Cohort 2 student, Scott Wellington, is currently in Japan for 5 months undertaking a project with the Yamagishi Lab at NII, entitled ‘Anonymization of voice donors within personalised synthetic voices.’ Scott describes the project:
“Creators of synthetic voices must adhere to regulatory requirements and ethical responsibilities to safeguard the privacy of individuals who provide their voice data. For a personalised synthetic voice, there is an interesting extra consideration: the donor voices used in its creation will typically share qualities (age, gender, accent, etc.) with a customer’s unimpaired natural speech (prior to speech impairment, from conditions such as MND). However, the identities of donor voices must still be protected, despite being selected for their demographic features. This project, in partnership with our ART-AI partner company, SpeakUnique Ltd., and the Yamagishi Lab at NII, explores different ways to quantify assurances of privacy.”
Scott has sent an update on his time so far in Japan:
“My research with NII is going well, and we are targeting the 2nd of March, which is the submission deadline for Interspeech, one of the two ‘big’ conferences for speech processing research (the other being ICASSP). In terms of what an internship is hoped to provide, I think this opportunity with NII has fulfilled its remit three times over, and then some. After focusing on brain signal processing for three years, I suspected that stepping back into the world of speech processing would be a steep learning curve (and it certainly was!) but the amount of take-aways I have from this experience is staggering, for both my professional and skills-based growth and my personal development.”
And of Scott’s adventures in Japan:
“Japan is great! Prior to the holidays, I hadn’t left Tokyo. You don’t really need to: Tokyo is so vast, and every prefecture has its own vibe, so I’ve just been choosing a direction and zipping off on the trains to explore. But in the holidays, I went with a fellow NII colleague to Hiroshima (Itsukushima island, mainly), then Osaka and Nara. Over Christmas, I cycled the famous Shiminami Kaido island chain there-and-back-again over two days, which was full of jaw-dropping vistas and natural beauty. Afterwards, I visited the grand O-Torii of Miyajima, took some cable cars up and over the Primeval Forest, and explored the famous mountain shrines on Itsukushima—equally awe-inspiring. Then I made lots of new deer friends in Nara. The crowds for hatsumode were insane in Osaka, even at midnight, so instead we went to the beautiful Osaka Castle and its shrine.”
The adventure continues for Scott and he is due back in the UK at the end of March.
