- Date: July 15, 2015
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - A new book on Bayesian Speech and Language Processing has been published by MERL researcher, Shinji Watanabe, and research collaborator, Jen-Tzung Chien, a professor at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
With this comprehensive guide you will learn how to apply Bayesian machine learning techniques systematically to solve various problems in speech and language processing. A range of statistical models is detailed, from hidden Markov models to Gaussian mixture models, n-gram models and latent topic models, along with applications including automatic speech recognition, speaker verification, and information retrieval. Approximate Bayesian inferences based on MAP, Evidence, Asymptotic, VB, and MCMC approximations are provided as well as full derivations of calculations, useful notations, formulas, and rules. The authors address the difficulties of straightforward applications and provide detailed examples and case studies to demonstrate how you can successfully use practical Bayesian inference methods to improve the performance of information systems. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and industry practitioners working in machine learning, signal processing, and speech and language processing.
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- Date: July 3, 2015
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Yebin Wang; Stefano Di Cairano; Arvind Raghunathan; Avishai Weiss Brief - MERL researchers presented 10 papers at the American Controls Conference, in Chicago, USA. The ACC is one of the most important conferences on control systems in the world. Topics ranged from theoretical, including new algorithms for Model Predictive Control and Co-Design, to applications including spacecraft control and HVAC systems.
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- Date: June 25, 2015
MERL Contact: William S. Yerazunis
Research Area: Data Analytics
Brief - The CRM114 Discriminator, an open-source spam filter / text classifier created by William Yerazunis in MERL's Data Analytics group, continues to turn up in interesting places - and apparently one of them is in the US Department of Transportation's process for analysis of car safety defect reports.
Although CRM114 is usually used as a spam filter, CRM114 has been used to analyze resumes for jobseekers, scanning outgoing emails to detect accidental confidential information leaks, perusing blogs for relevance, scanning syslog files for interesting events, and now, apparently, searching complaints sent to NHTSA to find safety-related vehicle malfunctions.
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- Date: June 4, 2015
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices
Brief - Li Zhu, Koon Hoo Teo and Qun Gao's paper, 'Dynamic On-resistance and Tunneling Based De-trapping in GaN HEMT,' was awarded the "Best Student Poster Award" at the IEEE International Conference on Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits (EDSSC) 2015.
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- Date: June 1, 2015
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Rui Ma has been elected as Vice Chair of the IEEE Boston Section Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Chapter.
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- Date: July 13, 2015
Where: SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015
Research Area: Control
Brief - MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers presented talks at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications 2015. The papers were published by SIAM in the conference proceedings.
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- Date: May 13, 2015 - May 15, 2015
MERL Contacts: Bingnan Wang; William S. Yerazunis
Research Areas: Applied Physics, Electric Systems
Brief - Description: Bingnan Wang presented a paper, 'Circularly Polarized Near Field for Resonant Wireless Power Transfer' at the recently held IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference in Boulder, Colorado from May 13-15, 2015.
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- Date: May 10, 2015 - May 15, 2015
MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Kieran Parsons
Research Area: Communications
Brief - Toshiaki Koike-Akino presented 'LDPC-coded 16-dimensional modulation based on the Nordstrom--Robinson nonlinear block code,' and 'Phase noise-robust LLR calculation with linear/bilinear transform for LDPC-coded coherent communications,' at the recently held CLEO conference in San Jose, CA.
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- Date: June 1, 2015
Where: International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) Brief - Andrew Knyazev gave a talk at the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), 2015 on Nonsymmetric preconditioning for conjugate gradient and steepest descent methods. The paper was published by Elsevier B.V. in the conference proceedings.
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- Date: April 28, 2015
Brief - MERL researcher and speech team leader, John Hershey, gave a talk at MIT entitled, "Deep Unfolding: Deriving Novel Deep Network Architectures from Model-based Inference Methods" on April 28, 2015.
Abstract: Model-based methods and deep neural networks have both been tremendously successful paradigms in machine learning. In model-based methods, problem domain knowledge can be built into the constraints of the model, typically at the expense of difficulties during inference. In contrast, deterministic deep neural networks are constructed in such a way that inference is straightforward, but their architectures are rather generic and it can be unclear how to incorporate problem domain knowledge. This work aims to obtain some of the advantages of both approaches. To do so, we start with a model-based approach and unfold the iterations of its inference method to form a layer-wise structure. This results in novel neural-network-like architectures that incorporate our model-based constraints, but can be trained discriminatively to perform fast and accurate inference. This framework allows us to view conventional sigmoid networks as a special case of unfolding Markov random field inference, and leads to other interesting generalizations. We show how it can be applied to other models, such as non-negative matrix factorization, to obtain a new kind of non-negative deep neural network that can be trained using a multiplicative back propagation-style update algorithm. In speech enhancement experiments we show that our approach is competitive with conventional neural networks, while using fewer parameters.
