Sources: Ikerbasque
Tanja Schultz presented her voice recognition system at a new Zientzia Foroa meeting
In front of a full house at the Alhondiga (Bilbao), researcher Tanja Schultz presented her voice recognition system at the conference on Speech Processing from a Multi-lingual Perspective. This system can give voice to movements of the mouth muscles, i.e. lip reading out loud, without the need to emit sounds when speaking and to communicate with another person.
The idea for this device occurred spontaneously. Dr Schultz explained that, while on a train, the nuisance and boring nature of all of the surrounding telephone conversations made her decide that she had to do something. She discovered the solution in her laboratory, specifically in a technique known as electromyography, which detects the electrical signals produced by the muscles.
Tanja Schultz obtained her Masters (1995) and PhD (2000) in IT from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2000, she joined the Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches at the Language Technologies Institute as a Scientific Researcher in IT, and where her research activities are focussed on the transferability of speech processing systems to many different languages. In addition, in 2005 she obtained a Professorship at the Carnegie Mellon Language Technologies Institute, Junior Facultyon.
She has received the FZI award for her doctoral thesis, the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence and the ISCA Best Paper Award for her work on language independent acoustic modelling. She is the author of over 80 articles and is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the European Language Resource Association and the German Society of Computer Science.