Application to join HUMAINE network of excellence
1. Name of Legal entity
GET (Groupe des Ecoles de Télécommunications)/Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Télécommunications (ENST) - Télécom Paris
46 rue Barrault F-75634 Paris Cedex 13
Phone: +33 1 45 81 77 77 Fax: +33 1 45 89 79 06
2. Names of researchers
Researchers
Ioana VASILESCU
Dr. Ioana VASILESCU obtained a Ph.D thesis in 2001 in linguistics in the area of
speech perception (Université Lyon 2 and UC Berkeley). After a year at LIMSI
(Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur), she
joined GET-Télécom Paris (ENST) as CNRS research scientist in October 2002. Her
current research interests are in speech production (spontaneous speech phenomena,
e.g. disfluencies) and perception (language identification by humans). Her work in the
field of emotions concerns emotion analysis and detection in speech and perceptual
approaches in building corpus independent annotation methodologies.
Gaël RICHARD
Dr. Gaël RICHARD obtained a Ph.D thesis in 1994 in the area of speech synthesis.
He then spent two years at the CAIP Center (Rutgers University, USA) in the speech
processing group of Prof. James Flanagan where he explored innovative approaches
for speech production. Between 1997 and 2001, he successively worked for Matra
Nortel Communications and for Philips Consumer Comunications. He was in
particular the project manager of several large scale European projects in the field of
multimodal verification and speech processing. He joined GET-Télécom Paris
(ENST) as Assistant Professor in the field of audio and multimedia signals
processing. Co-author of over 30 papers and inventor in a number of patents, he is
also one of the expert of the European commission in the field of man machine
interfaces.
Gerard CHOLLET
Gerard CHOLLET obtained a PhD in Linguistics and Speech Processing form the
University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined CNRS in 1978 and is affiliated
with GET-ENST since 1983. His current research interests are in audio-visual speech
processing, coding, recognition, synthesis, biometry and man-machine interfaces. 33
PhD and 8 PostDoctoral students worked under his supervision. He initiated, managed
and/or contributed to many European, international and national projects. He is the
author or co-author of more than 200 book chapters, journal articles and conference
papers.
Mutsuko TOMOKIYO
Guido AVERSANO
Students
Chloé CLAVEL
Chloé CLAVEL is currently PhD student (since December 2003) at THALES RT and
GET-ENST. Her work stress on “analysis and detection of acoustic manifestations of
emotional states related to Fear”. She previously had completed her Master degree in
signal processing after engineering studies at TELECOM Paris.
Walid Karam
3. Description of Unit:
The Groupe des Ecoles des Télécommunications (GET) is made up of six major
Graduate Schools of France in the field of Information Technology: Télécom
Paris (ENST) - Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, ENST –
Bretagne, INT – Evry, ENIC - in partnership with the University of Lille, EURECOM
in partnership with EPFL, and IAAI - Institute of Advanced Applications of Internet,
in collaboration with the Université d’Aix-Marseille. GET assembles around 50
laboratories addressing all issues related to the Information Society Technologies.
GET is a federation of 4 to 10 Research Departments in each GET school, in the
following areas:
Technologies and components: optics, microwave, radio, electromagnetism, electronics,
microelectronics, VLSI, MEMs, design and architecture.
Communication, Signal and Image processing: information theory, coding, modulation,
detection, compression, classification, speech recognition and synthesis, vision, biometry.
Computer science, software: architecture, operating systems, compilation, agents, objects,
software engineering, cognitive sciences, databases, data mining, natural languages, , mobile
computing.
Protocols and Networks: queuing theory, distributed systems, protocols design, specification,
validation, routing, multicast, QoS, administration, planning, intelligent, active networks,
security.
Social sciences, law, economy of ICT: micro and macro economical models, competition,
industrial strategy, digital economy, tariffs, investment, innovation, information systems,
regulation, user behavioural models.
GET resources are at par with this broad array of activities. GET features 470 full-time
professors, 1000 part-time lecturers, and 3000 students with 1000 graduates per year and 500
PhD students. A total of 50 nationalities are represented within the GET that has 30
international partner universities.
The GET has established framework agreements with major industrial key players in
the telecommunications and beyond in order to enable a smooth technology transfer
(eg : Alcatel, France Telecom, CDC). The GET has currently a portfolio of nearly 50
patents (eg : MPEG4, MPEG7 for compression of multimedia objects, Turbocodes,
for mobile, satellite and radio communications), has developped a start up programm
of technologies tranfers. Revenues from industries partnership are for 2003 circa 9
millions eur and from patent licensing 1 million.
The GET is the scientific coordinator of two Networks of Excellence in FP6 (EURONGI, Next Generation Internet, and BIOSECURE, Biometrics for secure
authentication), is a major partner of the NoE NEWCOM (Wireless Communications)
and SATNEX (Satellite Communications) as well as in several other networks, IPs,
STREPs, etc, notably in the field of broadband communications, security, networked
audiovisual systems, home platforms, eLearning, etc
Telecom Paris (ENST)
The “Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications” (Télécom Paris – ENST)
is one of the 6 GET graduate school. Telecom Paris is a state of the art institution in
the fields of technology and innovation and has four major missions which pay tribute
to its pedagogical excellence and its international dimension. These missions include
research, engineering studies, research-oriented study, and life-long learning.
Among those missions, the research, either methodological/fundamental or applied, is
developped in narrow partnership with national and international resarch centers and
industries. Signal and image processing, and computer science are at the heart of GET
research. This research encompasses information theory, coding, modulation,
detection, compression, classification, speech recognition and synthesis, audio
indexing, vision, biometry. and software engineering, cognitive sciences, databases,
data mining, and natural languages.
