Full Professor, Head  

University of Mons (UMONS) 

Faculty of Engineering 

ISIA Lab

31, Boulevard Dolez  

B-7000 Mons (Belgium)  

phone: +32 65 37 47 74  

fax: +32 65 374729   

Bio

Thierry Dutoit graduated as an electrical engineer and Ph.D. in 1988 and 1993 from the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (now UMONS), Belgium, where he teaches Circuit Theory, Signal Processing, and Speech Processing.  In 1995, he initiated the MBROLA project for free multilingual speech synthesis. Between 1996 and 1998, he spent 16 months at AT&T-Bell Labs, in Murray Hill (NJ) and Florham Park (NJ).  He has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing (2003-2006) and the president of ISCA’s SynSIG interest group on speech synthesis, from 2007 to 2010. In 2005, he initiated the eNTERFACE 4-weeks summer workshops on Multimodal Interfaces and was the organizer eNTERFACE'05 in Mons, Belgium. He was also part of the organizing committee of INTERSPEECH'07 in Antwerpen. He chaired or co-chaired the Journées d'Informatique Musicales (Mons, 2009), the 5th iNTETAIN International Conference on on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (Mons, 2013), the 11th eNTERFACE workshop on Multimodal Interfaces (Mons, 2015) and the 6th SLSP workshop on Statistical Language and Speech Processing (Mons 2018). T. Dutoit is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and has been part of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of the IEEE in2009-2013. He is the author of several books on Speech Synthesis and Applied Signal Processing, wrote or co-wrote more than 40 journal papers, and more than 120 papers on speech processing, biomedical signal processing, and creative technology, and holds 7 patents. He successively founded or co-founded ACAPELA-GROUP in 1996,  a European company specialized in TTS products, the NUMEDIART Institute for Creative Technology in 2009, of which he is the president, the FABLAB MONS non profit making organization in 2014, and the CLICK Living lab in 2016. T. Dutoit is very much involved in the developement of AI at UMONS. He is the co-founder of the TRAIL inter-university Institute for Trusted Artificial Intelligence.

Academic Connections

Classes

Scientific Societies

R&D Connections

Current and Past Ph.D. Students

Editorial activities

Publications

Main realizations

The aim of the MBROLA project, is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many languages as possible, and provide them free for non-commercial applications. The ultimate goal is to boost academic research on speech synthesis, and particularly on prosody. 

I restarted PolytechNews in 2002. The goal of this internal Journal is to give the temperature of the our University through through the words, initiatives, and achievements of the actors of its faculty life. 

The eNTERFACE summer workshops, are a unique type of European workshops. They aim at establishing a tradition of collaborative research and development work by gathering, in a single place, a group of senior project leaders, researchers, and (undergraduate) students, working together on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4 weeks. Participants are organized in teams, attached to specific projects related to multimodal interfaces.

NUMEDIART’s mission is to provide training and research in the field of creative technologies. Created in 2010, it brings together around 75 researchers and benefits from internationally recognised expertise in the field of sound, image, video, gesture and bio-signal processing for applications where the human-machine interactions aim to create emotion. 

"Créactifs!" workshops are free evening hands-on courses on creative technology, open to everyone. They are organized as 10 evenings per course, 5 courses in parallel (bascally every evening from Oct to Dec).

The FABLAB Mons n.p.o. promotes digital object design and provide access to the tools, the knowledge and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything.  

Artificial Interrligence (AI), mostly in its Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Neural Nets (DNN) components, has seen a considereble developement since 2012. With several groups of UMONS, we have created a crash hands-on course on DNN and Deep Reinforcement Learning, augmented by seminars and a hackaton.

CLICK’ is the Walloon Living Lab dedicated to technologies and creative industries. CLICK’s methodology includes exploration, experimentation and evaluation, in the lab and in the field, and is based on co-creation and feedback from the target audience (user-experience).

The Deep Learning Academy is an informal group of AI labs in Wallon Universities and Research Centers, which publish code, share know-how and organize meeting with industrials. I co-started it and initiaed its github repository

The TRAIL inter-university research center on AI was created in Belgium in 2020 by 5 universities and 3 research centers. Its goal is to promote the creation of talents in AI and to carry out cutting-edge research at international level in AI in Wallonia and Brussels.

The iDSP project, initiated by myself and by my colleague Prof. Marcelo Wanderley at McGill Montreal, aims at providing professors and students with reactive material for developing intuition in Digital Signal Processing.