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Professor Naomi Harte

Professor in Speech Technology (Electronic & Elect. Engineering)
ARAS AN PHIARSAIGH
      
Profile Photo

Professor Naomi Harte

Professor in Speech Technology (Electronic & Elect. Engineering)
ARAS AN PHIARSAIGH

 nharte@tcd.ie

 3531896 1861


Naomi is Professor in Speech Technology in the School of Engineering in Trinity College. She is Co-PI and a founding member of the ADAPT SFI Centre. In ADAPT, she has led a major Research Theme centered on Multimodal Interaction involving researchers from Universities across Ireland and was instrumental in developing the future vision for the Centre for 2021-2026. She is also a lead academic of the hugely successful Sigmedia Research Group in the School of Engineering. She was appointed as an SFI Engineering Initiative Lecturer in Digital Media in TCD in 2008 (Stokes Programme). Prior to returning to academia, Naomi worked in high-tech start-ups in the field of DSP Systems Development, including her own company. She also previously worked in McMaster University in Canada. She was a Visiting Professor at ICSI in 2015, and became a Fellow of TCD in 2017. She earned a Google Faculty Award in 2018 and was shortlisted for the AI Ireland Awards in 2019. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Computer Speech and Language and was General Chair of INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin. Naomi's research centres around Human Speech Communication. She likes to consider speech as something we both hear and see, with a strong multimodal aspect to her work. Her research involves the design and application of mathematical algorithms to enhance or augment speech communication between humans and technology. Much of that work is underpinned by signal processing and machine learning, but also requires an understanding of how humans interact. Her current research projects include audio-visual speech recognition, speech synthesis evaluation, multimodal speech analysis, and birdsong. Her industrial background brings a real-world approach to her research.
  Audio-visual speech processing   Birdsong Analysis   Emotion in Speech   Human-Computer Interaction   Information/Communication Systems   Multimedia   Signal Processing   Speaker Recognition   SPEECH   Speech Biometrics   Speech processing/technology   Speech Quality   SPEECH RECOGNITION
Project Title
 Dynamic Visual Features and Improved Audio-Visual Fusion for Automatic Speech Recognition
From
Oct. 2009
To
Sept. 2013
Summary
Human speech is bimodal in nature. Incorporating visual features in Automatic Speech Recognition systems can improve performance in real environments. This work addresses core challenges in audio-visual speech recognition. It will develop new dynamic visual features that better capture the correlations in key mouth movements used by humans in lipreading. This is crucial in improving Hidden Markov Model performance. It will explore a new audio-fusion strategy motivated by the differing visibility of visemes allowing the influence of the audio and video stream to change over time.
Funding Agency
SFI
Programme
RFP
Project Title
 Robust Speaker Verification
From
2009
To
2012
Summary
Biometrics involves the use of intrinsic physical or behavioural traits of humans to verify their identity. Traits used in biometrics typically include face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. Many are concerned that these technologies are potentially invasive and open to fraud. Speaker verification, using voice or voice and video, has been recognised as an important alternative in the world of biometrics. It is less invasive and requires less expensive installations that iris and fingerprint authentication systems. The changes that occur in the human voice due to ageing have been well documented. The impact of these changes on speaker verification is less clear. In this work, we examine the effect of long-term vocal ageing on a speaker verification systems.
Funding Agency
IRCSET
Person Months
36
Project Title
 Audio-Visual Fusion for Human Computer Interaction.
From
2011
To
2014
Summary
This project will thus focus on key challenges in Audio Visual Speech Recognition: . Given state of the art audio and visual features, do early or late integration strategies work better? . How well does such an integration scheme translate to less controlled situations, where the speech is less constrained, intonation or prosody is more natural, or the speech is emotionally influenced? . Can these algorithms work on a real handheld device?
Funding Agency
IRCSET
Project Title
 Speech Quality for VoIP
From
April 2011
To
April 2012
Summary
This project is developing new metrics to measure speech quality for VoIP applications, particularly Google Chrome WebRTC
Funding Agency
Google Inc
Project Type
Industrially sponsored research
Person Months
12
Project Title
 Advanced Metrics for Audio-Visual Signal Quality in Internet Communications
From
Sept 2013
To
Dec 2014
Summary
Funding Agency
Enterprise Ireland/Google
Programme
IPP
Project Type
Research
Person Months
42

