08 October 2010

Fine art photographer visits the Department

The fine art photographer Wendy McMurdo recently visited the Department of Computer Science in order to collect images for a photographic project on robotics.

Wendy was particularly interested in the animatronic "talking head" developed by Robin Hofe during his PhD studies. The robotic head, known as Anton, is being used to study mechanisms of speech production.

In related news, Robin Hofe was first author of a recent paper at the international Interspeech-2010 conference, held in Japan. His paper was selected as one of the top 20 papers in the conference (putting it in the top 3%) and the authors have been invited to submit an extended paper to the journal Speech Communication. The paper describes a silent speech interface for people who have lost the ability to vocalise (for example, due to diseases that affect the vocal cords). The interface consists of magnetic pellets that are fixed to the relevant speech articulators, and a set of magnetic field sensors that measure changes in the overal magnetic field created by these pellets during speech.

Robin Hofe's web page
Wendy McMurdo