Umut Sayin

My research is about creating audible sounds utilizing ultrasounds within different applications where the directivity is crucial. It involves, non-linear acoustics, loudspeaker design, material science and modal analyisis of piezoelectric and piezomagnetic materials and their interaction.

Umut Sayin holds a B.Sc degree on Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University, Turkey and a M.Sc. degree on Acoustics Engineering at Aalborg University,Denmark. 

e-mail: umut@salle.url.edu

Research area: acoustics, PhD advisor: Dr. Oriol Guasch

Marc Arnela Coll

My research aims at performing articulatory speech synthesis by means of numerical methods. In particular, I make use of finite element methods to solve the acoustic wave equation in the vocal tract. By means of this approach, I intend to synthesize vowels, diphthongs and consonants. In the midterm, the obtained results could be incorporated in a full TTS (Text-to-Speech) system, which in contrast to current corpus-based TTS systems speech could be generated from scratch.

Marc Arnela holds a BSc in Telecommunications Engineering (specialisation in Image and Sound) and a MSc degree in Telecommunications Networks by La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL) in Barcelona (2006 and 2009, respectively).

e-mail: marnela@salle.url.edu

Research area: acoustics, PhD advisors: Dr. Oriol Guasch and Dr. Francesc Alías

Àngels Aragonès

My research deals with applying graph theory to solve noise control engineering problems in statistical energy analysis (SEA) and finite element (FEM) models of vibroacoustic systems. With appropriate definition of SEA and FEM graphs it is possible, for example, to efficiently rank power flow between subsystems. Moreover, new insight can be gained for optimization strategies that aim at reducing energy transmitted from sources to receivers in structures.

Àngels Aragonès holds a BSc in Telecommunications Engineering (specialisation in Image and Sound) and a MSc degree in Telecommunications Networks by La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL) in Barcelona (2007 and 2010, respectively).

e-mail: angelsa@salle.url.edu

Research area: acoustics, PhD advisors: Dr. Oriol Guasch

Santi Planet

My research is about analyzing speech signals to specify the affective state (or, in general, the emotion) of a subject. I extract several features from voice, such as prosodic and voice quality related ones. By means of machine learning techniques I can analyze these features, extracting the information that is this big amount of data. This involves, usually, a previous preparation of the data and the application of feature selection algorithms. While a large number of studies in this field are related to acted speech, I also deal with spontaneous, non-acted speech signals recorded under adverse conditions.

Santi Planet holds a BSc Telecommunications Engineering (specialisation in Telecommunications Systems) and a MSc degree in Telecommunication Engineering by La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL) in Barcelona (2001 and 2003, respectively). He is currently pursuing the PhD Degree in the same university.

e-mail: splanet@salle.url.edu

Research area: Multimodal processing, PhD advisor: Dr. Ignasi Iriondo and Dra. Elisa Martínez

Angel Calzada Defez

My research is developed in the expressive speech synthesis field. Actual Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems are capable of synthesising expressive speech with high quality but their main drawback is the memory requirements and its low flexibility. Based on unit selection TTS, their final synthesis quality is correlated with the amount of data stored in the corpus. Also for each desired expressive style, the corresponding corpus must be recorded, processed, labelled and stored, thus increasing the storage requirements. The aim of this research is to develop signal processing tools, based on Harmonic plus Noise models, which allow to apply signal modifications to obtain the desired expressiveness in a synthesized speech signal without any quality degradations and with low memory space requirements.

Àngel Calzada received his BSc in Telecommunications specialized in Telematics at Universitat Politècnica de Mataró (EUPMt) from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 2004 and his MSc in Telecommunications in 2008 in La Salle-Universitat Ramon Llull.

e-mail: acalzada@salle.url.edu

Research area: Multimodal processing, PhD advisor: Dr. Joan Claudi Socoró 

Alexandre Trilla

"Natural Language Processing techniques applied to speech technologies". The gist of this research is the automatic extraction of affective information from text in order to feed a speech enabled application with this particular value added human feature.

Alexandre Trilla received the B.Sc. Degree in Telecommunications Engineering specializing in Electronic Systems at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, the M.Sc. Degree in Telecommunications Engineering at the same university and he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. Degree.

e-mail: atrilla@salle.url.edu

Research area: Multimodal processing, PhD advisor: Dr. Francesc Alías

Xavier Valero Gonzalez

Research is conducted on robust intelligent systems capable of recognising the sound sources present in the environment. Several sectors might benefit from the introduction of these smart technologies, having applications in multiple fields such as audio-based surveillance and teleassistance, audio-context awareness for portable devices, enhanced aids for hearing impaired people or accurate evaluation of noise health effects.

Xavier Valero holds a BSc in Telecommunications Engineering (specialisation in Image and Sound) and a MSc degree in Telecommunications Networks by La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL) in Barcelona (2006 and 2009, respectively). On 2008 he did a research internship at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. Since 2009 he is PhD student in CTMedia La Salle.

e-mail: xvalero@salle.url.edu

Research area: Multimodal processing, PhD advisor: Dr. Francesc Alías

Ramon Martín de Pozuelo Genís

He participated in European STREP project called SUIT, being in charge of developing a scalable video server for streaming H.264-SVC over DVB-T and WiMAX. Then, he has been involved in some other Spanish and Catalan founding projects about streaming and scalable video coding. He also has been working in a render module for composing multimedia applications automatically from DVB-PCF standard descriptions. Currently, he is focused in Service Composition and Media Provisioning in Future Internet, working on TARIFA project researching on Service Composition and Service-Oriented Architectures in Future Internet and collaborating on ISO Future Networks group ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 6.

Ramon Martín de Pozuelo holds a BSc in Telecommunications specialized in Telematics (2006) and MSc in Telecommunications (2009) from La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL). There he also got the CISCO´s CCNA certification in 2005. In La Salle he has been participating in the digital television area of CTMedia for 5 years.

e-mail: ramonmdp@salle.url.edu

Research area: Digital TV, PhD advisor: Dr. Francesc Pinyol

Marc Antonijoan Tresens

My research is about analyzing correlations between speech and body language with the aim of improving naturalness of body language synthesizers for 3d characters. The current focus of the study is on finding time alignments between prosody features of speech and kinematic parameters of gestures.

Marc Antonijoan received his MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in 2003. He obtained his BSc in Multimedia Engineering from La Salle – Universitat Ramon Llull in 2002. He worked as a software engineer at Geovirtual (2004-07) developing terrain visualization algorithms. He currently works as an assistant professor at La Salle – Universitat Ramon Llull and is pursuing a MSc in IT and Management at the same university.

Adso Fernández Baena

My research subject is about automatic motion synthesis for 3d character animation. One approach to solve this problem is Motion graphs. It consists in automatically assemble a graph from motion capture database and using this graph to synthesize motions that meet specific goals. We are focusing in distance metrics and transition methods, which are steps of motion graph process.

Adso Fernández holds a BSc in Multimedia Engineering (2009) at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL), Barcelona. On summer 2009 he did an internship at ETC (Entertainment Technology Center), Carnegie Mellon's University, Pittsburgh (USA). Since 2010 he is currently studying a Master Program in Multimedia Creation, Design and Engineering (MCDEM) at La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL), Barcelona.

e-mail: adso@salle.url.edu

Research area: Multimedia, PhD advisor: Dr. David Miralles