The field of speech processing has seen extensive advancements in speech recognition, dialog systems, voice communications. However, these advancements leave out any primary task a subject may be performance while addressing to the communications task. In this talk, we will explore the issues of differences in speech production including vocal effort, and modeling for speech in the car environment. We will include work on distraction behavior modeling using CAN-Bus signal analysis, as well as detection of speech style in the voice. These all impact voice interaction applications in when being used by a driver in a moving vehicle.
John H.L. Hansen (IEEE: S'81-M'82-SM'93-F'07) was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. He received the B.S.E.E. degree with highest honors from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. in 1982. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983 and 1988, respectively.
He is presently Department Head and Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). He also holds a joint appointment as Professor in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Speech & Hearing). He holds the University Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications Engineering. At UTD, he established the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS), which is focused on interdisciplinary research in speech processing, hearing sciences, and language technologies. From 1999 until 2005, he was with the University of Colorado at Boulder where he served as Department Chairman and Professor in the Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences (Univ. of Colorado-Boulder). While at CU-Boulder, he held a joint appointment as Professor in the Department Electrical & Computer Engineering. In 1988, he established the Robust Speech Processing Laboratory (RSPL) at Duke Univ., and served as Coordinator for the Robust Speech Processing Group at CSLR.. He was co-founder of the Center for Speech and Language Research (CSLR), where he served as Associate Director from 1999-2003. He was a faculty member at Duke Univ., Department of Electrical Engineering and Department of Biomedical Engineering for eleven years before joining Univ. of Colorado in 1999. Previously, he was employed by the RCA Solid State Division, Somerville, N.J., (1981-82), and Dranetz Engineering Laboratories, Edison, N.J., (1978-81). He has served as a technical consultant to industry and the U.S. Government, including AT&T Bell Laboratories, I.B.M., Texas Instruments, Infoture, LENA Foundation, Li Technologies, Sparta, ASEC, SignalScape, Hughes Research Lab, VeriVoice, and DOD in the areas of voice communications, wireless telephony, robust speech recognition, forensic speech/speaker analysis, and human-computer interaction.
His research interests span the areas of digital speech processing, analysis and modeling of speech and speaker traits, speech pathology and voice assessment, speech enhancement and feature estimation in noise, robust speech recognition with current emphasis on robust recognition and training methods for spoken document retrieval and recognition in accent, noise, stress, and Lombard effect, and speech feature enhancement in hands-free environments for human-computer interaction.
Dr. Hansen is the author/coauthor of 340 journal and conference papers, books, and book chapters in the field of speech processing, and is coauthor of the textbook Discrete-Time Processing of Speech Signals, (Prentice-Hall, 1993 [1st Edition], IEEE Press, 2000 [2nd Edition]). He is lead author of the text "The Impact of Speech Under `Stress' on Military Speech Technology," published by NATO Research & Technology Organization RTO-TR-10, AC/323(IST)TP/5 IST/TG-01, March 2000 (PDF [1.3MB]). He was the recipient of a Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Research Award in 1993, a National Science Foundation's Research Initiation Award in 1990, and has been named a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow for "Contributions to the Advancement of Engineering Education." He was Named IEEE Fellow for contributions to 'Robust Speech Recognition in Stress and Noise," serving as member of IEEE Signal Processing Society - Speech Technical Committee, and member of IEEE Signal Processing Society - Educational Technical Committee, and has served as Technical Advisor to the U.S. Delegate for NATO (IST/TG-01: Research Study Group on Speech Processing, 1996-1998). He was elected and is serving as Chair-Elect for the IEEE Signal Processing Society - Speech Technical Committee (2010), and will serve as Chair from 2011-2013. In 2004, he was selected as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2005-2006. He has also served as Chairman for the IEEE Communications & Signal Processing Society, North Carolina Section (1992-94), previous Advisor for the Duke University IEEE Student Branch (1990-97), an invited tutorial speaker for IEEE ICASSP-95 and the NATO Speech Under Stress Research Workshop (Lisbon, Portugal), Tutorials Chairman for ICASSP-96: Inter. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (1999-2001) and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Speech & Audio Processing (1992-98). He has also served as guest editor of the Oct. 1994 special issue on Robust Speech Recognition for IEEE Trans. Speech & Audio Proc., and organized the Special Session: Speech Processing under "Stress" for IEEE ICASSP-99, Phoenix, Az, March 1999. He organized and served as General Chair for INTERSPEECH-2002/ICSLP-2002: Inter. Conf. Spoken Language Processing, held in Denver, CO in Sept. 2002. He is serving on the IEEE Signal Processing Speech Processing Technical Committee (2006-2008; 2009-2011), and the IEEE Signal Processing Educational Technical Committee (2005-2007; 2008-2010)). He is also serving as Co-organizer (with Scott Douglas, SMU) and Technical Program Chair for IEEE ICASSP-2010, Dallas, TX, March 2010.