News & Events

77 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.


  •  AWARD    CHiME 2012 Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge Best Performance
    Date: June 1, 2013
    Awarded to: Yuuki Tachioka, Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey
    Awarded for: "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark"
    Awarded by: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The results of the 2nd 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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  •  NEWS    International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME) 2013: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey, Shinji Watanabe and others
    Date: June 1, 2013
    Where: International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Discriminative Methods for Noise Robust Speech Recognition: A CHiME Challenge Benchmark" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME).
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  •  EVENT    CHiME 2013 - The 2nd International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments
    Date & Time: Saturday, June 1, 2013; 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
    Location: Vancouver, Canada
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Shinji Watanabe and Jonathan Le Roux are members of the organizing committee of CHiME 2013, the 2nd International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments, Jonathan acting as Program Co-Chair. MERL is also a sponsor for the event.

      CHiME 2013 is a one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with ICASSP 2013 that will consider the challenge of developing machine listening applications for operation in multisource environments, i.e. real-world conditions with acoustic clutter, where the number and nature of the sound sources is unknown and changing over time. CHiME brings together researchers from a broad range of disciplines (computational hearing, blind source separation, speech recognition, machine learning) to discuss novel and established approaches to this problem. The cross-fertilisation of ideas will foster fresh approaches that efficiently combine the complementary strengths of each research field.
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  •  NEWS    MERL obtains best results in the 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
    Date: June 1, 2013
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The results of the 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge are out! The team formed by MELCO researcher Yuuki Tachioka and MERL Speech & Audio team researchers Shinji Watanabe, Jonathan Le Roux and John Hershey obtained the best results in the continuous speech recognition task (Track 2). This very challenging task consisted in recognizing speech corrupted by highly non-stationary noises recorded in a real living room. Our proposal, which also included a simple yet extremely efficient denoising front-end, focused on investigating and developing state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition back-end techniques: feature transformation methods, as well as discriminative training methods for acoustic and language modeling. Our system significantly outperformed other participants. Our code has since been released as an improved baseline for the community to use.
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  •  EVENT    ICASSP 2013 - Student Career Luncheon
    Date & Time: Thursday, May 30, 2013; 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
    Location: Vancouver, Canada
    MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • MERL is a sponsor for the first ICASSP Student Career Luncheon that will take place at ICASSP 2013. MERL members will take part in the event to introduce MERL and talk with students interested in positions or internships.
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2013: 9 publications by Jonathan Le Roux, Dehong Liu, Robert A. Cohen, Dong Tian, Shantanu D. Rane, Jianlin Guo, John R. Hershey, Shinji Watanabe, Petros T. Boufounos, Zafer Sahinoglu and Anthony Vetro
    Date: May 26, 2013
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jianlin Guo; Anthony Vetro; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux
    Brief
    • The papers "Stereo-based Feature Enhancement Using Dictionary Learning" by Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Effectiveness of Discriminative Training and Feature Transformation for Reverberated and Noisy Speech" by Tachioka, Y., Watanabe, S. and Hershey, J.R., "Non-negative Dynamical System with Application to Speech and Audio" by Fevotte, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "Source Localization in Reverberant Environments using Sparse Optimization" by Le Roux, J., Boufounos, P.T., Kang, K. and Hershey, J.R., "A Keypoint Descriptor for Alignment-Free Fingerprint Matching" by Garg, R. and Rane, S., "Transient Disturbance Detection for Power Systems with a General Likelihood Ratio Test" by Song, JX., Sahinoglu, Z. and Guo, J., "Disparity Estimation of Misaligned Images in a Scanline Optimization Framework" by Rzeszutek, R., Tian, D. and Vetro, A., "Screen Content Coding for HEVC Using Edge Modes" by Hu, S., Cohen, R.A., Vetro, A. and Kuo, C.C.J. and "Random Steerable Arrays for Synthetic Aperture Imaging" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    ICLR 2013: publication by Jonathan Le Roux and others
    Date: May 2, 2013
    Where: International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Block Coordinate Descent for Sparse NMF" by Potluru, V.K., Plis, S.M., Le Roux, J., Pearlmutter, B.A., Calhoun, V.D. and Hayes, T.P. was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
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  •  NEWS    IEEE Signal Processing Letters: publication by Jonathan Le Roux and others
    Date: March 1, 2013
    Where: IEEE Signal Processing Letters
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The article "Consistent Wiener Filtering for Audio Source Separation" by Le Roux, J. and Vincent, E. was published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
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  •  TALK    Probabilistic Latent Tensor Factorisation
    Date & Time: Tuesday, February 26, 2013; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Taylan Cemgil, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • Algorithms for decompositions of matrices are of central importance in machine learning, signal processing and information retrieval, with SVD and NMF (Nonnegative Matrix Factorisation) being the most widely used examples. Probabilistic interpretations of matrix factorisation models are also well known and are useful in many applications (Salakhutdinov and Mnih 2008; Cemgil 2009; Fevotte et. al. 2009). In the recent years, decompositions of multiway arrays, known as tensor factorisations have gained significant popularity for the analysis of large data sets with more than two entities (Kolda and Bader, 2009; Cichocki et. al. 2008). We will discuss a subset of these models from a statistical modelling perspective, building upon probabilistic Bayesian generative models and generalised linear models (McCulloch and Nelder). In both views, the factorisation is implicit in a well-defined hierarchical statistical model and factorisations can be computed via maximum likelihood.

