Thu, 26 May, 01:50 - 03:00 UTC
Biosignal Processing for Adaptive Cognitive Systems
Chair: Douglas O'Shaughnessy, Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre, Canada
Abstract
In my talk, I will describe technical cognitive systems that automatically adapt to users’ needs by interpreting their biosignals. Human behavior includes physical, mental, and social actions that emit a range of biosignals which can be captured by a variety of sensors. The processing and interpretation of such biosignals provides an inside perspective on human physical and mental activities, complementing the traditional approach of merely observing human behavior. As great strides have been made in recent years in integrating sensor technologies into ubiquitous devices and in machine learning methods for processing and learning from data, I argue that the time has come to harness the full spectrum of biosignals to understand user needs. I will present illustrative cases ranging from silent and imagined speech interfaces that convert myographic and neural signals directly into audible speech, to interpretation of human attention and decision making from multimodal biosignals.
Biography
Tanja Schultz is Professor for Cognitive Systems of the Faculty of Mathematics & Computer Science at the University of Bremen, Germany and adjunct Research Professor of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon, PA USA. She received the diploma and doctoral degrees in Informatics from University of Karlsruhe and a Master degree in Mathematics and Sport Sciences from Heidelberg University, both in Germany. In 2007, she founded the Cognitive Systems Lab (CSL) and serves as Director since then. She is the spokesperson of the University Bremen high-profile area “Minds, Media, Machines” and helped establish the Leibniz Science Campus on Digital Public Health in 2019 for which she serves on the board of directors.
Professor Schultz is a recognized scholar in the field of multilingual speech recognition and cognitive technical systems, where she combines machine learning methods with innovations in biosignal processing to create technologies such as in “Silent Speech Communication” and “Brain-to-Speech”. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, elected in 2020 “for contributions to multilingual speech recognition and biosignal processing”; a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, elected in 2016 “for contributions to multilingual speech recognition and biosignal processing for human-machine interaction”; a Fellow of the European Academy of Science and Arts (2017), and a Fellow of the Asian-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (2021). Her recent awards include the Google Faculty Research Award (2020 and 2013), the ISCA/EURASIP Best Journal Paper Award (2015 and 2001), the Otto Haxel Award (2013), and the Research Award for Technical Communication from the Alcatel-Lucent Award (2012) “for her overall scientific work in the interaction of human and technology in communication systems”.