People
Academics
Anil Kokaram received the Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University, U.K., in 1993. Then, he was a Research Fellow with the Cambridge University Engineering Department and Churchill College Cambridge. In 1998, he established the Sigmedia Group (www.sigmedia.tv) at Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 a company he founded, Green Parrot Pictures, operating in the consumer image processing space, was acquired by Google. He is currently working as a Tech. Lead in the Chrome Media Group at Google, Mountain View CA. He continues to hold his Professorship with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the College. He is the author of over 100 refereed papers in various conferences and journals over the years. His research interests include the general area of digital video processing and algorithms for stereoscopic quality improvement and video processing in the life sciences. He is best known for his work in automated motion picture restoration.
Prof. Kokaram was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions in Image Processing from 2002 to 2007. He was a recipient of an Academy Award alongside colleagues at The Foundry (a visual effects software manufacturer in London) for his contribution to a range of visual algorithms in 2007. These are now widely used in the industry for motion-based effects and quality improvement (The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, etc.).
Dr. François Pitié is an Ussher Assistant Professor in Media Signal Processing in the School of Engineering and part of the ADAPT Research Centre. His research is concerned with media signal processing applications related to film postproduction and film restoration. The aim of his research is to develop tools that can enhance the cinematic experience of immersion.
Dr. Naomi Harte is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and a Fellow of Trinity College. She was appointed as an SFI Engineering Initiative Lecturer in Digital Media in 2008. Prior to returning to academia, Dr. Harte worked in high-tech start-ups in the field of DSP Systems Development, including her own company founded in 2002. She also previously worked in McMaster University in Canada. Dr. Harte’s specialist area is Human Speech Communication. Her industrial background brings a real-world approach to her research. Her work involves the design and application of mathematical algorithms to enhance or augment speech communication between humans and technology. Current projects focus on speech quality, audio-visual speech recognition, emotion in speech, speaker verification and bird species analysis. She is a Co-PI at the SFI ADAPT Research Centre.
Postdoc./Research fellows
Ali Karaali was born in Istanbul, Turkey and has been working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Trinity College Dublin since August 2017. He holds a PhD degree from the department of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre Brazil.
Joao Cabral is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, in the School of Computer Science and Statistics, as part of the ADAPT Centre and SIGMEDIA group. He was awarded a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, U.K., in 2010, funded by a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship. His Ph.D. thesis contributed with the novel integration of an acoustic glottal source model in HMM-based speech synthesis, for improvement of speech quality and control over voice characteristics. Before joining Trinity College Dublin in 2013, he also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University College Dublin, as part of the CNGL research centre, from 2010. His main research is on improving Text-To-Speech syntesis (TTS) methods based on statistical learning models. He is also interested in evaluation methodologies of synthetic speech in the context of multi-modal applications with virtual characters. His research interests also include analysis of emotion and affect from speech and other modalities (text, video, biosignals, etc.), voice transformation, prosody modelling, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Sébastien Le Maguer is a postdoctoral research fellow based at Trinity College Dublin and funded by the IRC-GOIPD scheme. His work focuses on Speech Synthesis evaluation. Before joining ADAPT, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Saarland University/DFKI (Germany) where he worked on the integration of information density based features for speech synthesis; at INRIA/IRISA in Rennes (France) where he worked on information retrieval with application on medical context. He did his PhD on parametric speech synthesis evaluation at IRISA/Université de Rennes 1. Aside these projects, he also has interest about speech pathology, especially stutter-speech.
PhD Students
Ayushi Pandey is a PhD student under Professor Naomi Harte. She has a background in cognitive science and phonetics, and she is currently exploring the best practices in evaluation for synthetic speech data. She has received education at Johns’ Hopkins University, IIIT-Hyderabad and EFL-University, Hyderabad, India.
Daniel J. Ringis is a PhD researcher at Trinity College Dublin. He is from Trinidad and Tobago, and previously studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. His current research is focused on motion estimation and video analysis.
George Sterpu received his Master’s degree in Electronics, Automation and Signal Processing from University Grenoble Alpes in 2015 and his Bachelor’s degree from University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2013. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition under the supervision of Dr. Naomi Harte.
Marco Forte is a PhD researcher with the Electronic Engineering department at Trinity College Dublin, Sigmedia group. His research focuses on foreground estimation and motion estimation for video matting. Modern deep learning techniques are leveraged to create and tune more consistent and content aware results.
Mark Anderson is a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Naomi Harte. His research is focused on automatic monitoring of bird populations through analysis of their song. He has a background in signal processing and analogue design. He received his masters degree in electronic and electrical engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 2019.