Details Date
International Expert Reviewer for Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
Peer reviewing for top conferences and journals, e.g.: IEEE ICASSP, Interspeech, ACM ICMI, EUSIPCO, IEEE ASRU, IEEE ICIP, ACL, Speech Communication, JASA, IEEE Trans Multimedia ongoing
Senior Technical Program Committee for ACM ICMI 2019
TCD Representative to MIDAS (MicroElectronics Design Association of Ireland)
Irish representative to the EU COST Action 2101 entitled "Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart cards"
Regular Session Chair at Interspeech ongoing
Irish representative to the EU COST Action IC1006 Integrating Biometrics and Forensics for the Digital Age
ICT Evaluator for FP6 ICT Call FP6-2004-SME-COOP in Co-operative research (Research involving SMEs, Universities and research organisations). Acted as Group Rapporteur.
Expert Evaluator for FP7 Call FP7-REGIONS-2012-2013-1 in Transnational cooperation between regional research-driven clusters
PhD External Examiner University of Cambridge
PhD External Examiner, Victoria University, New Zealand
PhD External Examiner, University of York
PhD External Examiner, Athlone Institute of Technology
PhD External Examiner, University of East Anglia
Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
French Basic Basic Basic
German Basic Basic Basic
Irish Medium Medium Medium
Details Date From Date To
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
ISCA (International Speech Communication Association)
IEEE Women in Engineering
IEEE Signal Processing Society
Storey, Edward and Harte, Naomi and Bell, Peter, Language Bias in Self-Supervised Learning For Automatic Speech Recognition, 2024, pp37 â€" 42 , Notes: [Cited by: 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Sébastien Le Maguer, Simon King, Naomi Harte, The limits of the Mean Opinion Score for speech synthesis evaluation, Computer Speech and Language, 84, 2024, Journal Article, IN_PRESS
Russell, Sam O'Connor and Gessinger, Iona and Krason, Anna and Vigliocco, Gabriella and Harte, Naomi, What automatic speech recognition can and cannot do for conversational speech transcription, Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 3, (3), 2024, Notes: [Cited by: 0; All Open Access, Hybrid Gold Open Access], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Lopez-Espejo, Ivan and Rosello, Eros and Edraki, Amin and Harte, Naomi and Jensen, Jesper, Noise-Robust Hearing Aid Voice Control, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2024, Notes: [Cited by: 0], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Gonzales, Michael Gian and Corcoran, Peter and Harte, Naomi and Schukat, Michael, Joint Speech-Text Embeddings for Multitask Speech Processing, IEEE Access, 12, 2024, p145955 â€" 145967 , Notes: [Cited by: 0; All Open Access, Gold Open Access], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Kotey, S., Dahyot, R., Harte, N., Fine Grained Spoken Document Summarization Through Text Segmentation, 2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, SLT 2022 - Proceedings, 2023, p647-654 , Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Gonzales, M.G., Corcoran, P., Harte, N., Schukat, M., Joint Speech-Text Embeddings with Disentangled Speaker Features, 2023 34th Irish Signals and Systems Conference, ISSC 2023, 2023, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Anderson, M., Kinnunen, T., Harte, N., Learnable Frontends That Do Not Learn: Quantifying Sensitivity To Filterbank Initialisation, ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings, 2023-June, 2023, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Pandey, A., Edlund, J., Le Maguer, S., Harte, N., Listener sensitivity to deviating obstruents in WaveNet, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, 2023-August, 2023, p1080-1084 , Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Le Maguer, S., Anderson, M., Harte, N., Sp1NY: A Quick and Flexible Speech visualisation Tool in Python, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH, 2023-August, 2023, p2012-2013 , Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
  

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Dr. Silvia Giordani, Poster Making and Presentation, TCD, Chemistry Dept, 2007, Notes: [power point presentation on how to create a poster fro research and presentation tips for students.], Poster, PUBLISHED
Fine-Davis, M., Welcome Address, Mental Health and the Workplace: Challenges and Opportunities, Trinity College, Dublin, 13 March, 2000, Conference Paper, PRESENTED

  


Award Date
AI Awards (Shortlisted in Best Application of AI in an Academic Research Body) 2019
Google Faculty Award 2018
Fellow of Trinity College Dublin 2017
Cognitec Best Student Paper Award for PhD Student Finnian Kelly, International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) 2012
Shortlisted for Provost Teaching Award 2011
British Telecom Research Scholarship 1997-1999
IEE Leslie H. Paddle Scholarship 1995-1998
Glen Dimplex British Council Chevening Scholarship 1995-1996
Awarded a Gold Medal for Distinction in Engineering upon graduation. 1995
Maurice F. Fitzgerald Prize - first overall in the Engineering Faculty in the Degree exams. 1995
David Clark Prize - first place in the Microelectronic and Electrical Engineering Degree exams. 1995