Speech and mobile technologies for cognitive communication and information systems

This paper describes research, development and teaching activities in area of speech and mobile technologies like speech and audio processing, spoken language and speech-centric human-computer interaction (including speech recognition, natural language processing, dialogue management) in mobile environment, voice control of intelligent robotic systems, mobile ad-hoc networks routing protocols and localization algorithms etc. Firstly the latest results from the research in the area of automatic speech recognition systems are described. The main focus is on the large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, which could be used for dictation purposes, speech mining, as well as a part of the human-machine interface. The Slovak spoken dialogue system is also described, which enables speech dialog between user and computer to provide autonomous services. Next part is focused on advanced communication with embodied conversational agents. The intelligent robotic systems applications are presented including the voice control application for production series of service robot, new location and path correction mechanisms for presenting the paths of mobile objects on the map, etc. Finally the developed multimodal applications for mobile terminals as interface to spoken dialog services will be depicted. In the field of mobile ad-hoc networks our research is oriented to QoS, security, cross layer design (models), and localization algorithms for mobile devices. All these research areas are closely connected to the teaching activities in the "Telecommunications" degree course in our department.