20 February: fyi -- jobs & phd funding, Germany
Index of February 2008 | Index of year: 2008 | Full index
Research in Speech Technology and Usability
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-Labs,
http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/) as an "An-Institut" of
Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) is funded and supported by
Deutsche Telekom AG, owner of the T-Mobile brand in several
countries. Located in the heart of Berlin, T-Labs can offer both
academic freedom and access to industry resources.
Under the general paradigm of "usability", T-Labs researchers are
currently involved in a number of academic and industrial R&D projects
and are looking to expand their strengths in the area of audio
processing, with a focus on recognition of distant speech, meta-data
extraction as well as language and dialog modeling. Our goal is to
both improve currently deployed IVR systems and to provide ideas and
consulting for future voice-based services. In this setting, "word
error rate" is only one optimization criterion among many and it is
not our primary target to fundamentally change the core technology,
but to improve and make usable, what is conceivable today.
We are offering two- to six-year positions suitable for recent PhD in
speech recognition or related fields, with a desire to further
strengthen their academic credentials, but also have a strong interest
in getting their research results transferred to production
systems. In collaboration with the chair of quality and usability at
TUB
(http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_iv/institut_fuer_softwaretechnik_und_theoretische_informatik/sprofessur_usability/),
we also offer the possibility to work towards a PhD within T-Labs. For
these positions, previous experience in speech technology is not
mandatory, but still desirable. For both tracks, you should have a
strong analytical background, excellent programming skills, be
self-motivated and have good communication skills. Knowledge of the
German language however is not required. Interest in commercial
applications of speech recognition and an understanding of business
aspects is a plus.
Depending on your interest and qualification profile, we may be able
to arrange for opportunities including collaboration with external
partners, too.
Our current research focus is on:
* Robustness against environmental conditions
* Single channel de-noising, echo cancellation as preprocessing for ASR
* Acoustic models suited for distant microphones
* Channel adaptive/ normalized training
* Wide context clustering for robustness against room acoustics
* Comparisons between research toolkits and commercial toolkits using statistical language models
* Work on real-world telephony data
* Keyword spotting and topic detection, mainly on calls "lost" by the current IVR
* Clustering of unknown segments for novelty detection (i.e. upcoming topics)
* Meta-data (age, gender, emotion) extraction and processing
* Speech recognition in smart-home environments
* Dialog systems
Your qualification profile:
* Strong team player, good communication skills, self-motivated personality.
* Interested in working in a strategic corporate environment.
* Interest and/ or experience in speech processing.
* Software skills
* C/ C++, Tcl/ Tk, Python, Java
* Linux and Windows
* Research or industry ASR software
* Office software
* Languages
* English
* German a plus
* Education
* CS, EE, Maths, Physics and related disciplines
* Diploma/ Masters or PhD
For further information please contact:
Dr. Florian Metze
florian.metze@telekom.de
Tel.: +49 (30) 8353-58478
Dr. Florian Metze
Senior Research Scientist
Technische Universität Berlin, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, D-10587 Berlin
+49 30 8353 58478 (Fon)
+49 30 8353 58409 (Fax)
e-mail: florian.metze@telekom.de
http://www.telekom.de/laboratories
Deutsche Telekom AG
Aufsichtsrat: Dr. Klaus Zumwinkel (Vorsitzender)
Vorstand: René Obermann (Vorsitzender), Dr. Karl-Gerhard Eick (stellvertretender Vorsitzender), Hamid Akhavan, Reinhard Clemens, Timotheus Höttges, Thomas Sattelberger
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Bonn HRB 6794, Sitz der Gesellschaft: Bonn, WEEE-Reg.-Nr.: DE50478376
Index of February 2008 | Index of year: 2008 | Full index