ISCApad116

We invite all laboratories and industrial companies which have job offers to send them to the ISCApad editor: they will appear in the newsletter and on our website for free. (also have a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs.html as well as http://www.elsnet.org/ Jobs)

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Speech Engineer/Senior Speech Engineer at Microsoft, Mountain View, CA,USA

Job Type: Full-Time
Send resume to Bruce Buntschuh
Responsibilities:
Tellme, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, is a company that is focused on delivering the highest quality voice recognition based applications while providing the highest possible automation to its clients. Central to this focus is the speech recognition accuracy and performance that is used by the applications. The candidate will be responsible for the development, performance analysis, and optimization of grammars, as well as overall speech recognition accuracy, in a wide variety of real world applications in all major market segments. This is a unique opportunity to apply and extend state of the art speech recognition technologies to emerging spaces such as information search on mobile devices.
Requirements:
� Strong background in engineering, linguistics, mathematics, machine learning, and or computer science.
� In depth knowledge and expertise in the field of speech recognition.
� Strong analytical skills with a determination to fully understand and solve complex problems.
� Excellent spoken and written communication skills.
� Fluency in English (Spanish a plus).
� Programming capability with scripting tools such as Perl.
Education:
MS, PhD, or equivalent technical experience in an area such as engineering, linguistics, mathematics, or computer science.

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Speech Technology and Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Redmond WA, USA

Speech Technology and Software Development Engineer

Speech Technologies and Modeling

Speech Component Group

Microsoft Corporation

Redmond WA, USA

Please contact: Yifan.Gong@microsoft.com

Microsoft's Speech Component Group has been working on automatic speech recognition (SR) in real environments. We develop SR products for multiple languages for mobile devices, desktop computers, and communication servers. The group now has an open position for speech scientists with a software development focus to work on our acoustic and language modeling technologies. The position offers great opportunities for innovation and technology and product development.

Responsibilities:

�     Design and implement speech/language modeling and recognition algorithms to improve recognition accuracy.
�     Create, optimize and deliver quality speech recognition models and other components tailored to our customers' needs.
�     Identify, investigate and solve challenging problems in the areas of recognition accuracy from speech recognition system deployments.
�     Improve speech recognition language expansion engineering process that ensures product quality and scalability.

Required competencies and skills:

�     Passion about speech technology and quality software, demonstrated ability relative to the design and implementation of speech recognition algorithms.
�     Strong desire for achieving excellent results, strong problem solving skills, ability to multi-task, handle ambiguities, and identify issues in complex SR systems.
�     Good software development skills, including strong aptitude for software design and coding. 3+ years of experience in C/C++ and programming with scripting languages are highly desirable.
�     MS or PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or related disciplines, with strong background in speech recognition technology, statistical modeling, or signal processing.
�     Track record of developing SR algorithms, or experience in linguistic/phonetics, is a plus.

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PhD Research Studentship in Spoken Dialogue Systems- Cambridge UK

Applications are invited for an EPSRC sponsored studentship in Spoken Dialogue Systems leading to the PhD degree. The student will join a team lead by Professor Steve Young working on statistical approaches to building Spoken Dialogue Systems. The overall goal of the team is to develop complete working end-to-end systems which can be trained from real data and which can be continually adapted on-line. The PhD work will focus specifically on the use of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for dialogue modelling and techniques for learning and adaptation within that framework. The work will involve statistical modelling, algorithm design and user evaluation. The successful candidate will have a good first degree in a relevant area. Good programming skills in C/C++ are essential and familiarity with Matlab would be useful.
The studentship will be for 3 years starting in October 2007 or January 2008. The studentship covers University and College fees at the Home/EU rate and a maintenance allowance of 13000 pounds per annum. Potential applicants should email Steve Young with a brief CV and statement of interest in the proposed work area

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AT&T - Labs Research: Research Staff Positions - Florham Park, NJ

AT&T - Labs Research is seeking exceptional candidates for Research Staff positions. AT&T is the premiere broadband, IP, entertainment, and wireless communications company in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world. Our researchers are dedicated to solving real problems in speech and language processing, and are involved in inventing, creating and deploying innovative services. We also explore fundamental research problems in these areas. Outstanding Ph.D.-level candidates at all levels of experience are encouraged to apply. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in research, a collaborative spirit and strong communication and software skills. Areas of particular interest are

Large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition
Acoustic and language modeling
Robust speech recognition
Signal processing
Speaker recognition
Speech data mining
Natural language understanding and dialog
Text and web mining
Voice and multimodal search

AT&T Companies are Equal Opportunity Employers. All qualified candidates will receive full and fair consideration for employment. More information and application instructions are available on our website at http://www.research.att.com/. Click on "Join us". For more information, contact Mazin Gilbert (mazin at research dot att dot com).

