PHD POSITION IN COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING OF HEARING IMPAIRMENT (Guy Brown )


Subject: PHD POSITION IN COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING OF HEARING IMPAIRMENT
From:    Guy Brown  <g.brown@xxxxxxxx>
Date:    Fri, 9 Mar 2007 14:45:51 +0000
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RNID RESEARCH STUDENTSHIP - COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING OF SPEECH PERCEPTION IN HEARING IMPAIRED LISTENERS BASED ON MISSING FEATURE THEORY A research studentship in computational modelling of speech perception in hearing impaired listeners is available at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK, funded by the RNID. The studentship provides a stipend (approx. £15,000 p.a.), conference/training allowance (approx. £1,000 p.a.) and UK/EU tuition fees for PhD study. Applicants from outside the UK/EU will be considered if they are able to cover the difference between the UK/EU and international tuition fee. The studentship will run for three years and will ideally start in October 2007. The aim of the studentship is to develop a computational model of speech recognition in hearing impaired listeners, based on a 'missing feature' approach. Missing feature techniques have been used to improve the robustness of automatic speech recognition in noisy conditions by exploiting information about the relative levels of speech and noise in each time-frequency region of the acoustic signal. The speech recogniser uses different strategies to deal with 'reliable' regions (which are dominated by speech) and 'unreliable' regions (which are dominated by noise). In this studentship, a similar approach will used to model speech recognition in hearing impaired listeners, using the characteristics of a particular listener's hearing impairment (e.g., their susceptibility to simultaneous and forward masking) to determine the 'reliable' and 'unreliable' time-frequency regions. More specifically, the aims of the studentship are: * To develop a missing feature model of hearing impairment; * To investigate the utility of the missing feature model in characterising the hearing impairment of particular subjects, and in predicting the confusions that listeners will make when recognising speech in a background of noise; * To validate the model by comparing it against psychometric data from hearing impaired subjects, and by using it to inform the design of 'proof of concept' hearing aid algorithms. The studentship is part of an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Ray Meddis of the Department of Psychology, University of Essex. The successful applicant will be based at Sheffield, but will spend some time at Essex in order to attend progress meetings and receive training in psychometric testing techniques. Applicants should have a strong background in computer science, psychology or a related discipline. Applicants should send a full curriculum vitae, including the names and addresses of three referees, to: Dr. Guy Brown Speech and Hearing Research Group Department of Computer Science Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street Sheffield S1 4DP United Kingdom The deadline for applications is 1st May 2007. Informal enquiries can be made to Dr. Brown by email (g.brown@xxxxxxxx) or phone (+44 114 222 1821). See http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/spandh/ for further information.


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