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Author
Name Nickel, Robert
Research field Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
Career stage professor
Home university/institution Bucknell University
Department/Research unit at home university/institution -
Chair/Working group at home institution -

International activity
Country Germany
Location Bochum
University Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB)
Fund Research School VIP
Type of activity research stay
Period starts 01-01-2019
ends 31-12-2021
Keywords -
Report Second Main VIP Visit to the RUB (May 29th until August 3rd, 2018):

The second extended stay of Prof. Nickel with the Cognitive Signal Processing Research Group took place from May 29th until August 3rd, 2018. During that time Prof. Nickel resumed his direct work with his Ph.D. advisee Benedikt Bönninghoff within the SecHuman NRW-Fortschrittskolleg. Prof. Nickel interacted with Mr. Bönninghoff and his SecHuman “tandem” partner Steffen Hessler multiple times per week. Steffen Hessler is a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Lehrstuhl für Germanistische Linguistik under Prof. Dr. Karin Pittner. The close collaboration between engineers (Nickel and Bönninghoff) with a linguist (Hessler) was necessary to tackle the very difficult question about how develop more robust strategies for authorship recognition/verification, especially when intentional authorship deception/spoofing comes into play. Authorship deception and/or spoofing are of particular interest for forensic applications. Our team (Nickel, Bönninghoff, Hessler) was able to develop a research plan for the development of a technical systems that identifies/verifies authors, potentially even in light of intentional deception attempts. The work is still in its early stages. We expect, however, that step-by-step over the next one to two years we shall be able to build up and publish a working system. Since the technical difficulties in developing such a system are quite daunting, it is especially important that the fruitful collaboration with Prof. Nickel and the research team continues.

In addition to his work with Mr. Bönninghoff, Prof. Nickel also participated in a project surrounding the development of a novel generative speech model. The generative model is based in a deep neural network strategy that is trained in an unsupervised fashion to deliver a small-dimensional latent model for speech production. The small dimensional latent model can be used for a variety of technical applications, such as speech enhancement/denoising, speech uncertainly estimation, and potentially also speech coding. Participants in the project are Jan Freiwald, Benedikt Bönninghoff, Christopher Schymura, Lea Schönherr, Prof. Kolossa, Steffen Zeiler, and Prof. Nickel. Prof. Nickel developed the feature analysis and the feature resynthesis software for the necessary software platform. The project had, unfortunately, not yet come to full fruition by the time that Prof. Nickel had to return to the US. We are, therefore, intending to remotely continue our collaborative work over the coming year so that our initial goals for the project can be realized.

In summary, Prof. Nickel has not only continued but intensified his involvement with the RUB within the second year of his Research School VIP grant. He spent several months in one-on-one interaction with his RUB Ph.D. advisee, actively supported the RUB Cognitive Signal Processing Group in its strategic planning, and continued to provide expertise and software to help move the research goals of the group forward. Many of the projects that were started within the VIP grant framework will still be ongoing in the coming years.

KSV Strategie Meeting, Sorpesee (May 23rd and 24th, 2018):

The Cognitive Signal Processing (KSV) Research Group under the direction of Prof. Kolossa organized a strategy meeting at the Bildungszentrum Sorpesee on May 23rd and May 24th. At the meeting key directions for the research group as a whole as well as for individual members were discussed and planned. Important topics included the utilization, maintenance, and expansion of computational resources, novel developments in KSV research areas, as well as the planning and teaching of laboratories, seminars, recitation sessions, and lecture classes. Prof. Nickel fully participated in the KSV Strategie Meeting on both days and provided constructive ideas, suggestions, and perspectives in all areas.

Image Caption: Participants in the KSV Strategie Meeting in Sorpesee, May 23rd and 24th, from left to right: Mahdie Karbasi, M.Sc., Jan Freiwald, M.Sc., Benedikt Bönninghoff, M.Sc., Dipl.-Ing. Christopher Schymura, Nikola Marković, M.Sc., Lea Schönherr, M.Sc., Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dorothea Kolossa, Dr.-Ing. Steffen Zeiler, and Prof. Robert M. Nickel.

Short Visit (February 5th until February 9th, 2018):

Prof. Nickel was hosted by the Cognitive Signal Processing Research Group of Prof. Kolossa from February 5th until February 9th, 2018. This short stay was primarily devoted to discussing the progress on Prof. Nickel’s work with his Ph.D. advisee Benedikt Bönninghoff. Topic of the discussion were the development of a new training and inference paradigm for a variational autoencoder. Autoencoders generally provide means to develop compact representations for complex data types, such as images, audio, and text. As such, the newly developed algorithm is slated to play an important role in our work on natural language processing over the summer.