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Research Position in Speech Processing at UGent, Belgium

Background

Since March 2005, the universities of Leuven, Gent, Antwerp and Brussels have joined forces in a big research project, called SPACE (SPeech Algorithms for Clinical and Educational applications). The project aims at contributing to the broader application of speech technology in educational and therapeutic software tools. More specifically, it pursues the automatic detection and classification of reading errors in the context of an automatic reading tutor, and the objective assessment of disordered speech (e.g. speech of the deaf, dysarthric speech, ...) in the context of computer assisted speech therapy assessment. Specific for the target applications is that the speech is either grammatically and lexically incorrect or a-typically pronounced. Therefore, standard technology cannot be applied as such in these applications.

Job description

The person we are looking for will be in charge of the data-driven development of word mispronunciation models that can predict expected reading errors in the context of a reading tutor. These models must be integrated in the linguistic model of the prompted utterance, and achieve that the speech recognizer becomes more specific in its detection and classification of presumed errors than a recognizer which is using a more traditional linguistic model with context-independent garbage and deletion arcs. A challenge is also to make the mispronunciation model adaptive to the progress made by the user.

Profile

We are looking for a person from the EU with a creative mind, and with an interest in speech & language processing and machine learning. The work will require an ability to program algorithms in C and Python. Having experience with Python is not a prerequisite (someone with some software experience is expected to learn this in a short time span). Demonstrated experience with speech & language processing and/or machine learning techniques will give you an advantage over other candidates.

The job is open to a pre-doctoral as well as a post-doctoral researcher who can start in November or December. The job runs until February 28, 2009, but a pre-doctoral candidate aiming for a doctoral degree will get opportunities to do follow-up research in related projects.

Interested persons should send their CV to Jean-Pierre Martens (martens@elis.ugent.be). There is no real deadline, but as soon as a suitable person is found, he/she will get the job.

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Summer Inter positions at Motorola Schaumburg Illinois USA

Motorola Labs - Center for Human Interaction Research (CHIR) located in Schaumburg Illinois, USA, is offering summer intern positions in 2008 (12 weeks each).

CHIR's mission:

Our research lab develops technologies that provide access to rich communication, media and information services effortless, based on natural, intelligent interaction. Our research aims on systems that adapt automatically and proactively to changing environments, device capabilities and to continually evolving knowledge about the user.

Intern profiles:

1) Acoustic environment/event detection and classification.

Successful candidate will be a PhD student near the end of his/her PhD study and is skilled in signal processing and/or pattern recognition; he/she knows Linux and C/C++ programming. Candidates with knowledge of acoustic environment/event classification are preferred.

2) Speaker adaptation for applications on speech recognition and spoken document retrieval.

The successful candidate must currently be pursuing a Ph.D. degree in EE or CS with complete understanding and hand-on experience on automatic speech recognition related research. Proficiency in Linux/Unix working environment and C/C++ programming. Strong GPA. A strong background in speaker adaptation is highly preferred.

3) Development of voice search-based web applications on a smartphone

We are looking for an intern candidate to help create an "experience" prototype based on our voice search technology. The app will be deployed on a smartphone and demonstrate intuitive and rich interaction with web resources. This intern project is oriented more towards software engineering than research. We target an intern with a master's degree and strong software engineering background. Mastery of C++ and experience with web programming (AJAX and web services) is required. Development experience on Windows CE/Mobile desired.

4) Integrated Voice Search Technology For Mobile Devices.

Candidate should be proficient in information retrieval, pattern recognition and speech recognition. Candidate should program in C++ and script languages such as Python or Perl in Linux environment. Also, he/she should have knowledge on information retrieval or search engines.

We offer competitive compensation, fun-to-work environment and Chicago-style pizza.

If you are interested, please send your resume to:

Dusan Macho, CHIR-Motorola Labs

Email: dusan.macho@motorola.com

Tel: +1-847-576-6762

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Nuance: Software engineer speech dialog tools

In order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

SOFTWARE ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOGUE TOOLS

As part of our team, you will be creating solutions for voice user interfaces for embedded applications on mobile and automotive platforms.

