I’m a PhD student studying at the University of Auckland. I studied computer science and mathematics at undergraduate level before completing my BSc(Hons) dissertation on anomaly detection in wireless sensor networks. I then started my PhD research, supervised by Yun Sing Koh and Michael Witbrock.
My research is about speech emotion recognition, in other words, teaching computers to recognise someone’s emotional state just from their speech. This can include both what they say and how they say it. In particular I am trying to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition across different groups such as regional accent and language, so that minimal amounts of target data are required for reasonable performance.
As speech enabled devices become more prevalent, the utility of them having emotional awareness also increases. Speech emotion recognition has many interesting current and potential applications in healthcare, customer service, human computer interaction and gaming, to list a few.
