Multimodal People Monitoring Using Sound

Name :    Multimodal people monitoring using sound (and vision)
Type :    Postdoc
Description :    The Idiap Research Institute together with Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) invite applications for a post-doctoral position in research and development for multimodal people monitoring.
The position is funded for one year by Idiap (with a possible extension depending on his/her performance)

The successful candidate will work with Dr. Petr Motlicek in Idiap's Speech and Audio Processing group, engaged in world-class research in speech processing.
Exceptionally qualified candidate can also be considered for a longer-term Research Associate position.

Detailed description:
We have witnessed a large interest and potential of self-dependent smart sound devices to be deployed for security, surveillance, or emergency applications. Recent developments performed by CSEM in building occupancy detection and monitoring using embedded vision have led to the creation of successful monitoring applications. This project will focus on a combination of the visual and speech information which will take place in an embedded platform providing industrial grade vision sensing together with an acoustic front-end.

CSEM will provide an expertise in embedded platform, visual analysis and data fusion. The Idiap postdoctoral position will mainly focus on the speech related aspects of the project, including speaker identification and keyword spotting, aiming to operate with limited resources.

We envisage three related research threads for this position:
1. Parameter reduction, in which we will apply sparsity and relevance constraints to train neural networks that function using as few parameters as possible.
2. Acoustic modeling sharing between different applications, in which we will build on the commonality between technologies for automatic speech recognition or keyword spotting and speaker recognition to create a single system with multiple capabilities.
3. Far-field speech processing, in which we will process signals recorded by a microphone array to substantially increase SNR of the input signal.

The successful candidate will work at Idiap in Martigny, but in close collaboration with CSEM’s R&D team based in Switzerland.
The project is a unique combination of applied science and academic research expected to yield both reference designs and academic publications.

Profile:
Candidate should have either or both of:
1. A strong background in engineering, mathematics or a related discipline, along with the associated familiarity with modern distributed programming environments and languages such as C++, Python and Perl.
2. An exceptional academic record and a clear aptitude for creative (and independent) research in a related discipline.
In either case, familiarity with speech processing tools such as Kaldi and deep learning toolkits such as Torch will be a distinct advantage. Although a PhD is normally a prerequisite for a post-doctoral position, candidates without a PhD may be considered in exceptional cases.

Timescale:
The position is offered on a one-year basis with the possibility of renewal based on funding and performance.
The starting salary will be 80,000 CHF/year. Starting date could be immediate, but otherwise as soon as possible in 2018.