[CPCC] TALK: Speech Coding 5/24 12 PM

Ender Ayanoglu ayanoglu at uci.edu
Tue May 15 14:55:26 PDT 2007


				TALK

          Personal Reflections on Research in Speech Coding:
                           From LPC to CELP

                                  by

                            Bishnu S. Atal
                 Department of Electrical Engineering
              University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195

                             May 24, 2007
                               Thursday
				 Noon
                          Calit2 Auditorium


				Abstract

The research in speech coding originated about 75 years ago. It all
started from the desire to transmit voice signals over undersea
telegraph cables. I joined Bell Labs, Murray Hill in 1961. It was a
wonderful time period full of exciting developments. I started my
research in speech coding (compression) in 1966. Speech compression
then had no good applications in sight. In my talk, I will share my
personal impressions of this research as I navigated my way, starting
from basic LPC to multi-pulse and to code-excited linear prediction
(CELP). The semiconductor revolution produced faster and faster DSP
chips and made CELP practical. Speech coding technology is widely used
now in many applications, such as digital cellular phones, personal
computers, and VoIP.


                          Speaker's Biography

Bishnu S. Atal is an affiliate professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
He retired in March 2002 after working for more than 40 years at
Lucent Bell Labs and AT&T Labs.  He was a technical director at the
AT&T Shannon Laboratory, Florham Park, New Jersey, where he was
engaged in research in speech coding and in automatic speech
recognition. Previously, he was the head of the Acoustics and Audio
Communication Research Department at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill,
N.J. He was named a Bell Laboratories Fellow in 1994 and an AT&T
Fellow in 1997.

Atal received the B.Sc. (Honors) degree in physics from the University
of Lucknow (India) in 1952, the diploma in electrical communication
engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (India) in
1955, and a doctorate degree in electrical engineering from the
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York, in 1968. He joined the
technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1961, became head of the
Acoustics Research Department in 1985, and head of the Speech Research
Department in 1990.

His research work centered in the fields of acoustics and speech
processing covering a wide range of topics, such as computer
simulation of concert halls, fading in mobile radio, automatic speaker
recognition, and low bit rate speech coding. He is internationally
recognized for his contributions to speech analysis, synthesis and
coding. His pioneering work in linear predictive coding of speech
established linear prediction as one of the most important speech
analysis techniques, leading to many applications in coding,
recognition and synthesis of speech.

Atal invented multi-pulse linear predictive coding and code-excited
linear prediction (CELP) which have found widespread applications in
efficient transmission of speech in telephone networks. The CELP voice
coders have been adopted as standards for digital transmission of
voice on cellular radio systems in North America, Europe, Japan and
elsewhere in the world to meet the increasing demand for cellular
phones.  His current research interests include low bit rate speech
coding and automatic speech recognition. His research work is
documented in more than 90 technical papers and he holds 17 U.S. and
numerous international patents in speech processing.

He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 and to
the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He is a Fellow of the
Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE. He received the IEEE
Signal Processing Society Award in1993 for contributions to linear
prediction of speech, multi-pulse and code-excited source coding, and
the 1975 IEEE ASSP Society Technical Achievement Award for fundamental
contributions to linear predictive coding of speech signals. In 1980
he received, jointly with M. R. Schroeder, the IEEE ASSP Senior
Award. He is the recipient of the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 and
the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Field Award in 1986 for his
pioneering contributions to linear predictive coding for speech
processing. He received the Thomas Edison Patent Award from the R&D
Council of New Jersey in 1994, and the New Jersey Inventors Hall of
Fame "Inventor of the Year Award" in 2000. He was awarded the Benjamin
Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in 2003. Other recipients of
this prestigious award include Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo
Marconi, and John Pierce. He has co-edited two books, "Advances in
Speech Coding" and "Speech and Audio Coding for Wireless Network
Applications," with V. Cuperman and A. Gersho.

                         Additional Information

Event is co-sponsored by Calit2 at UCI, Center for Pervasive Communications
and Computing, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. It is free
and open to the public.

Host: Fan-Gang Zeng

Directions: www.uci.edu/campusmaps.shtml



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