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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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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Fully-funded Joint PhD Studentship in Speech-based Security over the Telephone

This Studentship is for a Joint Phd with the Speech & Image Research Group at Swansea University  and  Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon  at  Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse.

This studentship is fully funded and worth up to £15,000 p.a. plus fees.

Closing Date: Students are advised to apply as soon as possible.

Who is eligible:

• ·         Masters or Bachelor students with a first-class honours degree in a suitable engineering, mathematical or scientific discipline.
• ·         A good working knowledge of English is essential; a good knowledge of French is desirable.
• ·         UK/EU residents.

Further information:

This studentship is directly linked to a new EU Eureka/FP7 programme the overall aim of which is to enhance security of transactions over the telephone using speech-based signal processing and new biometric approaches.  Over the last 20 years both LIA and Swansea University have been at the forefront of international research in the area of  speaker recognition

How to Apply:

Send  your CV to:

Dr John Mason        j.s.d.mason@swansea.ac.uk

or

Dr. Jean-Francois BONASTRE   jean-francois.bonastre@univ-avignon.fr                               

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Ph D Position or Post-Doc Position in Speech Recognition at K.U.Leuven

Project: Feature Space Constraints for Acoustic Modeling of
under-resourced languages [Test Case: South African languages]


Job description

It is well known that the dimensionality of feature vectors used in state-of-the-art speech recognition systems (typically in the range 30-40) is much larger than the intrinsic dimensionality of speech which is estimated to be 7-10 only. Efforts to make the intrinsic dimensionality smaller have been largely futile as the constraints are too complex for our by and large linear techniques. This inefficiency in basic representation is the main reason why speech recognition systems contain so many hundreds of thousands parameters that are largely redundant and why we need such large corpora to train these parameters. While very large corpora are available for the major languages, this is not the case for smaller languages, making them “under-resourced”. This redundancy is also a major cause for lack of robustness in general.

The objective of this project is to apply novel mathematical techniques (e.g. spectral clustering) that can capture constraints - not in the feature space - but in the model space, i.e. in the underlying HMM parameters. Such constraints will lead to lesser requirements on the size of the training databases and should increase robustness in all situations where we don’t have large corpora available, such as speaker adaptation, accent adaptation or modeling of under-resourced languages. In this project two test cases of under-resourced languages will be studied: i) “Afrikaans”, for which data from Dutch and Flemish can be reused; ii) languages form the Bantu family as spoken in South Africa for which we can only bootstrap from a wide set of rather unrelated languages.

This project will be run in collaboration with Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa.


Qualifications

Candidates ideally have a university degree in engineering, computer science or applied mathematics. Skills and experience in any of the following areas are welcomed:

* speech recognition and speech modeling
* strong background in linear algebra and/or statistical parameter
estimation
* some familiarity with Dutch or Afrikaans
* computational skills (MATLAB, C, UNIX, Python)

Position

Within this project there is funding for either a 4yr Ph.D. scholarship or a 2 yr junior post-doc. In the case of a post-doc significant relevant experience would be requested.


Applications

Interested applicants send their CV to Prof. Dirk Van Compernolle [compi@esat.kuleuven.be ]

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Opened positions/internships at Microsoft: French Linguists (M/F)

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Financement  :  thèse  CIFRE  en  traitement  automatique de la langue parlée

Lieu :   EDF R&D,    1, av du Général de Gaulle,  92141 Clamart (80%)
            LIMSI, Université Paris XI, Orsay (20%)

Début : Janvier 2011
Durée : 3 ans


Titre : Extraction d'informations sémantiques à partir de données orales: application aux corpus EDF de dialogues client/conseiller

Encadrement   académique  :  Martine  Adda-Decker  (CNRS LIMSI/LPP, Univ. Paris 3),  Ioana  Vasilescu (CNRS LIMSI, Univ Paris 11), Sophie
Rosset (CNRS LIMSI, Univ Paris 11)

Encadrement industriel : Chloé Clavel (EDF R&D)

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Tenure-track position in signal processing and tenure-track position in acoustics at the Aalto University (Espoo, Finland).

We invite applications for two tenure-track positions (one in signal processing, one in acoustics) at the Aalto University, Espoo, Finland (formerly known as the Helsinki University of Technology). The tenure track is open to talented individuals who have excellent potential for a scientific career. On the basis of their experience and competence, applicants will be placed on any of the four levels of the tenure track system: Assistant Professor (1), Assistant Professor (2), Associate Professor, or Full Professor. The dead line of the call is January 30, 2011. Further information and instructions are available here:

http://www.aalto.fi/en/current/jobs/

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A PhD Position is available at the Multimodal Signal Analysis and Enhancement Laboratory (MuSAE Lab), Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS-EMT), located in Montreal, Canada.

The MuSAE Lab has an opening for a PhD student (full financial support) to work in the area of analysis, assessment, and/or enhancement of speech/audio/biomedical signals. Strong knowledge of digital signal processing (speech/audio/biomedical), pattern recognition, and sensor fusion is required. Strong programming skills in Matlab is preferred. Interested candidates should send their CV's, research interests and relevant publications (if applicable) to Dr. Tiago H. Falk (falk [at] emt [dot] inrs [dot] ca). Note that only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

Created in 1969, INRS is a university dedicated to research and graduate studies. At INRS, research is carried out in a context of innovation, action, and partnership with the industry and government. The Energy, Materials, and Telecommunications (INRS-EMT) Research Center focuses its research activities in strategic sectors of communications, photonics and energy. INRS-EMT is located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, a (bilingual, English/French) city renowned for its great pool of ethnic diversity and its vibrant cosmopolitan ambiance.

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