Academic Recognition 

(1) During the past 5 years (May 2016 to the present), I have led (or co-led) eight academic and three industrial research projects, including the Project for Excellent Junior Research Investigators granted by the Ministry of Science and Technology (2019–2022) and the Career Development Award granted by Academia Sinica (2017–2021). Through implementing projects, I have authored or co-authored 73 journal papers. Most of these journal papers were submitted and/or published in leading speech processing journals. In addition, our group has published more than 120 international conference papers. Among them, we received the Best Student Paper Award, ISCSLP 2018, Best Poster Presentation Award in IEEE MIT URTC 2017, a Poster Presentation Award in APSIPA 2017. Meanwhile, four papers received an ISCA travel grant, and one paper received an ICML 2019 travel grant.

(2) I am an Associate Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and an Associate Editor of IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems. I have also served in various positions in major international events, including as Session Chair of APSIPA 2013, ICASSP 2015, BigMM 2016, and ISCSLP 2016, Program Chair of ROCLING 2016, Conference Chair of ROCLING 2017, Sponsor Chair of TAAI 2017, and organizer of Speech Workshop 2015. We gave five tutorial lectures, namely, at APSIPA 2019, Interspeech 2019, ISCSLP 2018, ICASSP 2018, and APSIPA 2018. We also organized the pathological Voice Detection Challenge at IEEE Big Data 2018, which has attracted the participation of 109 teams from 27 different countries.

(3) I also received the Career Development Award from Academia Sinica in 2017 (a grant for a five-year project), gold medal at the 5th World Invention Innovation Contest, four National Innovation Awards in 2018 and 2019, an Outstanding Elite Award from the Chung Hwa Rotary Educational Foundation 2019–2020 (one award is given per year), and a Distinguished Lecture Award from APSIPA.

Industry Impact

(1) By implementing the project “Real-World Heart Sound Recognition” with iMEDI Inc., we established a noise-robust heart sound recognition system and a heart-lung sound separation system. Through the implementation of this industrial project, we proposed two algorithms that are currently running on diagnostic systems produced by iMEDI Inc.. Furthermore, we published two journal papers in the biomedical engineering field and received US and EU patents, all related to heart-sound processing and recognition.

(2) By implementing the project “Speech Enhancement and Speaker Recognition for Real-world Forensic Authentication” with the Bureau under the Ministry of Justice (MJIB) in Taiwan, we have built SE and speaker recognition systems that are used to recognize the voices of drug dealers in real-world conditions. The developed systems are transferred to MJIB as potential reference forensic authentication tools.

Social Impact

To promote the research and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), we have released our developed tools, given public presentations, and published science articles. Some representative articles are shown here: https://www.citi.sinica.edu.tw/pages/yu.tsao/others_en.html

Personnel Training

Research assistants, PhD or Master’s degree students from our lab have received numerous awards, including a Master’s Thesis Award, ACLCLP 2019, Gold Medal, Merry Electroacoustic Award 2019, PhD Thesis Award, ACLCLP 2018, and Best Student Paper Award at ISCSLP 2018. Four alumni are serving important academic positions in Taiwan: Dr. Tzu-Hao Lin (Assistant Research Fellow, Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica), Dr. Ying-Hui Lai (Assistant Professor, National Yang-Ming University), Dr. Natalie Yu-Hsien Wang (Assistant Professor, Asia University), and Dr. Hung-Yi Lee (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University). Many other alumni are working in well-known IT companies in Taiwan, such as HTC, ASUS, and Realtek.