Lluís Formiga (Evolutionary
Comp. / Speech Researcher)
Personal Information
Name and Surnames: Lluís Formiga i Fanals
Year of birth: 1981
Phone number: +34 93 290 24 40
Fax number: +34 93 290 24 70
email: lluisf@gmail.com
Academic Studies
- PhD Studies in Information Technologies and
Management (ending fall 2010):
ETSEEI La Salle – Univ. Ramon Llull
PhD Thesis: Tuning unit-selection based
text-to-speech synthesis systems by perceptual evolutionary computation
Abstract:
Interactive Genetic Algorithms (iGAs) provide a new
way to optimize data based on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and his/her
behaviour. Interactive Genetic Algorithms (iGAs) had been widely used on
various fields of research: e-commerce / perfume scent optimization / fitting
hearing aids, etc... active iGAs (aiGAs) are an evolution of simple iGAs which
obtain a model from user-machine interaction based on graph model. These new
representation allows to fuse human and computer capabilities for mining purposes
and thus either obtain efficiently innovative solutions to a problem or suggest
products based on his/her perceptual behaviour. In addition aiGAs allow
analyzing patterns such as consistency, ambiguity, consensus or multimodality
in a perceptual problem.
In the other hand, corpus based or unit selection
Text-to-Speech systems (US-TTS) are based on produce text from an input text by
retrieving the best set of speech units from a previously recorded speech
database. Several TTS tuning approaches have been defined so as to integrate
human preferences in the unit selection process, but with no great success
beyond expert-based hand tuning.
This thesis achieves a complete study of the problems
that come into the light when applying aiGAs to the US-TTS problem. To that
effect new indicators and methodologies are developed in order to improve their
efficiency. Research is conducted to different speech corpus of different
sizes, languages and feature selection (linguistic and acoustics).
Finally is concluded that aiGAs outperform previous
approaches working on the unit selection text-to-speech (US-TTS) weight tuning
problem.
- Advanced Studies Diploma – Research
Aptitude: ETSEEI La Salle –
Univ. Ramon Llull (2005-2007)
PhD Courses:
· Scientific Research
Methodology (URL)
· Parallel Database
Management Systems (URL)
· Neural Networks. Stochastic
Dynamichs II (URL)
· Evolutionary Computation
(URL)
· Data Mining 2 (UPC)
- MSc in Computer Science Engineering: ETSEEI La Salle – Univ. Ramon Llull (2002-2005) (MSc Thesis: A with honours)
- BSc in Computer Science Engineering: ETSEEI La Salle – Univ. Ramon Llull (1999-2003) (BSc Thesis: A with honours)
- International Baccalaureate (www.ibo.org) – Bell-lloc del Pla (1996-1999)
- Cambridge First Certificate (FCE) –
(1998)
Professional experience
Starting date: 2005-Nowadays.
Organization: FUNDACIÓ UNIVERSITAT I TECNOLOGIA
Job position: Speech
Synthesis Technology Researcher / Project Analyst
Detail of job position:
· 15
research publications (symposium and journal publications) related to
Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning applied to Signal Theory.
· Predoctoral
Researcher in SALERO, european project
FP6-027122
· Developer
and analyst in Integra-TV4all
(with tmtfactory), Virtual
Animations (SAM) (with TVCMedia),
INREDIS, SAVE, Reune-T, CuentaCuentos, evMIC.
Starting and ending date:
2003 (July - September)
Organization: BANCO POPULAR
ESPAÑOL, S.A.
Job Position: Office
assistant
Starting and ending date:
1998-2000 (July - September)
Organization: FRIGORIFICOS
UNIDOS, S.A.
Job Position: IT
assistant
Detail of job position:
Office automating process controller, OLAP statistical reports and tasks
(Online Analytical Processing).
Publications
Authors: Lluís Formiga, Francesc
Alías, Xavier Llorà
Title: Evolutionary process indicators for active IGAs
applied to Weight Tuning in Unit Selection TTS synthesis
Conference: 2010 Conference on
Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Place of celebration: Barcelona Year:
2010
Authors: Carlos Monzo, Lluís Formiga, Jordi Adell, Ignasi
Iriondo, Francesc Alías, Joan Claudi Socoró
Title: ADAPTACIÓN DEL CTH-URL PARA LA COMPETICIÓN ALBAYZIN 2008
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: V Jornadas en Tecnología
del Habla
Place of celebration: Bilbao (SPAIN) Year:
2008
Authors: Lluís Formiga, Francesc
Alías
Title: GTM user modelling for
aIGA weight tuning in TTS Synthesis
Type of presentation: Book chapter
Publication: Encyclopaedia of Artificial
Intelligence
Editors: Juan R. Rabuñal, Julian Dorado & Alejandro Pazos
ISBN: 978-1-59904-849-9
Pages: 788-795
Year: 2008
Authors: Lluís Formiga, Francesc
Alías
Title: Extracting user Preferences by GTM for aiGA
Weight Tuning in Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: 9th International
Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (IWANN'2007)
Publication: Lecture Notes in Computer
Science
Place of celebration: Donosti (SPAIN) Year:
2007
Journal: 904459 - Lecture Notes in
Computer Science Computational and Ambient Intelligence
Key: Article
Issue: 4507 Pages, start: 654
end: 661 City: Donostia Country: Germany Year: 2007
Authors: Alsina, R.; Socoró, J.C.;
Formiga, L.; Bernadó, E.
