University of theBasque Country
The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is a teaching and research institution officially founded in 1985. The university employs over 7,000 people in 20 faculties and schools distributed in three different campuses, with a total of more than 54,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The university offers the highest number of doctorate programmes of all Spanish universities, one third of which have received a mention of excellence from the Spanish Ministry of Education. The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation has recognised the university as an International Research Campus of Excellence and the UPV/EHU is also ranked in Shangai Ranking (2020).
Since the first Research Framework Programmes, the university has been very active and has participated in many collaborative projects. In Horizon 2020, we have been successful with 135 projects, which has resulted into a total sum of 35,5 million Euros in research and innovation financing so far.
Aholab Signal Processing research group from EHU has extensive experience in speech processing, speech synthesis and speech conversion. They have developed machine learning based algorithms aimed at improving the intelligibility of speech from laryngectomised patients as well as techniques to personalize synthetic speech that require reduced amounts of recordings to obtain the customized synthetic voice. Among the more than 50 research projects developed by the group, it is worth mentioning Repair, Storage and Rehabilitation of Speech (RESTORE, TEC2015-67163-C2-1-R).
This project was aimed at improving the quality of communication for people with difficulties producing speech while advancing in the research of restoration and rehabilitation of disordered speech, mainly focusing on speech from laryngectomees.
Key Research Infraestructures
- Acoustically isolated room, equipped with professional audio recording systems.
- EMG signals acquisition system (96 channels)
- 2 servers with 7 GPUs
- 2 disk and network servers, with 20Tb network storage.
- 8 fully equipped workstations.
Projects to be hosted
Research team of subproject 1
INMA HERNAEZ RIOJA
She will manage the coordinated project, ensuring no critical deviations from the initial planning and the achievement of the general goals of the project.
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Eva Navas
She will be managing subproject 1 and will be responsible for the intermediate and final technical reports. She also will be involved in the tasks related to parallel data training.
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Ibon Saratxaga
He will be involved in tasks related to the experimental setup of the recording equipment, non-Parallel data training and real time direct speech Synthesis.
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Jon Sanchez
Responsible for the acquisition of EMG data, and will also be in the care of ensuring that the project website has complete and updated information.
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Work team of subproject 1
Tanja Schultz
Main scientific advisor for the project, shaping the research priorities during its lifetime.
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Michael Wand
Consultant for issues relating to the experimental setup of the recording equipment and the data acquisition procedure.
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Lorenz Diener
Consultant for issues relating to the experimental setup of the recording equipment and the data acquisition procedure.
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Victor García
Develop and integrate novel neural vocoders in the general Direct Speech Synthesis schemas.