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QMUL, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series

Seminar by:
Prof. Ian McLoughlin

Date/time: Wednesday 20th of April, 3.00-4.00 pm

Location: Graduate Centre - Room 104 & online

Open to students, staff, alumni, public; all welcome. Admission is FREE, no pre-booking required.

Title: The strange world of speech and audio AI

Abstract: Audio and speech encompass some of the biggest and most prominent AI fields that exist today - automatic speech recognition, synthesis, analysis, verification, validation, enhancement and transmission. Music compression, generation, analysis, transmission and enhancement. Security monitoring through audio; social and medical applications of sound and speech analysis. It even extends to animal sounds, squeaky engines, damaged pottery and road conditions. There is a lot we can do with audio - unlike video it works in the dark, travels around corners and past blocking objects, is low bandwidth, and low energy. In AI terms, it is usually uniformly sampled one dimensional time series information but is often transformed to two-dimensional input feature representations. This seminar will overview much of the wide range of AI applications for speech and audio, and delve into several specific areas to examine machine learning architectures, and how they compare.

Bio: Professor Ian McLoughlin (Singapore Institute of Technology since 2020) was a professor and Head of the School of Computing at the Medway campus of the University of Kent from 2015-2019, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China NELSLIP lab from 2012-2015. Before that he spent 10 years at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and 10 years in the electronics R&D industry in New Zealand and the UK. Professor McLoughlin became a Chartered Engineer in 1998 and a Fellow of the IET in 2013 and is currently a Chinese Academy of Sciences President's Fellow. He has over 250 papers, 5 books and 10 patents in the fields of speech & audio, signal processing and embedded systems, and has steered numerous technical innovations to successful conclusions.