The IEEE and Audio Analysis Lab is organizing a talk on robot audition by IEEE Fellow Ken Sugiyama under the IEEE SPS Distinguished Leturer program next week. All are welcome.

Title: Signal Processing for Robot Audition: How signal processing helps a robot recognize user commands in adverse environment

Abstract: This lecture presents an overview of signal processing for robot audition. Human-robot communication is essentially supported by speech recognition whose performance is known to be seriously degraded in adverse environment. To help a robot recognize commands given by the user, four signal processing techniques are useful, namely, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, noise cancellation, echo cancellation, and beam forming. Problems in these techniques which are specific to human-robot communication are identified and solutions to those problems are presented. Video demonstrations in the talk will help audience understand effects of these techniques.

Biography: Akihiko Sugiyama (a.k.a. Ken Sugiyama), affiliated with NEC Data Science Research Labs., has been engaged in a wide variety of research projects in signal processing such as audio coding and interference/noise control. His team developed the world’s first Silicon Audio in 1994, the ancestor of iPod. He served as Chair of Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Tech. Committee, IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) [2011-2012], as associate editors for several journals such as IEEE Trans. SP [1994-1996], as the Secretary and a Member at Large to the Conference Board of SPS [2010-2011], as a member of the Awards Board of SPS [2015- ], and as the Chair of Japan Chapter of SPS [2010-2011]. He was a Technical Program Chair for ICASSP2012. He has contributed to 16 chapters of books and is the inventor of over 150 registered patents with more pending applications in the field of signal processing in Japan and overseas. He received 13 awards such as the 2002 IEICE Best Paper Award, the 2006 IEICE Achievement Award, and the 2013 Ichimura Industry Award. He is Fellow of IEEE and IEICE, and a Distinguished Lecturer in 2014 and 2015 for IEEE SPS. He is also known as a big host for a total of over 70 internship students.

Date: December 5, 15:00-16:00

Place: Room 3.529, AD:MT, Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg