Joao Cabral

Bio

Joao Cabral was part of Sigmedia. He is currently 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).