Francesc Alías Pujol falias@salle.url.edu

I am currently the Director of the Human-Computer Interaction area at the Engineering Department of La Salle (Ramon Llull University). I'm also a member of the Research Group on Media Technologies.

I was born in Tordera, a small town of Catalonia (Spain).

News!

The workshop is a satellite event of Interspeech 2013 (Lyon France, August 25-29, 2013). It follows on from the previous workshops, Autrans 1990, Mohonk 1994, Jenolan Caves 1998, Pitlochry 2001, Pittsburgh 2004, Bonn 2007 and Kyoto 2010, which aim to promote research and development of all aspects of speech synthesis.This workshop is co-sponsored by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech Synthesis (SynSIG).

I'm member of the Local Organization Committee, whose General Chair is Dr. Antonio Bonafonte (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya).

Research areas

I'm currently working on unit selection Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis in Catalan and Castilian Spanish, focused on perceptual cost function weight tuning and multi-domain Text-to-Speech synthesis. Some of the topics I'm also interested in are the following:

• Interactive Genetic Algorithms
• Automatic Text Classification and Clustering
• Emotion identification from text
• Articulatory speech synthesis
• Audiovisual Synthesis
• Speech Anotation Tools
• Speech Recognition
• Robust multimedia clustering
• New Methodologies of Teaching

Associations

• Spanish Thematic Network on Advanced Dialogue Systems (RTSDA)
• Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology (RTTH)
• ISCA Speech Synthesis Special Interest Group (SynSIG)
• ISCA Special Interest Group on Iberian Languages (SIG-IL)
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Spanish section of the Networked and Electronic Media platform (eNEM)

Conferences and Journals

• Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Information Sciences (Elsevier), The Computer Journal (Oxford).
  
• 2012 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2012). Member of the Scientific Comittee.
• 2011 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2011). Member of the Organizing Comittee (Publication co-chair) and the Scientific Committee (Quality Reviewer Award).
• 2010 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation of the WCCI 2010. Member of the Scientific Committee.
• XXI Congress of SEPLN (SEPLN 2005). Member of the Scientific Committee.
• XIX Symposium of URSI (URSI 2004). Member of the Organization and Scientific Comittees.