Carol Espy-Wilson

Director, Speech Communication Lab

email : espy (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Dr. Carol Espy-Wilson is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Espy-Wilson received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1979, and a M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, 1984 and 1987, respectively. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, Dr. Espy-Wilson was a faculty member at Boston University.
Dr. Espy-Wilson's research is in speech communication. She combines knowledge of digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics and acoustic phonetics to conduct interdisciplinary research in speech recognition, speech production, speaker recognition and speech enhancement. Specific research projects include the development of (a) a speech signal representation that contains only linguistic information, (b) the a speech signal representation that highlights speaker characteristics, (c) a probabilistic framework for an event-based speech recognition system, (d) supervised and unsupervised acoustic models for speaker recognition and (e) vocal tract models of complex speech sounds.

Dr. Espy-Wilson has authored or coauthored numerous papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Among the honors and awards she has received for her research contributions are the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in 1990, the Independent Scientist Award from the National Institutes of Health in 1998 and the Honda Initiation Award in 2003.

Om D Deshmukh

Post-Doctroral Research Associate

Email : omdesh (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Om Deshmukh received the M.S. degree in electrical  engineering from Boston University, Boston, MA, in 2001 and the B.E. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1999. He joined the lab in 2001 and is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree. His current research interests include speech enhancement, developing robust speech recognition techniques based on knowledge of acoustic phonetics and auditory processing.

Tarun Pruthi

Research Assistant

Email : tpruthi (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Tarun Pruthi is a graduate Student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland. Tarun received his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication from The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Guwahati) in 1999, and joined Hughes Software Systems, Gurgaon, India (now Flextronics Software Systems) as a Software Engineer after graduating. He was there until Feb 2001 after which he joined Cybernetics Infotech, Rockville, MD as a Research and Development Engineer.

He joined the University of Maryland in August of 2001 and has been a part of the lab since then. His research interests include knowledge-based speech recognition, auditory scene analysis, pattern recognition, and speech/image/video compression.

Xinhui Zhou

Research Assistant

Email : zxinhui (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Xinhui is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His interests include incorporating the knowledge of speech production and auditory system in audio and speech signal processing. Xinhui's primary projects involve acoustic modeling of vocal tract for American English Liquid sounds /r/ and /l/. He joined the Lab in October 2003 and currently is pursuing his PhD.

Srikanth Vishnubhotla

Research Assistant

Email : srikanth (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Srikanth is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Electronics & Communications Engineering in 2004 from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India. He joined the SCL in January 2005. His research interests include Pattern Recognition and Feature Extraction. In particular, his current research deals with the extraction of acoustic parameters for speech and speaker recognition applications. He is also interested in Blind Source Seperation, general Signal Processing and Image Processing.

Vikramjit Mitra

Research Assistant

Email : vmitra (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Vikram is currently a PhD student at the ECE Department, University of Maryland, College Park. He earned his MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Denver in 2004 and his BS from Jadavpur University, India, in 2000.

His research interests include signal processing, intelligent systems and object classification. In signal processing, he is particularly interested in speech and image processing and adaptive signal processing. He is also interested and has worked with support vector machines and neural networks. His prior research encompassed speech recognition and boundary detection techniques. Presently he is working on formant trajectories affiliated to /r/ utterances.

Daniel Garcia-Romero

Research Assistant

Email : dgromero (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Sandeep Manocha

Research Assistant (Alumnus)

Email : smanocha (at) glue (dot) umd (dot) edu

Sandeep is an alumnus of the ECE Department at the University of Maryland, and obtained his Master's degree in July 2006. He earned his Bachelor's degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 2004. He is currently employed at Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA.

His research work at the SCL included formant tracking and speaker identification experiments to compare standard MFCCs with acoustic parameters developed in the lab. He has also worked extensively on voice mining in a telephone database, which forms the core of his thesis work.