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I am a male mammal. My base pair sequence contains adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. At the sub-atomic level, I am almost entirely empty space. I have not come unstuck in time.

Below is some additional information about me.

Education

Ph.D - Computer Science, University of Toronto - 2006-2011
Advisor: Graeme Hirst
  • Thesis : Production knowledge in the recognition of dysarthric speech
  • See my research page.
M.Eng - Electrical & Computer Engineering, McGill University - 2004-2006
Advisor: Jeremy Cooperstock
  • Honours Thesis : CLAVIUS: Understanding Language Understanding in Multimodal Interaction
  • Final GPA : 4.0/4.0
  • Member : Centre for Intelligent Machines
B.Sc - Computer Science, Concordia University - 2000-2003
Advisor: Sabine Bergler
  • Minor : Mathematics and Statistics
  • Honours Thesis : Experiments and Analysis in Cross-Document NP-Coreference
  • Commendations : Graduated with Honours, Great Distinction
  • Member : Institute for Cooperative Education

Publications

  • Wang, J., Samal, A., Green, J.R., Rudzicz, F. (2012) Sentence recognition from articulatory movements for silent speech interfaces. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP12), March 25--30, Kyoto, Japan.
  • Rudzicz, F., Hirst, G., Van Lieshout, P. (in press) Vocal tract representation in the recognition of cerebral palsied speech. in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
  • Rudzicz, F., Namasivayam, A.K., Wolff, T. (in press) The TORGO database of acoustic and articulatory speech from speakers with dysarthria. in Language Resources and Evaluation.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2012) Using articulatory likelihoods in the recognition of dysarthric speech. in Speech Communication, 54(3), March, pages 430--444.
  • Mengistu, K., Rudzicz, F., and Falk, T. (2011) Using acoustic measures to predict automatic speech recognition performance for dysarthric speakers. in proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications at INTERSPEECH 2011, August, Firenze Italy.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2011) Acoustic transformations to improve the intelligibility of dysarthric speech. in proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT2011) at the ACL Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2011), 30 July, Edinburgh Scotland.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2011) Articulatory knowledge in the recognition of dysarthric speech. in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 19(4), May, pages 947--960.
  • Namasivayam, A.K., van Lieshout, P., Kroll, R., Le, J., Rudzicz, F. (2011) Voice onset self-monitoring and evaluation skills in persons who stutter. Proceedings of the 2011 International Speech Production Seminar (ISSP11), June 20--23, Montreal Canada.
  • Mengistu, K.T., Rudzicz, F. (2011) Comparing humans and automatic speech recognition systems in recognizing dysarthric speech. Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, May 25--27, St. John's Canada.
  • Mengistu, K.T., Rudzicz, F. (2011) Adapting acoustic and lexical models to dysarthric speech. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP11), May 22--27, Prague, Czech Republic.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2010) Learning mixed acoustic/articulatory models for disabled speech. Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Learning for Assistive Technologies at the twenty-fourth annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2010), pages 70--78, December, Whistler, British Columbia.
  • Reimer, M., Rudzicz, F. (2010) Identifying articulatory goals from kinematic data using principal differential analysis. Proceedings of Interspeech 2010, pages 1608--1611, September 26-30, Makuhari Japan.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2010) Correcting errors in speech recognition with articulatory dynamics. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010), July 11-16, Uppsala Sweden.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2010) Towards a noisy-channel model of dysarthria in speech recognition. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT) at the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2010), June 2-6, Los Angeles California, pages 80--88.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2010) Adaptive kernel canonical correlation analysis for estimation of task dynamics from acoustics. Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'10), March 14-19, Dallas, Texas.
  • Zhu, X., Penn, G., Rudzicz, F. (2009) Summarizing multiple spoken documents: finding evidence from untranscribed audio. Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP, August 2009, pp. 549--557, Suntec, Singapore.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2009) Applying Discretized Articulatory Knowledge to Dysarthric Speech. Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'09), April 19-24, Taipei, Taiwan.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2009) Phonological Features in Discriminative Classification of Dysarthric Speech. Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'09), April 19-24, Taipei, Taiwan.
  • Rudzicz, F., van Lieshout, P., Hirst, G., Penn, G., Shein, F., Wolff, T. (2008) Towards a Comparative Database of Dysarthric Articulation. Proceedings of the International Speech Production Seminar (ISSP08), December 8-12, Strasbourg France.
  • Kazemian, S., Rudzicz, F., Penn, G., Munteanu, C. (2008) A Critical Assessment of Spoken Utterance Retrieval through Approximate Lattice Representations. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR2008), October 30-31, Vancouver Canada.
  • Rudzicz, F., (2007) Comparing Speaker-Dependent and Speaker-Adaptive Acoustic Models for Recognizing Dysarthric Speech. Proceedings of Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07), October 15-17 2007, Tempe USA.
  • Rudzicz, F., (2006) Clavius: Bi-Directional Parsing for Generic Multimodal Interaction. Proceedings of COLING-ACL 2006, July 17-21 2006, Sydney Australia.
  • Rudzicz, F., (2006) Clavius: Bi-Directional Parsing of Multimodal Semantic Structures. (accepted). AAAI-06, July 16-20, 2006, Boston USA.
  • Rudzicz, F., (2006) Put a Grammar Here: Bi-Directional Parsing in Multimodal Interaction. Proceedings of the CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts, Montréal, Québec.
  • Boussemart, Y., Rioux, F., Rudzicz, F., Wozniewski, M., Cooperstock, J. (2004) A Framework for 3D Visualisation and Manipulation in an Immersive Space using an Untethered Bimanual Gestural Interface. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, Hong Kong.
  • Rioux, F., Rudzicz, F., Wozniewski, M. (2004) Palettes transparentes hybrides appliquées aux environnements immersifs. Proceedings of the 16th Conférence Francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine, Namur, Belgium.
  • Rioux, F., Rudzicz, F., Wozniewski, M. (2004) The Modellers' Apprentice - The Toolglass Metaphor in an Immersive Environment. Proceedings of the 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference, Leeds, UK.
  • Bergler, S., Witte, R., Khalife, M., Li, Z. and Rudzicz, F. (2003) Using Knowledge-poor Coreference Resolution for Text Summarization. HLT-NAACL 2003 Text Summarization Workshop (DUC 03), Edmonton AB, Canada.