Title: Multiobjective Evolution Strategies for DS-CDMA
Pseudonoise Sequence Design in a Multiresolutive Acquisition
Type of presentation: Poster
Conference: X Conference Internacional
de l'Associació Catalana d'Intel·ligència Artificial (CCIA'07)
Place of celebration: (ANDORRA) Year:
2007
Authors: Santiago Planet; Jose Antonio Morán; Lluís Formiga
Title: Reconocimiento de emociones basado en el análisis de la
señal de voz parametrizada
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: CISTI
Publication: M. Cunha & Á. Rocha (Eds.): 'Sistemas e
Tecnologias de Informação no Espaço Ibérico', vol. 2, pp. 837-854, ISBN
978-989-20-0271-2.
Place of celebration: Esposende (PORTUGAL) Year:
2006
Authors: Francesc Alías, Xavier
Llorà, Lluís Formiga, Kumara Sastry, David E. Goldberg
Title: Efficient interactive weight tuning for TTS
synthesis: reducing user fatigue by improving user consistency
Type of presentation: Poster
Conference: 2006 IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Proc. (ICASSP06)
Publication: vol I, pp. 865-868
Nombre d'Authors: 5 Place of celebration:
Toulouse (FRANCE) Year: 2006
Authors: Ignasi Iriondo, J. Claudi Socoró, Lluís Formiga, Xavier
Gonzalvo, Francesc Alías, Pere Miralles
Title: Modelado y estimación de la prosodia mediante
razonamiento basado en casos
Type of presentation: Keynote
Conference: IV Jornadas en Tecnologia
del Habla
Place of celebration: Zaragoza (SPAIN) Year:
2006
Authors: Formiga L., Alías F.
Title: Estudio de Heurísticas para la implementación de A* en
CTH basados en selección de unidades.
Type of presentation: Poster
Conference: IV Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla
Place of celebration: Zaragoza (SPAIN) Year:
2006
Authors: José Antonio Montero, José Antonio Moran, Lluis Vicent,
Sandra Ciutad, Lluis Formiga
Title: Hacia una mayor responsabilidad del alumno en su
aprendizaje: herramienta APLICTEST.
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: V Congreso Internacional
Virtual de Educación CIVE 2005
Place of celebration: Virtual (SPAIN) Year:
2005
Authors: Francesc Alías, Ignasi Iriondo, Lluís Formiga, Xavier
Gonzalvo, Carlos Monzo, Xavier Sevillano
Title: High quality Spanish
restricted-domain TTS oriented to a weather forecast application
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: The 9th European
Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (InterSpeech)
Place of celebration: Lisboa (PORTUGAL) Year:
2005
Authors: Jose Antonio Montero, Francesc Alías, Jordi Rodríguez,
Lluís Formiga
Title: ALGTEC como base de una nueva metodología
constructivista para la docencia del Álgebra Lineal en Ingeniería
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: Simposium Nacional de la Unión Radio-Científica
Internacional (URSI),
Place of celebration: Barcelona (SPAIN) Year:
2004
Authors: Francesc Alías, Xavier Llorà, Ignasi Iriondo, Xavier
Sevillano, Lluís Formiga, Joan Claudi Socoró
Title: Perception-Guided and Phonetic Clustering
Weight Tuning Based on Diphone Pairs for Unit Selection TTS
Type of presentation: Poster
Conference: The 8th International
Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP2004)
Place of celebration: Jeju Island (REPÚBLICA DE
COREA) Year: 2004
Authors: Francesc Alías, Xavier Sevillano, Pere Barnola, Lluís
Formiga, Ignasi Iriondo, Joan Claudi Socoró
Title: Conversión de Texto en Habla Multidomino
Type of presentation: Poster
Conference: Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla
Place of celebration: Valencia (SPAIN) Year:
2004
Authors: Francesc Alías, Xavier Llorà, Ignasi Iriondo, Lluís
Formiga
Title: Ajuste subjetivo de pesos para selección de unidades a
través de algoritmos interactivos
Type of presentation: Communication presentation
Conference: XVIII Simposium de la Sociedad Española para el
Procesado del Lenguaje Natural
Publication: pp. 75-82
Place of celebration: Alcalá de Henares (SPAIN) Year:
2003
Journal: 200107 - Procesamiento del
Lenguaje Natural
Issue: --- Pages, start:
75 end: 82 City: Alcalá de Henares Country: SPAIN Year:
2003
Personal skills:
Programming Languages: