Research Interests


I work on core algorithmic aspects of computer voice recognition, and artificial intelligence applied to voice forensics. My focus is on the development of technology for the automated discovery, measurement, representation and learning of the information encoded in voice signal for optimal voice intelligence. Speech, a highly ordered manifestation of the human voice, is also shaped and influenced by the external environment. Understanding general audio, it's interplay with human voice and it's contextual significance, is a vital part of my research. The final goal of my work is to enable computing machines to not only recognize the content of human speech better in general, but also to understand and respond to humans by gauging their persona, their intent and their staus vis-a-vis their environment from their voice alone, with an actuity that surpasses that of the human brain. This part of my research represents an intersection of the areas of AI and Voice Forensics. I continue to work towards making voice intelligence algorithms work much better than currently possible in high-noise and other kinds of complex environments, using minimal external (human-generated) knowledge. On the periphery, I work on the general quest for more automation, powerful search strategies and more scaleable learning algorithms for voice intelligence systems.

Media coverage...


Courses

Spring 2018:
  1. Computational Forensics and Investigative Intelligence

Students

  • Yolanda Gao, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Wayne Zhao, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Yandong Wen, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Vikram Kamath Cannanure, PhD, Human Computer Interaction

Recent Publications

  • Voice impersonation using generative adversarial networks, Yang Gao, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj, Int. conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP),Calgary, Canada, 15-20 April 2018 Canada. pdf

  • A corrective training approach for text-independent speaker verification, Yandong Wen, Tianyan Zhou, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj, Int. conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP),Calgary, Canada, 15-20 April 2018 Canada. pdf

  • Voice disguise by mimicry: deriving statistical articulometric evidence to evaluate claimed impersonation, Rita Singh, Abelino Jiminez and Anders Oland, IET Biometrics, January 2017. pdf

    • more below....

Books

Literary creations


Research publications (by topic)


  1. Forensics    Papers
    General theme: Forensic deductions from human voice, speech and audio signals in general. Publications in this area lag behind our current work by a couple of years at least, as we rapidly respond to the challenges posed by real crimes by creating technology that is immediately applied to the problem at hand.

  2. General audio analysis, microphone array processing, denoising, dereverberation, signal restoration    Papers
    General theme: Our approach is that of modeling the effect of highly-nonstationary noise and reverberation as compositional phenomena. Clean signals can then be recomposed from the bases of the composition. This approach differs from ones that model audio phenomena using dynamic generative models.

  3. Semi-supervised learning, structure discovery, statistical pattern recognition, classification    Papers
    These papers cover diferent topics such as learning basic units of sound from data, discovering pronunciations for words in terms of these units, selecting better classifiers using weaker classifiers iteratively in a gradient ascent solution to training good acoustic models from completely untranscribed data etc.. They also include general developments in classification techniques.

  4. Acoustic modeling, decoding, speech processing, speech recognition, adaptation, keyword spotting    Papers
    These papers relate to core and peripheral issues in speech recognition and processing for HMM-based ASR systems.

  5. Systems, applications, projects    Papers
    These papers describe systems developed or deployed for specific tasks. Also include papers from short-term student projects, technical reports and other writeups

  6. Miscellaneous    Papers
    Patents, papers on other topics such as chaos theory, radar signal design, geodynamics. From 1993-1998 I worked on these topics. Chaos and complexity theory remain my favorite hobby subjects.

Other activities

  • Associate Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Letters
  • Sphinx-4
  • LDC And other things for me...

Earlier Teaching


Spring 2017:
  1. Computational Forensics and Investigative Intelligence
    • CYSE-645 Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar
    • 15-498 (W) CMU Qatar
    • 15-498 (R) CMU Africa
  2. An Introduction to Knowledge based Deep Learning and Socratic Coaches
    • 11-364 CMU Pittsburgh
      • Backend collaboration. This course was taught in person by Prof. James Karl Baker at the CMU Pittsburgh location.

About me: I'm happiest where I come from. The mind is free, the days sparkle, the world is beautiful and little things are joyful.

Some hi_res pictures of me

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