Plenary Lecture

Signal Processing Education Challenge: A Speaker Verification R&D Undergraduate Team

Professor Roxana Saint-Nom
Electrical Engineering Department Chair
CAERCEM Researcher
Buenos Aires Institute of Technology (ITBA)
Av. Madero 399 (1106) Buenos Aires
ARGENTINA
Tel: (+54-11) 6393 4887
Fax: (+54-11) 6393 4800 ext. 5872
Email: saintnom@itba.edu.ar
Website: http://www.itba.edu.ar
 

Abstract: In order to develop the area of signal processing technology in Argentina, R+D projects have to be carried out at universities. In that way, they can train new SP doctors to start the job. But for that purpose doctorate candidates are a must, as well as proper funding for the graduate school.
How do you start the movement, when there is not such a graduate school, no candidates and the companies don’t do research? How do you get the funding if you don’t have the project or the people to do it?
This is the challenge I faced, as head of the Electrical Engineering Department in a small University in Argentina.
My talk will address the problem, and the way I could overcome it. It will describe an undergraduate team dealing with Speaker Verification (SV) research. It will explain how it is possible to insert such a subject in the EE curricula, how to encourage senior student to do R+D, how to contribute with teams in other countries, how to help build a new platform for SV and how to design a strategy to get funding and political support.




Brief Biography of the Speaker:
She received her Electrical Engineering degree in 1987 from the University ITBA (Buenos Aires Institute of Technology), Argentina. She achieved a Masters degree in Speech Processing from the “Universidad Politecnica de Madrid”, Spain, where she is currently finishing her Ph.D thesis on Speaker Verification.
Since 1988 she has been holding academic positions in Argentina, until she became tenured faculty in the rank of the Full Professor in 2004. Since 2007 she is the Electrical Engineering Department Chair at ITBA.

Her research area is primarily signal processing, as well as electromagnetic compatibility. In recent years she started research groups in different areas, such as speaker verification, acoustics, DSP application and EMC.

She is the author of more than 20 papers, mostly in the area of signal processing education, published in reviewed journals or presented at international conferences such as IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ISCAS, IASTED and WSEAS. She is a technical reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and IEEE ICASSP Proceedings.
She is an active senior member of the IEEE. She is the founder of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Argentina Chapter, from which she currently Chair, she is the IEEE SPS Education Technical Committee Chair and a IEEE SPS Lensing Oversight Committee Member.