New systems improve voice recognition

to spend more resources on the important speech sounds that reveal speaker identity traits.

Team members had implemented models that incorporated all of these algorithms. They further refined their techniques with regular online input from other teams in The Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland.

“In our PhD research, we were already identifying these problems for application in the real world without considering the competition,” said Omid Sadjadi, an electrical engineering doctoral candidate at UT Dallas. “Because we were already seeing results on some of the data used for our development, we expected to do well in the challenge.”

The release notes that the team was one of a few that were asked to give oral presentations of their approach to other challenge participants during a two-day workshop held in Orlando, Florida, in December.

In the five main categories of the challenge, CRSS scores ranked among the top three universities in the world and in the top five among all teams, including research labs and companies.

“It was a great team effort,” Taufiq Hasan, who was a lead student in the team. “Everyone contributed and was passionate about it. We worked day and night throughout the process, and the team was very humbled by their success.”

Earlier this summer, the paper written about their systems earned the Best Paper Award for student authors during the IEEE International Conference — the top conference in the signal processing field that was attended by more than 2,000 people. IBM is a sponsor of the award, and the winning paper received $500. In addition to Hasan and Sadjadi, other students contributing to the paper were Gang Liu and Navid Shokouhi, doctoral students in electrical engineering. Hynek Boil, an assistant research professor in electrical engineering, was a coauthor on the paper and collaborator in the competition.

“We were surprised because a team of mostly graduate students earning this award is rare, since companies and government research labs with much more resources also compete,” Sadjadi said. “That we took a systematic approach to the challenge of recognizing speakers made the difference.”

Since the competitions, team members said more companies and researchers have pursued them for collaborations.

“The goal of the competitions such as these has been to inspire research and start discussions about new and different ways to process speech for the real world, as well as give students the opportunity to work on real-world problems,” said Hansen, holder of the Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications. “I’m proud that our students and staff within CRSS have made significant contributions to this aim.”