Dr Heidi Christensen
PhD
Department of Computer Science
Senior Lecturer
Member of the Speech and Hearing (SpandH) research group

+44 114 222 1950
Full contact details
Department of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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Dr Heidi Christensen is a lecturer in Computer Science and a member of the Centre for Assistive Technology and Connected Healthcare (CATCH). She has a PhD degree from Aalborg University Denmark from 2002.
She joined the Speech and Hearing Group and the University of Sheffield in 2000 and has worked on numerous European and UK funded project. Dr Christensen is active in the Faculty of Engineering's work on ensuring more women in STEM subject; she recently featured on the university's Wall of Women.
- Research interests
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Dr Christensen’s research interests mainly concern clinical application of speech technology, spoken language processing and binaural machine listening.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Acoustic differences in emotional speech of people with dysarthria. Speech Communication, 126, 44-60. View this article in WRRO
- A fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 16(S6).
- 26 Can an automated assessment of language help distinguish between Functional Cognitive Disorder and early neurodegeneration?. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 91(8), e18.2-e19.
- Characterising spoken responses to an intelligent virtual agent by persons with mild cognitive impairment. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- 055 The digital doctor : a fully automated stratification and monitoring system for patients with memory complaints. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12). View this article in WRRO
- 056 Exploring the feasibility of automating verbal fluency tasks for cognitive assessment: data collection and analysis. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 90(12). View this article in WRRO
- A virtual agent to support individuals living with physical and mental comorbidities : co-design and acceptability testing. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(5). View this article in WRRO
- A new diagnostic approach for the identification of patients with neurodegenerative cognitive complaints. PLoS ONE, 14(5). View this article in WRRO
- Dementia detection using automatic analysis of conversations. Computer Speech and Language, 53, 65-79. View this article in WRRO
- Developing an intelligent virtual agent to stratify people with cognitive complaints: A comparison of human-patient and intelligent virtual agent-patient interaction.. Dementia. View this article in WRRO
- NeuroSpeech. SoftwareX, 8, 69-70. View this article in WRRO
- NeuroSpeech: An open-source software for Parkinson's speech analysis. Digital Signal Processing: A Review Journal, 77, 207-221. View this article in WRRO
- PO029 An avatar aid in memory clinic. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 88(Suppl 1), A19.4-A20.
- Characterisation of voice quality of Parkinson’s disease using differential phonological posterior features. Computer Speech & Language, 46, 196-208. View this article in WRRO
- An Innovative Speech-Based User Interface for Smarthomes and IoT Solutions to Help People with Speech and Motor Disabilities. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 242, 306-313. View this article in WRRO
- Toward the Automation of Diagnostic Conversation Analysis in Patients with Memory Complaints. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 58(2), 373-387. View this article in WRRO
- A hearing-inspired approach for distant-microphone speech recognition in the presence of multiple sources. Computer Speech and Language.
- The PASCAL CHiME speech separation and recognition challenge. Computer Speech and Language.
- Combining speech fragment decoding and adaptive noise floor modeling. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 20(3), 818-827.
- A cascaded broadcast news highlighter. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 16(1), 151-161.
Conference proceedings papers
- A comparison of acoustic and linguistics methodologies for Alzheimer’s dementia recognition. Interspeech 2020 (pp 2182-2186). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
- Recognising emotions in dysarthric speech using typical speech data. Interspeech 2020 (pp 4821-4825). Shanghai, China, 25 October 2020 - 29 October 2020.
- Improving Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Automatic Speech Recognition to Identify High-Quality Segments for More Robust Feature Extraction. Interspeech 2020
- Improving Cognitive Impairment Classification by Generative Neural Network-Based Feature Augmentation. Interspeech 2020, 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
- Source Domain Data Selection for Improved Transfer Learning Targeting Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4 May 2020 - 8 May 2020. View this article in WRRO
- Exploring Appropriate Acoustic and Language Modelling Choices for Continuous Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4 May 2020 - 8 May 2020. View this article in WRRO
- Automatic Hierarchical Attention Neural Network for Detecting AD. Interspeech 2019, 15 September 2019 - 15 September 2019.
- Phonetic Analysis of Dysarthric Speech Tempo and Applications to Robust Personalised Dysarthric Speech Recognition. ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
- Computational Cognitive Assessment: Investigating the Use of an Intelligent Virtual Agent for the Detection of Early Signs of Dementia. ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
- Examining Temporal Variations in Recognizing Unspoken Words using EEG Signals. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 7 October 2018 - 10 October 2018. View this article in WRRO
- Discriminating between Imagined Speech and Non-Speech Tasks using EEG. 2018 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) (pp 1952-1955), 18 July 2018 - 21 July 2018. View this article in WRRO
- Detecting Signs of Dementia Using Word Vector Representations. Interspeech 2018
- Detecting and Predicting Alzheimer's Disease Severity in Longitudinal Acoustic Data. Proceedings of the International Conference on Bioinformatics Research and Applications 2017 - ICBRA 2017, 8 December 2017 - 10 December 2017.
- An avatar to screen for cognitive impairment. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Vol. 381 (pp 319-319)
- An Avatar-based system for identifying individuals likely to develop dementia. Interspeech 2017 (pp 3147-3151) View this article in WRRO
- On the impact of non-modal phonation on phonological features. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 5090-5094) View this article in WRRO
- Multi-view representation learning via gcca for multimodal analysis of Parkinson's disease. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 2966-2970) View this article in WRRO
- Cloud-Based Speech Technology for Assistive Technology Applications (CloudCAST). Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, Vol. 242 (pp 322-329) View this article in WRRO
- An Innovative Speech-Based Interface to Control AAL and IoT Solutions to Help People with Speech and Motor Disability (pp 269-278)
- Brain-computer interface technology for speech recognition: A review. 2016 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA), 13 December 2016 - 16 December 2016.
- Diagnosing people with dementia using automatic conversation analysis. Proceedings of Interspeech 2016 (pp 1220-1224) View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Simple and robust audio-based detection of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. SLPAT 2016 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies
- Knowledge transfer between speakers for personalised dialogue management. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, September 2015 - September 2015.
- Remote Speech Technology for Speech Professionals - the CloudCAST initiative. Proceedings of SLPAT 2015: 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, September 2015 - September 2015.
- Speech-enabled environmental control in an AAL setting for people with speech disorders: a case study. IET International Conference on Technologies for Active and Assisted Living (TechAAL)
- Automatic selection of speakers for improved acoustic modelling: recognition of disordered speech with sparse data. 2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 7 December 2014 - 10 December 2014.
- A speech fragment approach to localising multiple speakers in reverberant environments. ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings (pp 4593-4596)
- From text summarisation to style-specific summarisation for broadcast news. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 2997 (pp 223-237)
- Fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
- Acoustic Feature Extraction with Interpretable Deep Neural Network for Neurodegenerative Related Disorder Classification. Interspeech 2020
- CloudCAST — Remote Speech Technology for Speech Professionals. Interspeech 2016
- View this article in WRRO
Reports
Theses / Dissertations
Working papers
Datasets
Other
- Acoustic differences in emotional speech of people with dysarthria. Speech Communication, 126, 44-60. View this article in WRRO
- Grants
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Current Grants
- Interdisciplinary project on COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors (COMPASS), Rosetrees Trust, 02/2020 - 02/2020, £124,864, as PI
- UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and their Applications, EPSRC, 04/2019 - 09/2027, £5,508,850, as Co-PI
- TAPAS: Training Network on Automatic Processing of PAthological Speech, EU H2020, 11/2017 - 10/2021, £468,000, as PI
- Deep learning of articulatory-based representations of dysarthric speech, Google, 02/2016 - 12/2021, £46,624, as PI
Previous Grants
- COMPASS: COMPutational Assessment of Stroke Survivors, Research England, 11/2019 - 06/2020, £48,886, as PI
- COCOA: COmputerised COgnitive Assessment, MRC, 10/2018 to 09/2019, £49,513, as PI
- CloudVent: Cloud-based speech recognition for people with paralysis using ventilators, RCUK, 10/2015 - 04/2016, £360,000, as Co-PI
- Professional activities
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- Member of the Speech and Hearing research group
- Co-organising the 6th Workshop on Speech and Language in Assistive Technology (SLPAT`15)
- Member of the Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SIG-SLPAT)
- Co-editor for an upcoming ACM TACCESS special issue on ``Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive
- Member of the COST action on ``Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)``