First VIP Visit to the RUB (July 10th until August 4th, 2017):

Prof. Nickel worked at the Cognitive Signal Processing Research Group of Prof. Kolossa from July 10th until August 4th, 2017 (5 weeks total). He had been a guest researcher at the RUB several times before (see publication list above), yet this trip was his first visit within the scope of the VIP Grant of the RUB Research School PLUS. During his time at the RUB he did not only continue to work on new avenues for the estimation of uncertainty information from noisy speech features, but also on a new project in the area of language processing. The goal of this new work is the development of automatic and semi-automatic methodologies for textual authorship recognition and/or verification. Potential results are of great interest to the law enforcement community (in forensic text analysis, for example) as well as for data mining tasks in social media and/or online commerce platforms. The project requires machine learning techniques that bear similarities to the ones employed in certain types of uncertainty estimation. Within the project Prof. Nickel is serving as a co-supervisor to the Ph.D. candidate Benedikt Bönninghoff. Mr. Bönninghoff is involved in this work through an interdisciplinary research initiative that is part of the SecHuman NRW-Fortschrittskolleg funded by the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research (MIWF). Prof. Nickel met regularly with Mr. Bönninghoff to discuss the technical aspects of his current work and to explore possible future directions of his research. While Prof. Nickel was a guest at the RUB he also participated in several meetings with the members of the Cognitive Signal Processing Research Group and attended one of the so-called “tandem-meetings” of the SecHuman project. At the “tandem-meetings” researchers who serve as the principal investigators in the project from various fields (including education, journalism, linguistics, media science, peace research, as well as social science) come together to discuss the current state and future direction of the work of two participating Ph.D. candidates. In SecHuman a “tandem” consists of two Ph.D candidates from different areas (e.g. linguistics and engineering) who work together on the same research project. Prof. Nickel’s continued involvement in all of these endeavors is greatly appreciated due to his experience and expertise. The collaboration will continue while Prof. Nickel is residing back home in the US. The next visit is planned for the summer of 2018.

Biosketch:

Prof. Robert M. Nickel received a Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the RWTH Aachen, Germany, in 1994, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2001. During the 2001/2002 academic year he was an adjunct faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. From 2002 until 2007 he was a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. Since the fall of 2007 he is a faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. At Bucknell he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. During the 2010/2011 academic year he was a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow at the Institute of Communication Acoustics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Prof. Nickel is author/co-author of over 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles, mainly in the areas of speech enhancement, automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, and time-frequency analysis.

Project:

Our collaborative work focusses on the development of new algorithms for the estimation of speech feature uncertainties in the presence of acoustic background noise. Our studies in automatic speech recognition have shown that with the incorporation of such uncertainty information it is possible to dramatically improve the performance of the respective systems. So far, most uncertainty estimation methods are based on modifications of well developed techniques for speech enhancement. Speech enhancement and uncertainty estimation, however, are technically quite different in scope. In focusing specifically on uncertainty estimation we are aiming to develop new signal models for further improvements.



Project Related Publications:

[1] “Inventory-Style Speech Enhancement with Uncertainty-of-Observation Techniques,” by R. M. Nickel, R. F. Astudillo, D. Kolossa, S. Zeiler, and R. Martin, Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Kyoto, Japan, March 25-30, 2012, pp. 4645-4648.



[2] “Inventory-Based Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement,” D. Kolossa, R. M. Nickel, S. Zeiler, and R. Martin, 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), Portland, Oregon, September 9-13, 2012.



[3] “Corpus-Based Speech Enhancement with Uncertainty Modeling and Cepstral Smoothing,” R. M. Nickel, R. F. Astudillo, D. Kolossa, and R. Martin, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 2013, pp. 983-997.



[4] "Robust Audiovisual Speech Recognition Using Noise-Adaptive Linear Discriminant Analysis," by S. Zeiler, R. M. Nickel, N. Ma, G. J. Brown, and D. Kolossa, Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Shanghai, China, March 20-25, 2016, pp. 2797-2801.



[5] "Dynamic Stream Weighting for Turbo-Decoding-Based Audiovisual ASR," by S. Gergen, S. Zeiler, A. H. Abdelaziz, R. M. Nickel, D. Kolossa, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), San Francisco, California, September 8-12, 2016, pp. 2135-2139.



[6] "Unsupervised Classification of Voiced Speech and Pitch Tracking Using Forward- Backward Kalman Filtering," by B. T. Bönninghoff, R. M. Nickel, S. Zeiler, and D. Kolossa, Proceedings of the 12th Speech Communication Conference of the Information Technology Society of the Association of German Engineers (ITG-VDE Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation), Paderborn, Germany, October 5-7, 2016.



[7] "Improving Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Using Deep Neural Networks With Dynamic Stream Reliability Estimates," by H. Meutzner, N. Ma, R. M. Nickel, C. Schymura, and D. Kolossa, Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), New Orleans, Louisiana, March 5-9, 2017.
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