2019. Both come with a stipend of 18000Euros per year, along with full student fees for a 4 year period. Please contact me  at nharte@tcd.ie if interested in either post.

Human Speech?  How do I know it’s Real?

20 years ago, the major focus in developing speech synthesis systems was testing the intelligibility of the output speech. More recently, attention has switched focus to assessing not only intelligibility, but also naturalness, pleasantness, pauses, stress, intonation, emotion and listening effort. The intelligibility of systems is now so high, that synthetic voices are becoming more human-like. This is good news for generating realistic synthetic speech for applications such as voice reconstruction or gaming. In tandem, research in the area of speaker verification, or voice based biometrics, has started to pay closer attention to the issue of spoofing – where systems are attacked with reconstructed speech. Now, with improvements in speech synthesis, another realistic form of spoofing is the use synthetic speech generated by modelling the target user. So how can you tell when speech is real, or when it is fake? This is the focus of this PhD project and it goes to the very core of the nature of human speech.

Remote and Automatic Monitoring of Bird Populations

The objective of this PhD project is to define the next-generation approaches to the use of remote monitoring for populations of birds of conservation concern. This PhD programme will develop acoustic techniques for the monitoring of bird species of conservation concern by leveraging recent developments in speech and language processing technologies. The PhD will develop appropriate approaches to acoustic data collection in the wild to ensure that acoustic surveys yield accurate bird population data and investigate audio signal analysis steps necessary to extract useful information from these long recordings. Approaches will involve the use of signal processing and deep learning. The research will be conducted in collaboration with the Dept of Zoology at TCD.

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Associate Professor Naomi Harte

School of Engineering,

Trinity College Dublin

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