      We express a tensor factorisation model using a factor graph and the factor tensors are optimised iteratively. In each iteration, the update equation can be implemented by a message passing algorithm, reminiscent to variable elimination in a discrete graphical model. This setting provides a structured and efficient approach that enables very easy development of application specific custom models, as well as algorithms for the so called coupled (collective) factorisations where an arbitrary set of tensors are factorised simultaneously with shared factors. Extensions to full Bayesian inference for model selection, via variational approximations or MCMC are also feasible. Well known models of multiway analysis such as Nonnegative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), Parafac, Tucker, and audio processing (Convolutive NMF, NMF2D, SF-SSNTF) appear as special cases and new extensions can easily be developed. We will illustrate the approach with applications in link prediction and audio and music processing.
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  •  NEWS    Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey and others
    Date: November 28, 2012
    Where: Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The article "Factorial Models for Noise Robust Speech Recognition" by Hershey, J.R., Rennie, S.J. and Le Roux, J. was published in the book Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition.
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  •  TALK    Self-Organizing Units (SOUs): Training Speech Recognizers Without Any Transcribed Audio
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 2:15 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Herb Gish, BBN - Raytheon
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  EVENT    SANE 2012 - Speech and Audio in the Northeast
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
    Location: MERL
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • SANE 2012, a one-day event gathering researchers and students in speech and audio from the northeast of the American continent, will be held on Wednesday October 24, 2012 at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, MA.
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  •  TALK    A new class of dynamical system models for speech and audio
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 4:05 PM
    Speaker: Dr. John R. Hershey, MERL
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Understanding Audition via Sound Analysis and Synthesis
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 11:45 AM
    Speaker: Josh McDermott, MIT, BCS
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Factorial Hidden Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Noise Robust Speech Recognition
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 3:20 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Steven J. Rennie, IBM Research
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Advances in Acoustic Modeling at IBM Research: Deep Belief Networks, Sparse Representations
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:55 AM
    Speaker: Dr. Tara Sainath, IBM Research
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Recognizing and Classifying Environmental Sounds
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Prof. Dan Ellis, Columbia University
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Latent Topic Modeling of Conversational Speech
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 1:30 PM
    Speaker: Dr. Timothy J. Hazen and David Harwath, MIT Lincoln Labs / MIT CSAIL
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Zero-Resource Speech Pattern and Sub-Word Unit Discovery
    Date & Time: Wednesday, October 24, 2012; 9:10 AM
    Speaker: Prof. Jim Glass and Chia-ying Lee, MIT CSAIL
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  NEWS    IWSML 2012: publication by Jonathan Le Roux, John R. Hershey and others
    Date: March 31, 2012
    Where: International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Latent Dirichlet Reallocation for Term Swapping" by Heaukulani, C., Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Machine Learning for Speech Processing (IWSML).
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  •  NEWS    ICASSP 2012: 8 publications by Petros T. Boufounos, Dehong Liu, John R. Hershey, Jonathan Le Roux and Zafer Sahinoglu
    Date: March 25, 2012
    Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
    MERL Contacts: Dehong Liu; Jonathan Le Roux; Petros T. Boufounos
    Brief
    • The papers "Dictionary Learning Based Pan-Sharpening" by Liu, D. and Boufounos, P.T., "Multiple Dictionary Learning for Blocking Artifacts Reduction" by Wang, Y. and Porikli, F., "A Compressive Phase-Locked Loop" by Schnelle, S.R., Slavinsky, J.P., Boufounos, P.T., Davenport, M.A. and Baraniuk, R.G., "Indirect Model-based Speech Enhancement" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R., "A Clustering Approach to Optimize Online Dictionary Learning" by Rao, N. and Porikli, F., "Parametric Multichannel Adaptive Signal Detection: Exploiting Persymmetric Structure" by Wang, P., Sahinoglu, Z., Pun, M.-O. and Li, H., "Additive Noise Removal by Sparse Reconstruction on Image Affinity Nets" by Sundaresan, R. and Porikli, F. and "Depth Sensing Using Active Coherent Illumination" by Boufounos, P.T. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
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  •  NEWS    ASJ 2012: publication by Jonathan Le Roux and John R. Hershey
    Date: March 13, 2012
    Where: Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ)
    MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • The paper "Speech Enhancement by Indirect VTS" by Le Roux, J. and Hershey, J.R. was presented at the Acoustical Society of Japan Spring Meeting (ASJ).
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  •  TALK    Learning Intermediate-Level Representations of Form and Motion from Natural Movies
    Date & Time: Wednesday, February 22, 2012; 11:00 AM
    Speaker: Dr. Charles Cadieu, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
    Abstract
    • The human visual system processes complex patterns of light into a rich visual representation where the objects and motions of our world are made explicit. This remarkable feat is performed through a hierarchically arranged series of cortical areas. Little is known about the details of the representations in the intermediate visual areas. Therefore, we ask the question: can we predict the detailed structure of the representations we might find in intermediate visual areas?