OVERVIEW:

- You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR R&D team, developing technology, tools, and run-time software to enable our customers to develop and test embedded speech applications. Together with our team of speech and language experts, you will work on natural language dialogue systems for our customers in the Automotive and Mobile sector.

- You will work either at Nuance's Office in Aachen, a beautiful, old city right in the heart of Europe with great history and culture, or at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the vibrant and picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Both Aachen and Ghent offer some of the most spectacular historic town centers in Europe, and are home to large international universities.

- You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- You will work on the development of tools and solutions for cutting edge speech and language understanding technologies for automotive and mobile devices.

- You will work on enhancing various aspects of our advanced natural language dialogue system, such as the layer of connected applications, the configuration setup, inter-module communication, etc.

- In particular, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, evaluation, optimization and testing, and documentation of tools such as GUI and XML applications that are used to develop, configure, and fine-tune advanced dialogue systems.

QUALIFICATIONS:

- You have a university degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, computational linguistics, or a related field.

- You have very strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally also for embedded applications.

- You have experience with Python or other scripting languages.

- GUI programming experience is a strong asset.

The following skills are a plus:

- Understanding of communication protocols

- Understanding of databases

- Understanding of computational agents and related frameworks (such as OAA).

- A background in (computational) linguistics, dialogue systems, speech processing, grammars, and parsing techniques, statistics and machine learning, especially as related to natural language processing, dialogue, and representation of information

- You can work both as a team player and as goal-oriented independent software engineer.

- You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

- You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

- You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

- Knowledge of other languages is a plus.

CONTACT:

Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

Deanna Roe Deanna.roe@nuance.com

Please make sure to document to us your excellent software engineering skills.

ABOUT US:

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched. With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

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Nuance: Speech scientist London UK

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched. With more than 2000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

To strengthen our International Professional Services team, based in London, we are currently looking for a

Speech Scientist, London, UK

Nuance Professional Services (PS) has designed, developed, and optimized thousands of speech systems across dozens of industries, including directory search, call center automation, applications in telecom, finance, airline, healthcare, and other verticals; applications for video games, mobile dictation, enhanced search services, SMS, and in-car navigation. Nuance PS applications have automated approximately 7 billion phone conversations for some of the world's most respected companies, including British Airways, Vodafone, Amtrak, Bank of America, BellCanada, Citigroup, General Electric, NTT and Verizon.

The PS organization consists of energetic, motivated, and friendly individuals. The Speech Scientists in PS are among the best and brightest, with PhDs from universities such as Cambridge (UK), MIT, McGill, Harvard, Penn, CMU, and Georgia Tech, and having worked at research labs such Bell Labs, Motorola Labs, and ATR (Japan), culminating in over 300 years of Speech Science experience and covering well over 20 languages.

Come and join Nuance PS and work on the latest technology from one of the prominent speech recognition technology providers, and make a difference in the way the world communicates.

Job Overview

As a Speech Scientist in the Professional Services group, you will work on automated speech recognition applications, covering a broad range of activities in all project phases, including the design, development, and optimization of the system. You will:

Work across application development teams to ensure best possible recognition performance in deployed systems
Identify recognition challenges and assess accuracy feasibility during the design phase,
Design, develop, and test VoiceXML grammars and create JSPs, Java, and ECMAscript grammars for dynamic contexts
Optimize accuracy of applications by analyzing performance and tuning statistical language models, pronunciations, and acoustic models, including identifying areas for improvement by running the recognizer offline
Contribute to the generation and presentation of client-facing reports
Act as technical lead on more intensive client projects
Develop methodologies, scripts, procedures that improve efficiency and quality
Develop tools and enhance algorithms that facilitate deployment and tuning of recognition components
Act as subject matter domain expert for specific knowledge domains
Provide input into the design of future product releases

Required Skills

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Physics, Mathematics, or related field (or equivalent)
Strong analytical and problem solving skills and ability to troubleshoot issues
Good judgment and quick-thinking
Strong programming skills, preferably Perl or Python
Excellent written and verbal communications skills
Ability to scope work taking technical, business and time-frame constraints into consideration
Works well in a team and in a fast-paced environment

Beneficial Skills

Strong programming skills in either Perl, Python, Java, C/C++, or Matlab
Speech recognition knowledge
Strong pattern recognition, linguistics, signal processing, or acoustics knowledge
Statistical data analysis
Experience with XML, VoiceXML, and Wiki
Ability to mentor or supervise others
Additional language skills, eg French, Dutch, German, Spanish

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Nuance: Research engineer speech engine

n order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH ENGINE

As part of our team, you will be creating solutions for voice user interfaces for embedded applications on mobile and automotive platforms.

OVERVIEW:

- You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR R&D team, developing, improving and maintaining core ASR engine algorithms for our customers in the Automotive and Mobile sector.

- You will work either at Nuance's Office in Aachen, a beautiful, old city right in the heart of Europe with great history and culture, or at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the vibrant and picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Both Aachen and Ghent offer some of the most spectacular historic town centers in Europe, and are home to large international universities.

- You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- You will work on the developing, improving and maintaining core ASR engine algorithms for cutting edge speech and natural language understanding technologies for automotive and mobile devices.

- You will work on the design and development of more efficient, flexible ASR search algorithms with high focus on low memory and processor requirements.

QUALIFICATIONS:

- You have a university degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, computational linguistics, or a related field. PhD is a plus.

- A background in (computational) linguistics, speech processing, ASR search, confidence values, grammars, statistics and machine learning, especially as related to natural language processing.

- You have very strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally also for embedded applications.

The following skills are a plus:

- You have experience with Python or other scripting languages.

- Broad knowledge about architectures of embedded platforms and processors.

- Understanding of databases

- You can work both as a team player and as goal-oriented independent software engineer.

- You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

- You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

- You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

- Knowledge of other languages is a plus.

CONTACT:

Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

Deanna Roe Deanna.roe@nuance.com

Please make sure to document to us your excellent software engineering skills.

ABOUT US:

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched. With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

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Nuance RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOG SYSTEMS:

In order to strengthen our Embedded ASR Research team, we are looking for a:

RESEARCH ENGINEER SPEECH DIALOGUE SYSTEMS

As part of our team, you will be creating speech technologies for embedded applications varying from simple command and control tasks up to natural language speech dialogues on mobile and automotive platforms.

OVERVIEW:

-You will work in Nuance's Embedded ASR research and production team, creating technology, tools and runtime software to enable our customers develop embedded speech applications. In our team of speech and language experts, you will work on natural language dialogue systems that define the state of the art.

- You will work at Nuance's International Headquarters in Merelbeke, a small town just 5km away from the heart of the picturesque city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Ghent has one of the most spectacular historic town centers of Europe and is known for its unique vibrant yet cozy charm, and is home to a large international university.

- You will work in an international company and cooperate with people on various locations including in Europe, America, and Asia. You may occasionally be asked to travel.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- You will work on the development of cutting edge natural language dialogue and speech recognition technologies for automotive embedded systems and mobile devices.

- You will design, implement, evaluate, optimize, and test new algorithms and tools for our speech recognition systems, both for research prototypes and deployed products, including all aspects of dialogue systems design, such as architecture, natural language understanding, dialogue modeling, statistical framework, and so forth.

- You will help the engine process multi-lingual natural and spontaneous speech in various noise conditions, given the challenging memory and processing power constraints of the embedded world.

QUALIFICATIONS:

- You have a university degree in computer science, (computational) linguistics, engineering, mathematics, physics, or a related field. A graduate degree is an asset.

-You have strong software and programming skills, especially in C/C++, ideally for embedded applications. Knowledge of Python or other scripting languages is a plus. [HQ1]

- You have experience in one or more of the following fields:

dialogue systems

applied (computational) linguistics

natural language understanding

language generation

search engines

speech recognition

grammars and parsing techniques.

statistics and machine learning techniques

XML processing

-You are a team player, willing to take initiative and assume responsibility for your tasks, and are goal-oriented.

-You can work in a multi-national team and communicate effectively with people of different cultures.

-You have a strong desire to make things really work in practice, on hardware platforms with limited memory and processing power.

-You are fluent in English and you can write high quality documentation.

-Knowledge of other languages is a strong asset.

