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New Frontiers paper on voice-AI!

12/21/2020

 
We are thrilled that our paper, Age- and gender-related differences in speech alignment toward humans and voice-AI, has been accepted at Frontiers in Communication: Language Sciences today!

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.600361/abstract

Interspeech 2020

7/25/2020

 
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We are thrilled to have several papers accepted to the 2020 Interspeech conference:

  • Social and functional pressures in vocal alignment: Differences for human and voice-AI interlocutors (Georgia Zellou & Michelle Cohn) 
  • Perception of concatenative vs. neural text-to-speech (TTS): Differences in intelligibility in noise and language attitudes (Michelle Cohn & Georgia Zellou)
  • Individual variation in language attitudes toward voice-AI: The role of listeners’ autistic-like traits (Michelle Cohn, Melina Sarian, Kristin Predeck, & Georgia Zellou)

Including one for the new collaboration between UC Davis and Saarland University:
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  • Differences in Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa Voices (Michelle Cohn, Eran Raveh, Kristin Predeck, Iona Gessinger, Bernd Möbius, & Georgia Zellou)  

New Paper in Language by Santiago Barreda

6/22/2020

 
Check out this month's edition of Language for a new article by Santiago Barreda, "Vowel normalization as perceptual constancy."
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Barreda, S. (2020). Vowel normalization as perceptual constancy. Language 96(2), 224-254. doi:10.1353/lan.2020.0018

Congrats to Aleese Block!

6/18/2020

 
Congratulations to doctoral student Aleese Block for passing her qualifying exam! She is now a Ph.D. Candidate!
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Aleese Block and Georgia Zellou celebrating at a socially distanced lunch!

Congrats to Georgia, 2020 UC Davis Dean's Fellow

4/22/2020

 
Congrats to Georgia Zellou for being awarded a 2020 UC Davis Dean's Faculty Fellowship!

Before leaving UC Davis, Dean Spiller instituted the Dean's 2020 Faculty Fellows program, which aimed to support emerging junior faculty with a potential for extraordinary research impact in the coming years. These 3-year awards drawn from annual development funds will provide $7.5k/year to 3 new fellows. The program is expected to continue every year in the future. The main criterion for eligibility is that the faculty member should have received their PhD no more than 10 years ago. 

For this inaugural year, the program received 16 nominations, all of which were worthy of such an award. The L&S Research Support Committee (RSC*), a faculty advisory body in the college, took on the difficult task of reviewing these applications. Here are the three recipients:
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Mairaj Syed, Religious Studies
Tucker Jones, Physics
Georgia Zellou, Linguistics
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Virtual Picnic Day Booth!

4/15/2020

 
This year's Picnic Day is going 100% digital in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, a small team of talented RAs (Patty Sandoval, Julian Rambob, Mia Gong, and Marlene Andrade) helped postdoc Michelle Cohn create videos for our Virtual Picnic Day Booths! 

Speech Science with Siri & Alexa

Hosted by the Voice-AI Speech Research Group in the UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics

Speech Science with the Amazon Alexa Prize chatbot, Gunrock

Hosted by the UC Davis Human-Device Interaction Group: UCD Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab (Computer Science), UCD Phonetics Lab (Linguistics) 
See the other Virtual Picnic Day events here!

Participate in experiments from home!

As part of Virtual Picnic Day, we are launching online studies that you and your family can participate in from home! 
  • Go to our 'Participate' page for more information
  • We have short studies for adult and kids (ages 7-12) to try!
  • We have a kid-friendly post-experiment video that will explain what we were testing! A great educational activity for kids while they're inside for the quarantine!

Congrats to Kris Predeck!

4/13/2020

 
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​Congrats to Ph.D. student Kristin (Kris) Predeck for being awarded the 2020-2021 Provost's Dissertation Year Fellowship!

New paper published: JASA

3/23/2020

 
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New paper out by Dr. Georgia Zellou, Dr. Santiago Barreda, and Ph.D. student Bruno Ferenc Segedin. You can read it here: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121/10.0000951?download=true. 

Congrats to Aleese Block!

3/2/2020

 
Congratulations to Aleese Block, Ph.D. student, for being awarded a year-long research grant through American-Scandinavian Foundation!
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(L-R): Aleese Block and Georgia Zellou

Call for RAs for human-Alexa project

2/27/2020

 
Call for RAs: Alexa- vs. human-directed speech project (Dr. Michelle Cohn, UCD Phonetics Lab)

Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Michelle Cohn, is recruiting undergraduate research assistants (RAs) to serve as confederates in the Alexa- (Amazon Echo) vs. human-directed speech project for Spring 2020 (with possibility of a paid STDT 2 position in Summer 2020 and LIN 199 units in Fall 2020).

RAs are expected to work approximately 6-8 hours a week on the project and will receive 2 units of LIN 199 credit per quarter (Note that 4 units count as upper division elective toward LIN major). 

Details (Spring Qtr 2020):
  • Act as a confederate in an interactive psycholinguistic experiment 
  • Will receive 2 units of LIN199 (6-8 hours / week) 
  • Attend lab meetings (if possible)
The project: Alexa- vs. human-directed speech
  • We are comparing how adults and children talk to Amazon's Alexa compared to a real human (you!). There will be both scripted and open ended interactions between you and the participants (and they will complete the same tasks with Alexa). Note that the scripted portion will not require memorization. 

​Requirements: 
  • Since 'Alexa' has apparent social characteristics ('female', native English speaker), we are aiming to match those properties in our confederates. At this time, we’re seeking only female native English speakers. 

Desired qualifications
  • Interest in research! (Prior experience not required) 
  • Be a Linguistics or Cognitive Science Major
  • Enthusiastic and interested in talking to new people

Application deadline: March 8, 2020 (by midnight PST)
To apply, email the following to the project PI, Dr. Cohn (mdcohn@ucdavis.edu): 
  • CV / Resume
  • Unofficial academic transcripts
  • 1-2 paragraph description of your interest in the RA position (why do you want to be an RA? Why do you think you'll be a good fit?) 
  • Spring 2020 course schedule 

Next steps: 
  • After receiving your application, we may offer you an interview with the project PI (Dr. Michelle Cohn).
  • Training will begin the first week of Spring quarter 2020. 
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Location: 
​251 Kerr Hall

Principal Investigators

Georgia Zellou, Ph.D.
Santiago Barreda, Ph.D

 ​Contact ucdphonlab@gmail.com
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