Mark Gales is a Professor of Information Engineering in the (formerly the Speech Vision and Robotics (SVR) group) and a Fellow of Machine Intelligence Laboratory (formerly the Speech Vision and Robotics (SVR) group) and a Fellow of Emmanuel College.He is a member of the Speech Research Group together with faculty staff members Phil Woodland and Bill Byrne. Speech Research Group together with faculty staff members Steve Young, Phil Woodland and Bill Byrne.

For more information see his personal webpage: http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/.

Research Interests

• Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition
• Automatic Assessment of Spoken English
• Speaker adaptation and robust speech recognition
• Machine learning (particularly model selection and kernel-based methods)
• Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

A brief introduction to speech recognition is available online. For a technical review see The Application of Hidden Markov Models in Speech Recognition. A draft review of model-based noise compensation schemes is also available.

Research Projects

Current projects:

• BABEL (IARPA funded project) - local web-page
• Automatic Oral Communication Skill Evaluation (Cambridge English funded) - local web-page
• The Alta Institute (Cambridge English funded) - local web-page
• Broad Operational Language Translation (DARPA funded project)
• Natural Speech Technology (ESPRC funded project)
• Generative Kernels and Score-Spaces for Classification of Speech (DARPA funded project) - local web-page
• Adaptive Meeting Transcription - PhD Studentship (Toshiba Research Europe Ltd funded)
• HTK Version 3 - HTK V3.4.1 and examples are available.

Recently completed projects:

• Structured Support Vector MAchines for Speech Recognition (Toshiba Research Europe Ltd funded)
• Rapid and Robust Environment Aware Processing (Toshiba Research Europe Ltd funded)
• !CoreTex (Improving Core Speech Recognition technology)
• HTK Rich Audio Transcription (DARPA EARS funded project) - local web-pages
• AGILE (DARPA GALE funded project)

Publications

A full list of publications can be viewed here.

Students

Current list of PhD Research Students and their general research topics:

• Jeff Chen: Adaptive Meeting Transcription systems (Toshiba funded)
• Eric Wang: Universal Acoustic Models (RATS/AGILE/Google Research Award part-funded)
• Chunyang Wu: Canonical Models for Speech Processing (Natural Speech Technology funded)
• Justin Yang: Non-Parametric models for speech recognition (EPSRC funded)
• Austin Zhang: Structured Discriminative Models (Toshiba Funded)

Past PhD Research Students

• Catherine Breslin : Complementary System Generation and Combination [pdf]
• Martin Layton : Kernel Methods for Classifying Variable Length Data [pdf]
• Hank Liao : Uncertainty Decoding for Noise Robust Speech Recognition [pdf]
• Andrew Liu : Discriminative Complexity Control and Linear Projections for LVCSR [pdf]
• Chris Longworth : Speaker Verification and Identification using Kernel Methods [pdf]
• Anton Ragni : Discriminative models for speech (examined)
• CK Raut : Discriminative Adaptive Training and Bayesian Inference for ASR [pdf]
• Antti-Veikko Rosti : Linear Gaussian models for speech recognition [pdf]
• Rogier van Dalen : Noise Robust Speech Recognition [pdf]
• Khe Chai Sim : Structured Precision Matrix Modelling for Speech Recognition [pdf]
• Nathan Smith : Using augmented statistical models and score spaces for classification [pdf]
• Mathew Stuttle : Formant-like features for speech recognition [pdf]
• Kai Yu : Adaptive Training for LVCSR [pdf]

If you are interested in studying for a PhD in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory please see the "Joining Us" page for information.

Teaching

2012-2013 Prof Gales was on Sabbatical this year.

2011-2012

For the Engineering Department:

• MPhil in Advanced Computer Science:
  • Machine Learning for Language Processing (L101)
  • Spoken Language Processing (L106)
• Fourth year engineering undergraduates Module 4F10: Statistical Pattern Processing.
• Material available online (local access only)
• Fourth year engineering undergraduate projects offered 2011-2012 (local access only).

For Emmanuel College: (supervision timetable local access only)

• Part IB Paper 6: Information Engineering