CONTACT:

Please send your applications, including cover letter, CV, and related documents (maximum 5MB total for all documents, please) to

Deanna Roe Deanna.roe@nuance.com

ABOUT US:

Nuance is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance by calling directory assistance, requesting account information, dictating patient records, telling a navigation system their destination, or digitally reproducing documents that can be shared and searched. With more than 3000 employees worldwide, we are committed to make the user experience more enjoyable by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Making each of those experiences productive and compelling is what Nuance is about.

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Research Position in Speech Processing at Nagoya Institute of

Research Position in Speech Processing at Nagoya Institute of

Technology, Japan

Nagoya Institute of Technology is seeking a researcher for a

post-doctoral position in a new European Commission-funded project

EMIME ("Efficient multilingual interaction in mobile environment")

involving Nagoya Institute of Technology and other five European

partners, starting in March 2008 (see the project summary below).

The earliest starting date of the position is March 2007. The initial

duration of the contract will be one year, with a possibility for

prolongation (year-by-year basis, maximum of three years). The

position provides opportunities to collaborate with other researchers

in a variety of national and international projects. The competitive

salary is calculated according to qualifications based on NIT scales.

The candidate should have a strong background in speech signal

processing and some experience with speech synthesis and recognition.

Desired skills include familiarity with latest spectrum of technology

including HTK, HTS, and Festival at the source code level.

For more information, please contact Keiichi Tokuda

(http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~tokuda/).

About us

Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT), founded on 1905, is situated in

the world-quality manufacturing area of Central Japan (about one hour

and 40 minetes from Tokyo, and 36 minites from Kyoto by Shinkansen).

NIT is a highest-level educational institution of technology and is

one of the leaders of such institutions in Japan. EMIME will be

carried at the Speech Processing Laboratory (SPL) in the Department of

Computer Science and Engineering of NIT. SPL is known for its

outstanding, continuous contribution of developing high-performance,

high-quality opensource software: the HMM-based Speech Synthesis

System "HTS" (http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/), the large vocabulary

continuous speech recognition engine "Julius"

(http://julius.sourceforge.jp/), and the Speech Signal Processing

Toolkit "SPTK" (http://sp-tk.sourceforge.net/). The laboratory is

involved in numerous national and international collaborative

projects. SPL also has close partnerships with many industrial

companies, in order to transfer its research into commercial

applications, including Toyota, Nissan, Panasonic, Brother Inc.,

Funai, Asahi-Kasei, ATR.

Project summary of EMIME

The EMIME project will help to overcome the language barrier by

developing a mobile device that performs personalized speech-to-speech

translation, such that a user's spoken input in one language is used

to produce spoken output in another language, while continuing to

sound like the user's voice. Personalization of systems for

cross-lingual spoken communication is an important, but little

explored, topic. It is essential for providing more natural

interaction and making the computing device a less obtrusive element

when assisting human-human interactions.

We will build on recent developments in speech synthesis using hidden

Markov models, which is the same technology used for automatic speech

recognition. Using a common statistical modeling framework for

automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis will enable the use

of common techniques for adaptation and multilinguality.

Significant progress will be made towards a unified approach for

speech recognition and speech synthesis: this is a very powerful

concept, and will open up many new areas of research. In this

project, we will explore the use of speaker adaptation across

languages so that, by performing automatic speech recognition, we can

learn the characteristics of an individual speaker, and then use those

characteristics when producing output speech in another language.

Our objectives are to:

1. Personalize speech processing systems by learning individual

characteristics of a user's speech and reproducing them in

synthesized speech.

2. Introduce a cross-lingual capability such that personal

characteristics can be reproduced in a second language not spoken

by the user.

3. Develop and better understand the mathematical and theoretical

relationship between speech recognition and synthesis.

4. Eliminate the need for human intervention in the process of

cross-lingual personalization.

5. Evaluate our research against state-of-the art techniques and in a

practical mobile application.

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C/C++ Programmer Munich, Germany

Digital publishing AG is one of Europe's leading producers of  interactive software for foreign language training. In our e- learning courses we want to place the emphasis on speaking and  spoken language understanding.  In order to strengthen our Research & Development Team in Munich,  Germany, we are looking for experienced C or C++ programmers with  at least 3 years experience in the design and coding of  sophisticated software systems under Windows.

We offer

-a creative working atmosphere in an international team of   software engineers, linguists and editors working on    challenging research projects in speech recognition and    speech dialogue systems

- participation in all phases of a product life cycle, as we    are interested in the fast transfer of research results    into products.

- the possibility to participate in international scientific    conferences.

- a permanent job in the center of Munich.

- excellent possibilities for development within our fast    growing company.

- flexible working times, competitive compensation and    arguably the best espresso in Munich.

We expect

-several years of practical experience in software    development in C or C++ in a commercial or academic    environment.

-experience with parallel algorithms and thread    programming.

-experience with object-oriented design of software    systems.

-good knowledge of English or German.

Desirable is

-experience with optimization of algorithms.

-experience in statistical speech or language    processing, preferably speech recognition, speech    synthesis, speech dialogue systems or chatbots.

-experience with Delphi or Turbo Pascal.

Interested? We look forward to your application:  (preferably by e-mail)

digital publishing AG

Freddy Ertl  f.ertl@digitalpublishing.de

Tumblinger Stra�e 32

D-80337 M�nchen Germany

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Speech and Natural Language Processing Engineer at M*Modal, Pittsburgh.PA,USA

Speech and Natural Language Processing Engineer

M*Modal is a fast-moving speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Our portfolio of conversational speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies is widely recognized as the most advanced in the industry. We are a leading innovator in the field of conversational documentation services (CDS) - where speech recognition and natural language understanding are combined in a unique setup targeted to truly understand conversational speech and turn it directly into actionable and meaningful data. Our proprietary speech understanding technology - operating on M*Modal's computing grid hosted in our national data center - is already redefining the way clinical information is captured in healthcare.

We are seeking an experienced and dedicated speech and natural language processing engineer who wants to push the frontiers of conversational speech understanding. Join our renowned research and development team, and add to our unique blend of scientific and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities:

You will be working with other members of the R&D team to continuously improve our speech and natural language understanding technologies.
You will participate in designing and implementing algorithms, tools and methodologies in the area of automatic speech recognition and natural language processing/understanding.
You will collaborate with other members of the R&D team to identify, analyze and resolve technical issues.

Requirements:

Solid background in speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and information extraction.

2+ years of experience participating in software development projects
Proficient with Java, C++ and scripting (e.g. Python, Perl, ...)
Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
Integrate and communicate well in small R&D teams
Masters degree in CS or related engineering fields
Experience in a healthcare-related field a plus

In June 2007 M*Modal moved to a great new office space in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. We are excited to be growing and are looking for individuals who have a passion for the work they do and are interested in becoming a member of a dynamic work group of smart passionate drivers who also know how to have fun.

M*Modal offers a top-notch benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, short-term disability, matching 401K savings plan, holidays, paid-time-off and tuition refund. If you would like to be considered for this opportunity, please send your resume and cover letter to Mary Ann Gamble at maryann.gamble@mmodal.com.

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Senior Research Scientist -- Speech and Natural Lgage Processing at M*Modal, Pittsburgh, PA,USA

Senior Research Scientist -- Speech and Natural Language Processing

M*Modal is a fast-moving speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Our portfolio of conversational speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies is widely recognized as the most advanced in the industry. We are a leading innovator in the field of conversational documentation services (CDS) - where speech recognition and natural language understanding are combined in a unique setup targeted to truly understand conversational speech and turn it directly into actionable and meaningful data. Our proprietary speech understanding technology - operating on M*Modal's computing grid hosted in our national data center - is already redefining the way clinical information is captured in healthcare.

We are seeking an experienced and dedicated senior research scientist who wants to push the frontiers of conversational speech understanding. Join our renowned research and development team, and add to our unique blend of scientific and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities:

Plan and perform research and development tasks to continuously improve a state-of-the-art speech understanding system
Take a leading role in identifying solutions to challenging technical problems
Contribute original ideas and turn them into product-grade software implementations
Collaborate with other members of the R&D team to identify, analyze and resolve technical issues

Requirements:

Solid research & development background with 3+ years of experience in speech recognition research, covering at least two of the following topics: speech processing, acoustic modeling, language modeling, decoding, LVCSR, natural language processing/understanding, speaker verification/identification, audio mining
Working knowledge of Machine Learning, Information Extraction and Natural Language Processing algorithms
3+ years of experience participating in large-scale software development projects using C++ and Java.
Excellent analytical, problem-solving and communication skills
PhD with focus on speech recognition or Masters degree with 3+ years industry experience working on automatic speech recognition
Experience and/or education in medical informatics a plus
Working experience in a healthcare related field a plus

In June 2007 M*Modal moved to a great new office space in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh. We are excited to be growing and are looking for individuals who have a passion for the work they do and are interested in becoming a member of a dynamic work group of smart passionate drivers who also know how to have fun.

M*Modal offers a top-notch benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, short-term disability, matching 401K savings plan, holidays, paid-time-off and tuition refund. If you would like to be considered for this opportunity, please send your resume and cover letter to Mary Ann Gamble at maryann.gamble@mmodal.com.

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Postdoc position at LORIA, Nancy, France

Building an articulatory model from ultrasound, EMA and MRI data

Postdoctoral position

Research project

An articulatory model comprises both the visible and the internal mobile articulators which are involved in speech articulation: the lower jaw, tongue, lips and velum) as well as the fixed walls (the palate, the rear wall of the pharynx). An articulatory model is dynamic since the articulators deform during speech production. Such a model has a potential interest in the field of language learning by providing visual feedback on the articulation conducted by the learner, and many other applications.

Building an articulatory model is difficult because the different articulators have to be detected from specific image modalities: the lips are acquired through video, the tongue shape is acquired through ultrasound imaging with a high frame rate but these 2D images are very noisy. Finally, 3D images of all articulators can be obtained with MRI but only for sustained sounds (as vowels) due to the long acquisition time of MRI images.

The subject of this post-doc is to construct a dynamic 3D model of the entire vocal tract by merging the 3D information available in the MRI acquisitions and temporal 2D information provided by the contours of the tongue visible on the ultrasound images or X-ray images.

We are working on the construction of an articulatory model within the European project ASPI (http://aspi.loria.fr/ ).

We already built an acquisition system which allows us to obtain synchronized data from ultrasound, MRI, video and EM modalities.

Only a few complete articulatory models are currently available in the world and a real challenge in the field is to design set-ups and easy-to-use methods for automatically building the model of any speaker from 3D and 2D images. Indeed, the existence of more articulatory models would open new directions of research about speaker variability and speech production.

Objectives

The aim of the subject is to build a deformable model of the vocal tract from static 3D MRI images and 2D dynamic 2D sequences. Previous works have been conducted on the modelling of the vocal tract, and especially of the tongue (M. Stone[1] O. Engwall[2]). Unfortunately, important human interaction is required to extract tongue contours in the images. In addition, only one image modality is often considered in these works, thus reducing the reliability of the model obtained.

The aim of this work is to provide automatic methods for segmenting features in the images as well as methods for building a parametric model of the 3D vocal tract with these specific aims:

The segmentation process is to be guided by prior knowledge on the vocal tract. In particular shape, topologic as well as regularity constraints must be considered.
A parametric model of the vocal tract has to be defined (classical models are linear and built from a principal component analysis). Special emphasis must be put on the problem of matching the various features between the images.
Besides classical geometric constraints, both the building and the assessment of the model will be guided by acoustic distances in order to check for the adequation between the sound synthesized from the model and the sound realized by the human speaker.

Skill and profile

The recruited person must have a solid background in computer vision and in applied mathematics. Informations and demonstrations on the research topics addressed by the Magrit team are available at http://magrit.loria.fr/

References

[1] M. Stone : Modeling tongue surface contours from Cine-MRI images. Journal of Speech, language, hearing research, 2001.

[2]:P. Badin, G. Bailly, L. Reveret: Three-dimensional linear articulatory modeling of tongue, lips and face based on MRI and video images, Journal of Phonetics, 2002, vol 30, p 533-553

Contact

Interested candidates are invited to contact Marie-Odile Berger, berger@loria.fr, +33 3 54 95 85 01

Important information

This position is advertised in the framework of the national INRIA campaign for recruiting post-docs. It is a one year position, renewable, beginning fall 2008. The salary is 2,320� gross per month.

Selection of candidates will be a two step process. A first selection for a candidate will be carried out internally by the Magrit group. The selected candidate application will then be further processed for approval and funding by an INRIA committee.

Doctoral thesis less than one year old (May 2007) or being defended before end of 2008. If defence has not taken place yet, candidates must specify the tentative date and jury for the defence.

Important - Useful links

Presentation of INRIA postdoctoral positions

To apply (be patient, loading this link takes times...)

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Number: 116	Date: 02/06/2008
Author: Chris Wellekens

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