We kindly invite you to participate in the Colloquium of the Field of Expertise "Information, Communication & Computing". This time, Prof. Christian Poellabauer, Fulbright Visiting Professor at TU Graz presents his research on what we can learn about the wellness of persons by analyzing their speech and what this implies for speech-based human-machine interfaces.

Please register for participation at the latest by May 2 by sending email to Nora Zakany so that we can plan for catering. There will be drinks, snacks and networking after the event.

Abstract

Recent projections indicate that the number of connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, sensors, and actuators will pass 46 billion in 2021 and people will interact with these devices on a daily basis, e.g., to monitor and control our health, home, connected vehicles, security systems, social interactions, and almost every other aspect of our daily activities. As one of the most natural ways of communication, speech has recently found a rapidly increasing interest as primary mode of interaction between humans and IoT devices. At the same time, recent research has shown that there are clear links between the neurological and mental wellness of an individual and patterns in the individual's speech. Timely detection of such impairments can help improve the user-machine interactions (e.g., adapt the computing systems to the mental or cognitive conditions of the user) and prevent problems (such as operation of safety-critical equipment by users lacking appropriate cognitive fitness) before they cause damage to humans and machines. In this talk, I will discuss several challenges in continuous and non-intrusive speech assessment and present our ongoing research efforts in several specific case studies.

Biography

Christian Poellabauer received his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1998 and the Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA in 2004, both in Computer Science. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and was awarded a 2019 Fulbright Scholar grant to pursue his academic interests at TU Graz. His research interests are in the areas of wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, ad-hoc and vehicular networks, pervasive computing, and mobile healthcare systems. He has published over 150 scientific contributions in these areas and he has co-authored a textbook on Wireless Sensor Networks. His research has received funding through the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Department of Education, Department of Defense, IBM, Intel, Toyota, Ford Research, Motorola Labs, National Geographic, the National Football League, GE Health, and various other foundations and businesses. He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Georgia Tech and an NSF CAREER Award in 2006. He is a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

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