Theses, Technical Reports, and Databases

  • Rudzicz, F., Hirst, G., van Lieshout, P., Penn, G., Shein, F., Namasivayam, A., Wolff, T. (2012) TORGO Database of Dysarthric Articulation
  • Rudzicz, F. (2011) Production knowledge in the recognition of dysarthric speech. Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toronto.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2006) CLAVIUS: Understanding Language Understanding in Multimodal Interaction. Master's of Engineering Thesis, McGill University.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2004) Discriminative Training of Language Models in the CMU Sphinx Framework: Experiments and Analysis. Technical report for ECSE-523, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2003) ALICE: A Line-based Coordinate Estimator: Towards a More Robust Soccer Robot. Technical report for ECSE-494, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2003) Experiments and Analysis in Cross-Document NP-Coreference. Honours Thesis, Concordia University.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2003) Cross-Document NP Coreference: Shallow Syntactic Heuristics vs. Probabilistic Networks. Technical Report, CLaC Labs.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2003) Fuzzy Pronominal Coreference: Two Approaches. Technical Report, CLaC Labs.
  • Rudzicz, F. (2002) Towards Reliable Intra-Text NP-Coreference in ERS: A Practical Implementation of a Rule-based Approach. Technical report for NSERC USRA.

Patents

  • System and method for acoustic transformation - Provisional application US 78053/00002.
  • The Globally Adaptive Filesystem - application stalled at McGill's Office for Technology Transfer.

Professional History

Founder and CEO - Thotra Incorporated
Toronto, ON - Sep 2011 - current
Research intern - Quillsoft Ltd., Bloorview Kids Rehab
Toronto, ON - Jan 2009 - Sep 2009
  • Transformation-based machine learning for word- and phrase-prediction in accessibility software.
  • Human-computer interaction for accessibility software.
Research assistant - Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University
Montréal, QC - Jan 2004 - May 2006
  • Designed, implemented and documented specialized POSIX-compliant file system.
  • Designed, implemented and conducted experiments measuring human behaviour in 3D immersive environments.
  • System administration and support for Linux lab machines.
  • Implemented specialized acoustic echo cancellation library.
Research assistant / Sys admin - CLaC Labs, Concordia University
Montréal, QC - Jan 2001 - Dec 2003
  • Implemented Java-based infrastructure and heuristic components for NL text summarizer, including experiments and publication.
  • Designed and documented heuristics for cross-document entity coreference from analysis of corpora.
  • System administration and support for Linux and Windows lab machines.
Speech science - Scansoft Inc.
Boston, USA - Summer 2003
  • Designed, implemented, and analyzed discriminative training algorithms for proprietary language models, with documentation.
  • Deployed and analyzed web-based speech applications with Apache.
  • Wrote maintenance and analysis scripts for speech databases in Perl and MySQL.
  • Performed recognizer and international languages regression analysis, with documentation.
Speech science - SpeechWorks Inc.
Montréal, QC - Jan 2001 - Aug 2001
  • Implemented program to perform acoustic, language and lexical model training for international spoken languages.
  • Designed telephony-based speech applications.

