MULTITEL R&D centreMultimedia

TélécommunicationMons

MULTITEL - Key dates

2000 : MULTITEL N.P.O. : Independent Research Centre

Networking

Signal ProcessingTelecommunications

Optics Voice Signal

1995 : Under the Objective 1 programme of the European Community and the Walloon Region, foundation of the Centre of Excellence MULTITEL coming from the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons

Faculté Polytechnique de Mons

Multitel - Mission• Objective 1 – European Union and Walloon Region

• Funding of Research Activities from 2001 to 2006• Specific Projects which aim to

– Be R&D Partner of Walloon companies– Enhance access of Walloon Companies to High Technologies– Promote Spin off Project / realize Incubator objectives – Enhance access of Walloon Companies to Research Fundings

• European and National Research Project• Eureka / IST / ESPRIT / National Projects (Collective Research – Waleo – Initiative - …)

– FASTY (IST – 2000 )– FABRICAP (National Project – 2000 )

• EoI (NoE / Integrated Project) – 5 NoE and 12 Integrated Projects have been submitted, several projects will

be submitted• Spin-off royalties

• Babel Technologies SA – 1997– (Speech Technologies / Turn Over : 5 Mio Euro)

• IT-OPTICS SA – 2000 – (Optical Components / Free Software Solutions – Start-up – 0.5 Mio Euro 2002)

Multitel - Research Centre

• Independant research centre, created in 2000 (Non-Profit-Organisation)

• 63 persons• Management staff ( 10 persons )• Research staff ( 53 persons )

• Based in Mons, BELGIUM ( 2 Sites)

• Research Area – Key topics• Telecommunication (Optical Fiber Telecommunication)• Signal Processing (Speech Synthesis and recognition)

• Creation of 2 Spin Off :

• Babel Technologies (voice signal processing)• It-Optics (video streaming, open source software and network management)

Multitel - Activities / Domains

DOMAINS• Networking

• Optical Telecommunications

• Signal Processing

• Sound and Image coding

• Speech Technologies (Speech Synthesis, speaker and Speech recognition)

Independent expertise centre in the fields of :ACTIVITIES

• Research & Development

• Development of prototypes• Availability of algorithms adapted

to applications• Embedded Software (Speech

Synthesis and Recognition)• European and National Research

Projects• Services

• Consulting, audit, Technological Surveillance

• Metrology – Labs / on site (Laboratory Certification 17025 in final stage)

• Prototyping• Small Series Production• Training (45 Sessions covering all

domains)

MULTITEL - organisation

Optical department

(18)

Speech & Signal

(18)

Image & video processing (10)

Management Board

Administrative & financial department

Scientific & technical department

Marketing & business

development (5)

Legal & intellectual property rights (2)

HRM (2)

Networking(8)

• Background funds « objectif 1 »  (Europe / region)• Industrial & private contracts ( Spin-off, strategic partnership)• Europe (FP6,IP,Noe,CA,CRAFT,EUREKA,EURESCOM,…)• Bilateral national agreement (program technolangue [F],

interreg)• National (SSTC,…)• Regional (Initiative,Collective research, First, Wist, « réseau »)• Royalties for exploitation of our technologies

Funding sources

Speech Speech technologytechnology

• Since 20 years active in speech• Activity domains:

- ASR based on HMM/ANN (robustness against noise)- Desktop ASR (voice portal,VXML, dedicated application)- Embedded system speech reco (on PDA & starting on PSOC)- Speech synthesis (signal part [MBROLA],NUU)- Speech synthesis ( NLP)- Implementation on any embedded platform - Multilingual speech SDK are available

(28 Languages by Babeltech spin off) - We have full control of our speech technologies- Future : integration of speech in

multimodal Interface (haptic/speech)

Major & EC Speech projects

Winner of the IT European Award 1996

SPeech Recognition Algorithms for Connectionist Hybrids (95-98)

Thematic Indexing of Spoken Language (97-00)

REcognition of Speech by Partial Information TEchniques (99-02)

Faster Typing for Disabled Persons (01-03)

More info : www.multitel.be & http://tcts.fpms.ac.be

FASTY : FASter TYping…

• Natural Language Processing,

• Artificial Intelligence,

• Self-adaptive interfaces

• Dedicated knowledge databases

• Dutch, French, German, Swedish

Improved typing rate

Higher text generation rate

FASTY : FASter TYping…Current solutions :

• Typing rate saving < 50%

• English-based

FASTY : • Typing rate saving > 50%

• Prediction of compounds and proper inflectional forms

• Generic algorithms to ensure cross-language portability

• Adaptable and Multimodal User Interfaces

• Dictionaries based on actual use of the predictor

FASTY : FASter TYping…

Speech synthesis' role : For users who have reading problems

words in the prediction list read aloud

audible feedback of a selected word

Speech synthesis' principle : Combination of

a grapheme to phoneme converter

a synthesizer (MBROLA) based on the

concatenation of diphones

FASTY : FASter TYping…

Demo :

More information is available on : http://www.fortec.tuwien.ac.at/reha.e/projects/fasty/fasty.html

SYPOLE : SYstème auditif POrtable de LEcture pour personne mal-voyante

Target : To have a mobile reading help system for blind users

Challenges :• End-users are project partners !!

critical for the system ergonomics ;

• Improvement of embedded Speech synthesis ;

• Adapt both OCR and pattern recognition to embedded platforms with the lowest performance degradation ;

SYPOLE : SYstème auditif POrtable de LEcture pour personne mal-voyante

Current solutions : • experimental systems for auditory video representations ;

• non-mobile solutions (transportable but not mobile)

SYPOLE should be:• a stand-alone, small-size and mobile prototype ;

• able to recognize text and pictures ;

• able to synthesize them into a voice signal ;

• able to read train timetables, bank notes, price labels, headers, …

Signal Department Data Fusion Team

• Positioning applicationsCollaboration with major train

manufacturer– Safe odometry applications– Integration of GNSS data– Generic framework, may be used for other

applications• Other transport modes• Low-cost positioning

Signal Department Data Fusion Team

• Biomedical applications

– 1D (EEG, …) and 2D (images) signals analysis

– Classification according to relevant features

– Applications to • Automatic sleep analysis• Image segmentation• …

Signal Department Data Fusion Team

• Monitoring applications– Apply experience in fault &

change detection to other fields– Contacts for :

• Automatic monitoring of welding process based on optical & acoustic information

• Automatic assessment of product quality based on acoustic information

Multitel – Spin offs

• Babel Technologies– Creation in February 1997– Origin : Faculté Polytechnique de Mons– Initial Objectives : Commercialization of research

results (Speech technologies)– Position on the market : Provider of technologies

• IT-OPTICS– Creation in November 2000– Origin : Multitel Asbl– Initial Objectives : Commercialization of research

results (Telecom solutions)– Position on the market : Provider of technologies,

products and services

Questions ?

Multitel – In mobinews

• Embedded mobile system development– Embedded speech ASR provider

(with adaptation to VLBR database)– Improvement of front-end (secondary)– Algorithm simplification for integration in JAVA plug in for

GSM– Study of speech smooth menu-driven interface combining

speech & haptic interface,lexical and semantic information– Dialog management for content provider application