MULTITEL R&D centre Multimedia Télécommunication Mons

1. MULTITELR&D centreMultimediaTélécommunicationMons

2. Telecommunications Signal Processing Optics Voice Signal MULTITEL - Key dates 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 Networking 2000 : MULTITEL N.P.O. : Independent Research Centre

3. 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 - Mission

4. 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 - Research Centre

5. DOMAINS Networking Optical Telecommunications Signal Processing Sound and Image coding Speech Technologies (Speech Synthesis, speaker and Speech recognition) Multitel - Activities / Domains 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)

6. MULTITEL - organisation Management Board Administrative & financial department Scientific & technical department HRM (2) Marketing & business development (5) Legal & intellectual property rights (2) Optical department (18) Speech & Signal (18) Networking(8) Image & video processing (10)

7. 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

8. 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) Speech technology

9. 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 Major & EC Speech projects

10. 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…

11. 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…

12. 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

13. FASTY : FASter TYping… Demo : More information is available on : http://www.fortec.tuwien.ac.at/reha.e/projects/fasty/fasty.html

14. 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

15. Current solutions : • experimental systems for auditory video representations ; • non-mobile solutions (transportable but not mobile) SYPOLE should be: • astand-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, … SYPOLE : SYstème auditif POrtable de LEcture pour personne mal-voyante

16. Positioning applications Collaboration 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

17. 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

18. 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 Signal Department Data Fusion Team

19. 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 Multitel – Spin offs

20. Questions ?

21. 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 Multitel – In mobinews