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Nicholas Kibre

curriculum vitæ

5073 Amberly Place, Goleta CA 93111
(805) 687 0110 xt 230
nick@stl.research.panasonic.com
kf6lxh

Research Interests

Education

1999 Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, Linguistics. Dissertation: Terminal Contours in Welsh Intonation.
1995 M.A., University of California, Santa Barbara, Linguistics. Thesis: A Model of Mutation in Welsh.
1991 B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, Language Studies. Thesis: Linearization in a Relational Grammar Account of German.

Professional Experience

1999- Research Engineer, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory.

Duties: Research and development for text-to-speech synthesis systems.

Accomplishments: Adapted in-house ASR technology to build a segment-aligner package. Led development of multilingual TTS and German-language TTS system. Developed tools for selection of concatenative unit source texts, including text analysis system for identification of optimal text strings. Assisted in development of German ASR system. Developed part of a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion module.

1998-9 Associate Scientist, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory.

Duties: Research and development for text-to-speech synthesis systems.

Accomplishments: Developed text-processing algorithm for reading of email text. Designed and implemented algorithms for crossfading of glottal source and vocal track filter demisyllable units in the development of a new text-to-speech system. Developed stylization algorithm for efficient storage of formant trajectories. Spearheaded integration of sound-generation and prosody modules of new TTS system. Created GUI tools to expedite the development of synthesis algorithms and speech unit databases.

1994-7 Research Linguist/Speech Programmer, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory.

Duties: Research and development for text-to-speech synthesis systems.

Accomplishments: Helped in development of female voice for existing synthesis system. Implemented algorithms for time and pitch modification of speech signals, including PSOLA and Fourier analysis/resynthesis. Developed system for high-quality concatenative synthesis, including novel algorithm for intonationally-sensitive unit selection. Assisted in development of basic speech synthesis technologies, including computational models of prosody and waveform generation techniques. Applied artificial neural networks to problem of segment duration modeling in speech synthesis. Developed online TTS demo.

1994 Research Assistant, Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory.

Duties: Software development for electropalatographic speech training system.

Accomplishments: Developed software for analysis of electropalatographic data.

1994 Computer Lab Manager, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.
1993-4 Teaching Assistant, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Patents

2001 "Identification of unit overlap regions for concatenative speech synthesis system" (with Steve Pearson). US Patent 6,202,049.
2000 "Formant-based speech synthesizer employing demisyllable concatenation with independent cross fade in the filter parameter and source domains" (with Steve Pearson and Nancy Niedzielski). US Patent 6,144,939.
1999 "Technique for high quality concatenative synthesis" (with Kazue Hata). US Patent 5,878,393.
1999 "Message assembler using pseudo randomly chosen words in finite state slots" (with Toru Kanno, Yoshi Terada, Kazue Hata, and Rhonda Shaw). US Patent 5,966,691.

Publications

2000 "Welsh." In The Encyclopedia of the World's Languages. H. W. Wilson Press.
1998 A Model of Mutation in Welsh (Revision of M.A. thesis). Indiana University Linguistics Club.
1998 "Between irregular and regular: Imperfect generalizations in Istanbul Turkish and the status of phonological rules." In Functionalism/Formalism. John Benjamins.
1996 "Modeling segment durations with artificial neural networks." Speech Technology Laboratory Research Reports 6. Presented at the Third Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Societies of America and Japan.
1995 "Cues for /th/ in American English" (with Kazue Hata). Speech Technology Laboratory Research Reports 5. Presented at 130th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
1995 "Word order, mutation, and topic in Welsh." Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
1994 "Form and function of the English Subject 1150-1400." Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
1994 "Noun + gar-nu expressions in Nepali." UCSB Linguistics Department Working Papers 6: Aspects of Nepali Grammar.

Other Papers and Presentations

1999 "Selection of cross-fade regions for concatenation of demisyllable units." ASA.
1999 "Analysis of pitch accent categories in Welsh." ASA.
1998 "A Synthesis method based on concatenation of demisyllables and a residual excited vocal tract model" (with Steve Pearson and Nancy Niedzielski). ICSLP.
1998 "Modeling pitch accent types in Welsh." Phonetics/Phonology Workshop and CSTR Seminar Series, Edinburgh University.
1996 "Timing of articulatory and acoustic targets-Evidence from Electropalatography" (with Hector Javkin). Third Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Societies of America and Japan.
1995 "Nick's Quick Guide to HTML." Online Documentation, University of California, Santa Barbara.
1995 "On some regularities in gender in Welsh." University of California Celtic Conference, University of California, Berkeley.
1995 "Some problems of constituency in Welsh." Workshop on Constituency, University of California, Santa Barbara.
1995 "Impersonals and passives in Welsh: Motivations for a structural shift in progress." Workshop on Grammatical Relations, University of California, Santa Barbara.
1995 "Mutation, word order, and grammatical relations in Welsh." Linguistics Colloquium, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Grants and Awards

1997 Regents' Fellowship, University of California.
1997 UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Research Grant (for dissertation fieldwork).
1994 UCSB Instructional Improvement Grant (for development of teaching materials for acoustic phonetics).
1991 Phi Beta Kappa.
1991 Stevenson College Honors, University of California at Santa Cruz.

Other Skills

Professional Organizations

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