      In pursuit of this question, I will present a model of intermediate-level visual representation that is based on learning invariances from movies of the natural environment and produces predictions about intermediate visual areas. The model is composed of two stages of processing: an early feature representation layer, and a second layer in which invariances are explicitly represented. Invariances are learned as the result of factoring apart the temporally stable and dynamic components embedded in the early feature representation. The structure contained in these components is made explicit in the activities of second-layer units that capture invariances in both form and motion. When trained on natural movies, the first-layer produces a factorization, or separation, of image content into a temporally persistent part representing local edge structure and a dynamic part representing local motion structure. The second-layer units are split into two populations according to the factorization in the first-layer. The form-selective units receive their input from the temporally persistent part (local edge structure) and after training result in a diverse set of higher-order shape features consisting of extended contours, multi-scale edges, textures, and texture boundaries. The motion-selective units receive their input from the dynamic part (local motion structure) and after training result in a representation of image translation over different spatial scales and directions, in addition to more complex deformations. These representations provide a rich description of dynamic natural images, provide testable hypotheses regarding intermediate-level representation in visual cortex, and may be useful representations for artificial visual systems.
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  •  TALK    Auxiliary Function Approach to Source Localization and Separation
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 3:40 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Nobutaka Ono, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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  •  TALK    Analysing Digital Music
    Date & Time: Thursday, October 20, 2011; 2:20 PM
    Speaker: Prof. Mark Plumbley, Queen Mary, London
    MERL Host: Jonathan Le Roux
    Research Area: Speech & Audio
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