Month: December 2018

Alessandro and Andrew travelled to London for the 13th Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop hosted at Queen Mary University of London. The event followed a format similar to recent ISMIR conferences where presenters at poster sessions each gave a 4 minute overview of their research prior to the main poster session so you could get a feel for the work and then go and talk to the presenters to find out more about their results. This format is a nice mix between regular 10+5 minute oral session presentation and questions or the rapid fire 1 minute ‘poster madness sessions’. Hopefully it will catch on at more conferences!

At the poster session Alessandro presented his work on “What happens to the musical works of the past?” As an SFI funded PhD student in the Insight Research centre at UCD, Alessandro is co-supervised by Emmanouil Benetos from Queen Mary University of London. He will be spending one year of his PhD based in London at the Alan Turing Institute.

The 26th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science was hosted by the Trinity College Dublin on the 6th and 7th of December in the Long Room Hub. The conference covered an interesting variety of topics across computer science, psychology and neuroscience. This led to interesting presentations including one asking the question whether Amazon’s Alexa suffers from Alexithymia?

 

QxLab was well represented with two papers: Rahul, who is funded by a scholarship from the SFI CONNECT research centre for future networks, presented his work on voice over IP quality monitoring with a presentation entitled: “The Sound of Silence: How Traditional and Deep Learning Based Voice Activity Detection Influences Speech Quality Monitoring”. In his paper he investigated how different voice activity detection strategies can influence the outputs from a speech quality prediction model.  In his experiment used a dataset with labelled subjective quality judgments.

Alessandro also had a paper in the proceeding and gave an interesting talk on exploring a DNN-based fusion for speech separation. Alessandro’s PhD is funded by the SFI Insight Centre for data analytics.