GET conducts methodological and technological research in various fields of
multimedia signal processing (3D geometric modeling, stochastic modeling, multiple
data compression, selective compression, MPEG-4-compliant 3D mesh coding,
MPEG-7 indexing,…). GET work on audio is also quite extensive: audio objects
manipulation, sound scenes indexation and analysis, automatic music transcription,
and communication and cognition that concerns modeling language and its cognitive
links with images.
The Signal and Image Processing department (TSI) has also developed tight links
with the Computer science department of Telecom Paris which is heavily involved in
Graphical User Interfaces and information visualization and hypermedia, language
processing, interactive Web, information sharing, databases and knowledge base
research, thus leading to document structure and indexation and multi-modal humanmachine interaction.
Nb: link to emotions…?
Publications
Publications of Ioana VASILESCU
[IV1] Clavel, C., Vasilescu, I., Devillers, L., Ehrette, T., (2004), Fiction database for
emotion detection in abnormal situations, ICSLP 2004, Jeju Island, South Korea.
[IV2] Devillers, L., Vasilescu, I. (2004), Anger versus Fear detection in recorded
conversations, Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japon, March 2004.
[IV3] Devillers, L., Vasilescu, I., Lamel, L. (2003), Emotion detection in a taskoriented dialog corpus, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo
ICME 2003, Baltimore, July 2003.
[IV4] Maddieson, I., Vasilescu, I. (2002), Factors in human language identification,
7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado,
September 2002.
[IV5] Vasilescu, I., Pellegrino, F., Hombert, J-M. (2000), Perceptual features for the
identification of Romance Languages, 6th International Conference on Spoken
Language Processing, Beijing, China, October 2000.
Publications of Gaël RICHARD
[GR1] R. Badeau, G. Richard et B. David, "Sliding window adaptive SVD
algorithms", IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 52, no. 1, janvier 2004.
[GR2] S. Essid, G. Richard, B. David, “Efficient features for musical instrument
recognition on solo performances” Proc. of AES 25th International Conference, June
17-19, 2004.
[GR3] O. Gillet et G. Richard "Automatic transcription of drum loops", International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ICASSP’ 04, Montréal,
Québec, 17-21 mai 2004.
[GR4] Van den Heuvel H., Boves L., Moreno A., Omologo M., Richard G., Sanders
E., “Annotation in the speechdat projects’, International Journal of Speech
Technology, 4, pp. 127-143., 2001.
[GR5] Richard G., d'Alessandro C., "Analysis-synthesis of the Aperiodic Component
of Speech", Speech Communication, Sept 1996, Vol 9.
Your research group and HUMAINE
The area of expertise of the ENST researchers in the field of emotion oriented systems
concerns (1) emotion analysis and detection in speech, (2) semantic representation of
emotions (for SSMT and for language independent vocal information encoding for
interactive voice servers), and (3) emotion generation (talking faces).
(1) Researchers interested in emotion analysis and detection in speech can provide to
the Humaine network an active contribution in the sphere of processing of physical
signals conveyed by the voice to carry emotion manifestations in the vocal
interactions, and of their descriptors with the aim of building emotion-oriented and
task-dependent systems (I. Vasilescu, G. Richard, C. Clavel and G. Aversano).
Besides, members of the group are developing a profitable partnership with other
researchers members of Humaine (Laurence Devillers, LIMSI) and with academic (?)
and industrial partners (THALES RT).
More precisely, given the thematic areas identified as salient by the Humaine experts
for a multidisciplinary study of emotions, our activity concerns and can bring
contribution to the analysis and description of the relationship between signal and sign
in the framework of emotion manifestations in vocal interactions according to
different contexts of emergence. Or the idea is nowadays generally accepted that
emotions are strongly dependent on the corpus employed. Our work is conducted on
real-life (call center recordings) and realistic (tv fictions) corpora and focus on the
detection of task-dependent emotionally significant features. As a result, the
methodology we adopted and developed needs to be robust and takes into account the
complexity and variability of the speech material in which emotionality is not
prototypical but mixed with moods, attitudes, personality traits etc. Consequently, the
expertise we can bring is both multidisciplinary (linguistics, speech processing
analysis and synthesis) and supported by an experience in dealing with ecological
interactions in which the relationship between emotional states and physical signs is
highly determined by the situation. The final aim is to develop models of emotional
behaviour for the use of emotion-oriented systems.
I. Vasilescu possess a long experience in analysing and isolating emotional significant
features in speech and in developing a robust and corpus independent methodology of
annotation. This experience is the result of a fruitful collaboration with L. Devillers
(LIMSI) [IV1-3]. I. Vasilescu and L. Devillers’s work focus on emotion annotation,
analysis and detection in real-life agent-client dialogs recorded in call centers (stock
exchange and bank services). Their work concerns the study of acoustic, linguistic
and dialogic cues carrying salient information for emotion characterization in these
different natural contexts. The search of emotional significant features in voice is
supported by the development of an annotation paradigm aiming at being applicable
for different real-life corpora. The annotation methodology exploits findings in
different theories of emotions and makes use of perceptual tests in order to validate
emotion labels (which can be either named or described via abstract dimensions).
A project representing a collaboration between ENST (I. Vasilescu, G. Richard, C.
Clavel), LIMSI (L. Devillers) and Thales RT (C. Sedogbo, C. Clavel) allows at
extending this research to civil security applications [IV1]. This work focus on verbal
interactions occurring in abnormal situations, in which human life could be
threatened, and engendering strong negative emotions such as fear or panic. For this
project, a multimodal corpus (audio/video) based on realistic tv fictions is under the
process of construction and annotation.