Teaching

  • CSC 401 (Toronto) - Natural Language Computing - Instructor - Winter 2012
  • CSC 401 (Toronto) - Natural Language Computing - Instructor - Winter 2011
  • CSC 108 (Toronto) - Introduction to Computer Programming - TA - Summer 2010
  • CSC 401 (Toronto) - Natural Language Computing - TA - Winter 2010
  • CSC 401 (Toronto) - Natural Language Computing - TA - Winter 2009
  • CSC 108 (Toronto) - Introduction to Computer Programming - TA - Fall 2008
  • CSC 190 (Toronto) - Computer Algorithms, Data Structures and Languages - TA - Winter 2007
  • ECSE 526 (McGill) - Artificial Intelligence - TA - Winter 2006
  • ECSE 424 (McGill) - Human Computer Interaction - TA - Winter 2006
  • COMP 472 (Concordia) - Artificial Intelligence - TA - Winter 2003
  • COMP 472 (Concordia) - Artificial Intelligence - TA - Fall 2002
  • COMP 472 (Concordia) - Artificial Intelligence - TA - Summer 2002
  • COMP 472 (Concordia) - Artificial Intelligence - TA - Winter 2002

Awards

  • Nominee for NSERC Innovation Challenge - National - 2011 - N/A
  • MITACS Elevate Industrial Fellowship - National - 2011-2012 - $65,000
  • Ontario Graduate Scholarship - Provincial - 2009-2010 - $15,000 (declined)
  • MITACS Accelerate Canada award - National - 2009 - $15,000
  • NSERC Collaborative Research and Development Grant (with my PhD committee) - National - 2008,2009 - $152,895
  • Bell University Labs Research Grant (with my PhD committee) - Institutional - 2007 - $75,000
  • NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship (Doctoral) - National - 2006-2009 - $105,000
  • McGill Majors Fellowship - Institutional - 2006 - ~$30,000 (declined)
  • FQRNT Bourse de Maitrise - Provincial - 2004-2005 - $25,000
  • NSERC undergraduate research award (AI) - National - 2002 - ~$6,000
  • CS graduation awards - Institutional - 2004 - ~$1,200
  • Dean's List - Institutional - 2001-2003 - N/A

Service

  • Program committee, Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2012.
  • Editor, MITACS Associate Research Review Committee, 2011-2012.
  • Mentor, Department of Computer Science mentorship program, 2012.
  • Chair, Machine Learning II, Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2011.
  • Reviewer, Assistive Technology (2011), Computer Speech and Language (2012), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (2011), Speech Communication (2011)
  • Judge, Toronto Rehab Research Day, 2011.
  • Student representative, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute Research Advisory Committee, 2011-2012.
  • Co-chair, NAACL-HLT Student Research Workshop 2010.
  • Review committee, NAACL-HLT 2009.
  • Undergraduate representative (elected, 1 year) on CS faculty - 2002-2003.

Affiliations

  • Student Member, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
  • Member, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
  • Student Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
  • Member, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Natural Languages

  • English - spoken and written - native language.
  • French - spoken and written - french immersion.

Preferred Formal Languages & Operating Environments

  • C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Prolog, LisP/Scheme, #!/bin/bash, SQL, HTML/XML (+CSS, PHP), LaTeX, MATLAB.
  • Emacs and terminal. Windows or Linux preferred.

Academic Lineage

My immediate academic lineage, defined by Ph.D. advisory relationships:

  • Marvin Minsky - Princeton, 1954
    • Eugene Charniak - MIT, 1972
      • Graeme Hirst - Brown, 1984
        • Frank Rudzicz - Toronto, 2011