Kishore S. Prahallad (Timeline)

2014

• Dec 1, 2014: Moved to SIRI speech team in Apple Inc., at Cupertino, USA to work.

• Nov 24, 2014: Dr. Suryakanth Gangashetty formally takes over the MCIT_TTS project and Dr. Manish Shrivastava takes over the ITRA project.

• Nov 22, 2014: Evaluation of 1st year progress in ITRA done over phone.

• Sep 19, 2014: The Blizzard challenge workshop at I2R was held successfully. http://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2014_Workshop - It was interesting to see all participants performed better than baseline systems (the open source HTS system without any tunings), indicating that one has to fine tune the open source systems for specific languages and speech databases for practical usage. The next year tasks would involve Indian languages and some more tasks in the area of expressive speech synthesis. Thanks again to Indian partners for their help and collaboration.

• Sep 15-19, 2014: At Interspeech in Singapore, quite a learning experience.

• Aug 23-24, 2014: An eventful hectic two-day at Chintarevula.

• Aug 20-22 2014: An ITRA feedback meeting was held in Delhi. It was quite enlightening to see what other teams (at IITs) are doing in their project. The feedback is done by a panel of real experts, and the whole meeting was quite refreshing. It was so different from a regular PRSG.

• Aug 2014: The semester has started, and I am involved in teaching three courses this time. All these three courses are offered in learning-by-doing mode.

• Jul 12, 2014: Blizzard Challenge 2014 results are announced. It has been an exciting (and of course tiring) experience. Thanks to Santosh, Anand, Gautam from IIIT-H and other coordinators Aashish (IIT Madras), Tanvina (DA-IICT), Bidisha (IITG), Priyanka (IIT-Mandi), Anushiya (SSN).

  • The systems and results will be discussed in detail by each participant on the Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop to be held in Singapore as a co-located event of INTERSPEECH 2014.

  • To attend/register for the workshop, please visit Registration for Blizzard Challenge 2014 Workshop

• Jun 20, 2014: Anandswarup and Basil got awarded the ISCA travel grant to present his paper in INTERSPEECH 2014, in Singapore.

• Jun 19, 2014: E. Naresh Kumar successfully defended his MS thesis titled "A Study on Multi-Lingual and Cross-Lingual Speech Synthesis for Indian Languages".

• Jun 14-16, 2014: MCIT-TTS project meeting at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar. Intense discussions within the group on the project status and the future of the consortium.

• Jun 10, 2014: Anandswarup Vadapalli and Basil George got their INTERSPEECH 2014 papers accepted. Respective titles are: "Learning continuous-valued representations for phrase break prediction" and "Unsupervised Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection using Bag of Acoustic Words and Non-Segmental Dynamic Time Warping".

  • Jun 01, 2014: Blizzard 2014 listening tests live: http://wissap.iiit.ac.in/blizzard2014/listening_tests.html - Participants include 5 International teams and 3 Indian institutes.

• May 20, 2014: Santosh Kesiraju, Bhargav Pulugundla and Sudarshan Reddy from speech lab are selected for TCS PhD Fellowship of 2014. Congratulations!

• May 16, 2014: PRSG meeting of text-to-speech consortium project in DeiTy, New Delhi.

• May 04, 2014: Gautam Mantena presented his ICASSP paper on spoken audio search in Florence, Italy during May 4-9, 2014.

• May 02, 2014: The spring course on Digital Signal Analysis and Applications with 192 students is successfully completed. Received some good feedback from the students.

• Apr 09, 2014: Ronanki Srikanth successfully defended his MS thesis titled "Generation of syllable level templates using dynamic programming for statistical speech synthesis".

• Feb 15, 2014: Blizzard speech synthesis challenge 2014 is on Indian languages. IIIT-Hyderabad is one of the major organizing units along with partner institutions including IIT Madras, IIT Guwahati, DA-IICT, IIT Mandi and SSN college of engineering.

• Jan 17, 2014: WiSSAP 2014 is being held at IIIT-Hyderabad from 17-20 Jan, The theme is "Deep learning for multilingual speech processing".

• Jan 02, 2014: The first ITRA project meeting is held on Jan 2 in Delhi. It was an exciting experience.