Acoustic Information Science Laboratory (Akagi lab)

Human Information Processing Laboratories, School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Address: 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan

Lab Director: Prof. Masato AKAGI

Masato Akagi received his B.E. from Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.E. and Ph.D. Eng. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1981 and 1984. He joined the Electrical Communication Laboratories of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in 1984. From 1986 to 1990, he worked at the ATR Auditory and Visual Perception Research Laboratories. Since 1992 he has been on the faculty of the School of Information Science of JAIST and is now a full professor. His research interests include speech perception, the modeling of speech perception mechanisms in human beings, and the signal processing of speech. He is a member of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) of Japan, the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), the IEEE, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). He is Ex-President of ASJ. Dr. Akagi received the IEICE Excellent Paper Award from the IEICE in 1987, the Best Paper Award from the Research Institute of Signal Processing in 2009, and the Sato Prize for Outstanding Papers from the ASJ in 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2011.
URL (http://www.jaist.ac.jp/~akagi/index-e.html )

Research topics

Interests of Akagi Lab. are speech signal processing and modeling the speech perception mechanism of human beings. Speech is the most natural means of communication between human beings. Therefore, it is believed that modeling these mechanisms is able to realize high-performance speech processing systems.


Research Areas

Figure 1 shows the principle procedures of speech communication (production and perception). Akagi laboratory .is mainly focusing on the topics indicated by the red blocks, such as speech production, speech communication in real environments, and speech perception. In our research, not only engineering (digital signal processing) but also knowledge of physiology and/or psychology is required.


Research Issues

Production: Through modeling the speech production mechanisms, the research is aimed to synthesize the natural speech. The research includes: to investigate the relationship between speech spectrum and shape of vocal tract, to synthesize natural speech with non-linguistic information (e.g., individuality and emotion), to synthesize singing voice.

Perception: Through modeling the perception mechanisms of human beings, the research is aimed to recognize speech in real-world conditions. Specifically, the research includes: to realize cock-tail-party effect, to enhance speech.

akagi@jaist.ac.jp