7 June: fyi -- speech research funding, Cambridge

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Department of Engineering

The University is committed to equality of opportunity

Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED) is able to offer a
number of well-funded three year PhD research studentships associated
with a new grant (HTK Rich Audio Transcription) from the DARPA
Effective, Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text (EARS) speech
recognition research programme. The overall aim of EARS is to very
significantly advance the state-of-the-art while tackling the hardest
speech recognition challenges including the transcription of broadcast
news and telephone conversations. A wide range of PhD topics will be
on offer at Cambridge which are aimed at both improving the word error
rate of conventional speech recognition systems and developing an
enriched output format with additional acoustic and linguistic
metadata. For more information see:
http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/EARS/ears_summary.html

Most of the work will use the existing large vocabulary recognition
system developed at Cambridge based on the publicly available HTK
toolkit ( http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/). The studentships give an
opportunity for study towards a PhD while working in a research group
which has a world-leading reputation in speech recognition
research. There are excellent opportunities for publication and travel
to international conferences. The group has outstanding research
facilities.

Candidates must have a very good first degree in a relevant discipline
and a Masters degree (or equivalent) is an advantage. Since the
project will use and extend the HTK large vocabulary speech
recognition system, familiarity with the HTK toolkit and a good
knowledge of C is a distinct advantage.

The research studentships are available from October 2002. The
studentships will cover fees and a maintenance allowance in excess of
current EPSRC awards from the UK Government. For non-EU candidates,
the studentships will also cover all overseas fees. Interested
candidates should contact the Principal Investigator of the CUED EARS
project:

Phil Woodland, Engineering Dept,
Trumpington Street, Cambridge.
Email: pcw@eng.cam.ac.uk Tel: +44 1223 332669

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