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- Date: April 20, 2015
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric researcher, Yuuki Tachioka of Japan, and MERL researcher, Shinji Watanabe, presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP) entitled, "A Discriminative Method for Recurrent Neural Network Language Models". This paper describes a discriminative (language modelling) method for Japanese speech recognition. The Japanese Nikkei newspapers and some other press outlets reported on this method and its performance for Japanese speech recognition tasks.
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- Date: April 19, 2015 - April 24, 2015
Where: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing (ICASSP)
MERL Contacts: Anthony Vetro; Hassan Mansour; Petros T. Boufounos; Jonathan Le Roux Brief - Multimedia Group researchers have presented 8 papers at the recent IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing, which was held in Brisbane, Australia from April 19-24, 2015.
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- Date: April 16, 2015
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - The INCITS L3 technical committee is the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC29, which includes the JPEG and MPEG working groups. The technical committee is responsible for providing recommendations on US positions pertaining to the coding of audio, picture, multimedia, and hypermedia information. Anthony Vetro has been appointed as Chair of the L3 committee for a 3-year term from April 2015 to 2018.
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- Date: April 14, 2015
Awarded to: Anthony Vetro
Awarded by: InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS)
MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro Brief - The INCITS Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management recognizes individuals who, as officers, have provided outstanding leadership to the subgroup in its national and/or international work, have demonstrated proficiency in achieving consensus in the national and/or international arenas and have followed the approved procedures in an exemplary fashion. Anthony Vetro was the recipient of this award in 2015. He has more than 15 years of participation in standards development, including service as the INCITS L3.1 Vice-Chair and Chair and an active technical participant in the MPEG committee.
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- Date: April 1, 2015
Brief - MERL researcher, Robert Cohen, was appointed to the Industrial Relations Committee for a 3-year term from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2017. This committee is responsible for maintaining and improving relations between the IEEE Signal Processing Society and industry members.
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- Date: March 25, 2015
MERL Contacts: Kieran Parsons; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Six papers from the Optical Comms team will be presented at the 2015 Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) being held in LA, USA in March 2015. The papers relate to high-dimensional modulation, signal processing, coding for coherent optical links and semiconductor laser linewidth measurement.
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- Date: March 1, 2015
MERL Contact: Petros T. Boufounos Brief - Signal Processing Repository (SigPort) is an online repository of manuscripts, reports, technical white papers, theses, and supporting materials. Created and supported by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), SigPort collects technical material of interests to the broad signal processing community. It hosts material to help individuals obtain early and broad exposure on their work. MERL researcher, Petros Boufounos, was appointed to the SigPort Board for a 3-year term from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2017.
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- Date: March 9, 2015
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Recent research on speech enhancement by MERL's Speech and Audio team was highlighted in "Cars That Think", IEEE Spectrum's blog on smart technologies for cars. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest association of technical professionals with more than 400,000 members.
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- Date: February 17, 2015
MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
Research Area: Speech & Audio
Brief - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has developed breakthrough noise-suppression technology that significantly improves the quality of hands-free voice communication in noisy conditions, such as making a voice call via a car navigation system. Speech clarity is improved by removing 96% of surrounding sounds, including rapidly changing noise from turn signals or wipers, which are difficult to suppress using conventional methods. The technology is based on recent research on speech enhancement by MERL's Speech and Audio team. .
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- Date: February 20, 2015
Research Area: Computer Vision
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- Date: October 1, 2014
Where: Intellectual Property Exchange InternationaI (IPXI)
Research Areas: Communications, Signal Processing
Brief - Intellectual Property Exchange International, Inc. (IPXI), the world's first financial exchange for licensing and trading intellectual property (IP) rights, today announced a multi-party offering for standard essential patents (SEPs) involving the world's most widely adopted standard protocol for wireless technology. The offering of Unit License Right™ (ULR™) contracts is based on patent rights from eight organizations—including MERL and other leading consumer electronics and telecommunications companies, universities and research laboratories—whose rights are considered essential to the IEEE 802.11n standard for higher throughput in wireless local area network (WLAN) communications.
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- Date: July 11, 2014
Where: R&D Magazine
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - A team with members from MERL, ATC, and Meiden received an R&D 100 award for its work on Mitsubishi Electric's MELFA-3D Vision system for industrial robot arms. This system completely automates bin picking a task for picking up parts that are randomly placed in a bin and aligning their poses for assembly processes.
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- Date: July 1, 2014
Where: IEEE International Wireless Symposium (IWS) Brief - Rui Ma has joined the Technical Program Committee for the 2015 IEEE International Wireless Symposium and will act as Sub-committee Chair for power amplifier design and organize a workshop on GaN.
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- Date: June 12, 2014
Where: IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques Society Brief - Rui Ma has been accepted as a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE
Microwave Theory & Techniques Society (Boston Section).
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- Date: June 10, 2014
Where: European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC)
MERL Contacts: Kieran Parsons; Toshiaki Koike-Akino
Research Areas: Communications, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Signal Processing
Brief - Four papers from the Optical Communications team have been accepted for publication and presentation at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) to be held in Cannes, France in September 2014. The papers relate to high-dimensional modulation, signal processing and coding for coherent optical links.
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