Sturm BL, Mailhé B, Plumbley M. On Theorem 10 in “On Polar Polytopes and the Recovery of Sparse Representations”. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 2013.

Sturm BL. Evaluating music mood recognition: Lessons from music genre recognition. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

Sturm BL. Music genre recognition with risk and rejection. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

Sturm BL. On music genre classification via compressive sampling. International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. 2013.

On March 15th, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, founder of the Audio Analysis Lab, received the Statoil Prize (Statoil Prisen) 2013. Mads received the prestigious prize of 100.000 DKK for his significant research contributions within digital signal processing and analysis of speech, music and sound.

The Statoil Prize is one of the oldest, danish prizes within the field of technical research, and has been awarded once a year since 1951.

Congratulations to Mads on this impressive achievement!

We are pleased to announce that the Audio Analysis Lab had 8 out of 8 papers accepted for presentation at the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). The titles of the papers are:

• Multichannel Signal Enhancement using Non-Causal, Time-Domain Filters
• Statistically Efficient Methods for Pitch and DOA Estimation
• Joint DOA and Fundamental Frequency Estimation based on Relaxed Iterative Adaptive Approach and Optimal Filtering
• An Exact Subspace Method for Fundamental Frequency Estimation
• Bayesian Model Comparison and the BIC for Regression Models
• Estimating Multiple Pitches Using Block Sparsity
• Real-Time Implementations of Sparse Linear Prediction for Speech Processing
• Recovery of Nested Support by Greedy Sparse Representation Algorithms

This year, ICASSP is held in Vancouver, Canada, and the conference is taking place from May 26 to May 31. The paper presentations are not scheduled yet, but they should soon be available on the conference homepage.

The Audio Analysis Lab is extremely proud to announce that Jacob Benesty has joined the lab as Professor! Jacob Benesty is well-known in the community for his work on microphone array signal processing, which is both highly-cited and has received several awards. He is currently on sabbatical from his normal position at University of Quebec, INRS-EMT, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and he will be employed by Aalborg University for the next six months working on the Villum Foundation project.

We are happy to announce that Audio Analysis Lab member Bob Sturm has just been promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. Bob, who graduated from UCSB and has been with us at AAU since January 2010, is currently working on the project Greedy Sparse Approximation and the Automatic Description of Audio and Music Data , which funded by an individual postdoc grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research, and will continue do so for another year. Congratulations to Bob!

On October 29 and 30, the Audio Analysis Lab held its first annual workshop. The workshop started with a social event and dinner on the 29th followed by presentations and discussions on the 30th, where ongoing research as well as ideas for future projects were discussed.

On Friday Nov 2, Lei Yu will give a talk at 13:00 in room A6-306.

Title: Coordinated Scheduling and Beamforming for Multicell Spectrum Sharing Networks

Abstract:  We consider the downlink of a multicell network where neighboring multi-antenna base stations share the spectrum and coordinate their frequency and spatial resource allocation strategies to  improve the overall network performance. The objective of the coordination is to maximize the number of users that can be scheduled, meeting their quality-of-service requirements with the minimum total transmit power. The coordinated scheduling and multiuser transmit beamforming problem is combinatorial; we formulate it as a mixed-integer  second-order cone program and propose a branch & bound algorithm that  yields the optimal solution with relatively low-complexity. The algorithm can be used to motivate or benchmark approximation methods and  to numerically evaluate the gains due to spectrum sharing and coordination.

Bio: Lei Yu received his Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Sheffield, UK, in 2010, M.Sc. degree in Signal Processing and Communications from University of Edinburgh, UK, in 2005, and B.Eng. degree in Communication Engineering from Xidian University, China, in 2004. He joined Communication Systems Division, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden in March 2010 as a postdoctoral researcher. He is currently working on the project of EU FP7 SAPHYRE. His research interests include: robust beamforming, stochastic and array signal processing, and convex optimization.

On October 26 Mohamed Abou-Zleikha will give a talk at 13:00 in room A6-306.

Title: Exemplar Theory Meets Speech-based Technology

Abstract: Exemplar Theory was first introduced in psychology as a model of perception and categorization of concepts in the memory. It has emerged in several domains, AI reasoning (case-based reasoning) linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics), machine learning (example based classification and categorization) and speech processing (recognition, production, and synthesis). The presentation will give an overview of my work on implementing the exemplar theory for speech recognition and synthesis. It will address the use of an exemplar-based technique combined with a model-based technique for speech recognition. It will also give an overview of different exemplar-based techniques for the generation of prosody parameters, which underpin my PhD thesis.

Bio: Mohamed Abou-Zleikha is a final stage doctoral student with a specific research interest in speech technology.  He received his B.A. from Damascus University in Syria, and his M.Sc from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. His work focuses on the construction of computational models of speech. He is interested in cognitively inspired models and the use of these models for speech recognition and synthesis.  His Ph.D. work focuses on prosody parameters generation using an exemplar-based technique for speech synthesis.

On September 26, Jesper Rindom Jensen successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. During the defense, Jesper gave a presentation of his work after which the thesis committee asked questions about the research. The thesis committe was comprised of Prof. Alle-Jan van der Veen (Delft University of Technology), Prof. Jingdong Chen (Northwestern Polytechnical University) and Prof. Bernard Fleury (Aalborg University). Jesper’s Ph.D. studies were carried out at the Dept. of Electronic Systems, where Jesper was employed before joining the Audio Analysis Lab, and he was supervised by Prof. Søren Holdt Jensen and Assoc. Prof. Mads Græsbøll Christensen. Congratulations to Jesper.

The Audio Analysis Lab is part of the new CoSound project. CoSound is a joint effort headed by Assoc. Prof. Jan Larsen at DTU, funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research. The project is about a cognitive systems approach to enriched and actionable information from audio streams. The funding covers a three year postdoc position for a joint position with us and the Dept. of Electronic Systems, which is currently open. We had a nice kickoff workshop earlier this year and will be ramping up the activities during the fall.