It is a longstanding tradition that National Council committees visit their president’s canton at the end of his or her term.
On September 4th 2013, Afsaneh Asaei, made the public defense of her PhD thesis entitled "Model-based Sparse Component Analysis for Multiparty Distant Speech Recognition". She received the EPFL diploma from her doctoral advisor (Hervé Bourlard).
Prof. Hervé Bourlard, Idiap Director and EPFL Full Professor, has been named as a Fellow by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
Idiap Research Institute would like to congratulate Dinesh Babu Jayagopi who will join end of this year as an Assistant Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Between 2007 and 2011 he finished his Phd at Idiap, specialized in the field of Social Computing. Currently, he is a post-doctoral researcher at Idiap.
Bob provides both efficient implementations of several machine learning algorithms as well as a framework to help researchers to publish reproducible research.
Le déferlement d’outils technologiques accélère la communication et bouleverse notre rapport au monde. Basé à Martigny, l’Idiap – qui mène des projets de recherche fondamentale au plus haut niveau – travaille à l’amélioration des relations personne-machine et à l’optimisation de la communication humaine. Ce prestigieux institut s’engage pour un progrès scientifique au service de l’homme. Interview de son directeur, Hervé Bourlard, expert mondial du traitement de la parole et également professeur à l’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
On June 6th 2013, Majid Yazdani, made the public defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Similarity Learning Over Large Collaborative Networks". He received the EPFL diploma from his doctoral advisor (Andrei Popescu-Belis).
On June 28, 2013, Joan-Isaac Biel Tres made the public defense of his PhD thesis entitled "Mining Conversational Social Video". He received the EPFL diploma from his doctoral advisor (Daniel Gatica-Perez.)
Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are based on parametric statistical models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), exploiting 1) acoustic-phonetic models, which need to be trained on large amount of acoustic data, 2) a language model, which needs to be trained on large amount of text data and, finally, 3) a lexicon with phonetic transcription which requires linguistic expertise. Developing multilingual ASR systems, or systems that are robust to accents and dialects, is therefore a very challenging task for current state-of-the-art ASR systems.
Messages - Research - Network - Faces - Finances - Organization - Scientific inserts.
The collaboration between Idiap's Social Computing Group and the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel on analysis of nonverbal behavior in job interviews was featured in Radiotelevisione Svizzera (RSI) scientific program "Il giardino di Albert", aired on 26.05.2013.
This work investigates several extensions of a state-of-the-art content-based image retrieval system. The two main contributions are an algorithmic extension to make it suitable for collections of one million images or more, and a novel procedure to smoothly transition from an exploratory phase to an exploitation one.
The work described in her thesis takes place in the context of visual recognition and category detection, in all scenarios where there is a need for learning a new category model but it is not possible or expensive, to obtain large amounts of annotated training data. The main contribution of the thesis of Tatiana Tommasi is to cast the problem of learning to learn from small samples into the max-margin classifiers framework, providing to the community principled algorithms for open ended learning of object categories from few samples. The power and generality of the results achieved in the thesis has further been demonstrated in other domains, such as control of prosthetic hands for amputees.
In its issue of April 17, 2013, the Swiss economic journal Bilan released its annual ranking of the top 300 "most influential personalities" in Switzerland.
On April 4, 2013, Lakshmi Saheer successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "Unified Framework Of Feature Based Adaptation For Statistical Speech Synthesis And Recognition".
The project “Valais*Wallis Digital” proposed by the Idiap Research Institute seduces the jury of the Bicentenary of Valais’s entry into the Swiss Confederation (www.valais2015.ch) and is amongst the 13 dossiers selected out of 204 by the Government of Valais to receive the title “star-project”.
Mr Marc-André Berclaz has been appointed as Operations Director of the new EPFL Valais Wallis academic cluster. Marc-André Berclaz is the current director of HES-SO and has an in-depth understanding of the academic and political environment in Valais and in Switzerland as well as in the fields of the future cluster. Starting from March 2013, he will gradually take up his functions within the project, and will work fulltime as from July 2013.
Professor Philippe Gillet will ensure the presidency of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) from August 2013 to January 2014. The Swiss Federal Council has named him on Wednesday, February 20 in order to replace Patrick Aebischer, who will benefit from a sabbatical leave in order to explore new forms of education.
Find the top 50 start-ups list and the full article in number 3 of Bilan from February 20.
The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) expresses once again its faith in Idiap by according a subsidy of 10 MCHF Swiss francs for the period of 2013-2016. Concurrently, Idiap strengthens its ties with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL) by renewing and reinforcing the joint development plan that unites the two institutions since 2008.
at the Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (PETS), 2013.
A hands-on introduction to Bob and Python will take place at Idiap on January 30th between 2-4pm. Free places are still available.