Download Constantinos Boulis - University of Washington

Constantinos Boulis
University of Washington
Department of Electrical Engineering
Paul Allen Center - Room AE100R
Campus Box 352500
Seattle, WA 98195-2500
Work: 206-543-4868
Email: [email protected]
Objective
To find a position in applied research and development on natural language processing, automatic speech
recognition and data mining.
Skills
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Κnowledge of statistical learning algorithms, both supervised and unsupervised. Text
classification, text clustering, data mining, training and inference on Bayesian & Markov
Networks. Sequence models, such as Hidden Markov Models. Core speech recognition
algorithms.
8 years of software development in C,C++, Perl, Matlab on Linux/Unix platform. Contributed
on software projects of tens of thousand of lines of code, such as Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
Decipher and Microsoft Research Whisper systems, both systems of large vocabulary speech
recognition.
Education
PhD, Electrical Engineering, September 2005
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Dissertation: "Topic Learning in Text and Conversational Speech"
Advisor: Professor Mari Ostendorf
MPhil, Computer Engineering, August 2000
Technical University of Crete, Greece
Thesis: "Maximum Likelihood Stochastic Adaptation using Medium and Small Data Sets"
Advisor: Professor Vassileios Digalakis
Diploma (5 year study program with thesis), Computer Engineering, December 1998
Technical University of Crete, Greece
Thesis: "Rapid Speaker Adaptation using Markov Random Fields" (in Greek)
Advisor: Professor Vassileios Digalakis
Awards
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Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award, Electrical Engineering Dept., Univ. of
Washington, 2005
Best student paper award, PKDD 2004
Second place in Ericsson Award of Excellence for undergraduate theses related to communication,
2000
Experience
Research Assistant : September 2001 - present
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
Researching methodologies on extracting topic information from speech and text databases. Developing
new algorithms for combining clustering partitions and feature selection for text. Also, investigating issues
pertinent to spoken language understanding such as the role of prominence, disfluencies, gender and word
errors.
Research Intern : June 2001 - August 2001
Speech Technologies Group, Microsoft Research
Worked on a client-server approach to speech recognition for hand-held devices. Developed different
source and channel coders that offered improvements compared to existing baselines.
Research Assistant : September 2000 - June 2001
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
Worked on the design of a client-server architecture for speech recognition using lightweight hand-held
communication devices and a remote ASR server. Developed source and channel coding algorithms
offering robustness to packet losses under manageable total delay. Experiments were conducted on the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Communicator database.
Research Assistant : January 1999 - August 2000
Department of Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Work involved exploring a new speaker adaptation algorithm to work under small amounts of adaptation
data. Experiments were conducted on the Wall Street Journal database. Also, implemented an adaptation
tool to be used in a system of automatic large vocabulary dictation in Greek. The implementation included
methods for combining different speaker adaptation algorithms.
Teaching Assistant : February 1999 - June 1999
Department of Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Conducted classroom exercises and graded homework assignments for the undergraduate course "Analog
Telecommunication Systems".
Visiting Scholar : June 1998 - August 1998
Center for Speech and Language Processing, Johns Hopkins University
Worked as part of a team with the goal to introduce algorithms for speaker adaptation under limited
resources.
Journal Publications
Deng, L., Wang, Y., Wang, K., Acero, A., Hon, H.-W., Droppo, J., Boulis, C., Mahajan, M., and Huang,
X.D, February-March 2004, “Speech and Language Processing for Multimodal Human-Computer
Interaction”, Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems, 36(2-3):161-187.
Boulis, C., Ostendorf, M., Riskin, E., Otterson, S. November 2002. “Graceful Degradation of Speech
Recognition Performance Over Packet-Erasure Networks”, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio
Processing, 10(8):580-590.
Deng, L., Wang, K., Acero, A., Hon, H.-W., Droppo, J., Boulis, C., Wang, Y.-Y., Jakoby, D., Mahajan, M.,
Chelba C., and Huang, X.D. November 2002. “Distributed Speech Processing in MiPad's Multimodal User
Interface”, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 10(8):605-619.
Boulis, C., Diakoloukas, V., Digalakis, V. July 2001. “Maximum Likelihood Stochastic Transformations
Adaptation for Medium and Small Data Sets”. Computer Speech and Language, 15(3):257-287.
Conference Publications
Boulis, C., Ostendorf, M., September 2005. “Using Symbolic Prominence to Help Design Feature Subsets
for Topic Classification and Clustering of Natural Human-Human Conversations”, Interspeech-05, pp.
425-428.
Boulis, C., Kahn, J., Ostendorf, M., July 2005. “The Role of Disfluencies in Topic Classification of Natural
Human-Human Conversations”, Proc. of the Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding, pp 9-14.
Boulis, C., Ostendorf, M., June 2005. “A Quantitative Analysis of Lexical Differences Between Genders in
Telephone Conversations”, Proc. of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL), pp. 435-442.
Boulis, C., Ostendorf, M. April 2005. “Text Classification by Augmenting the Bag-of-Words
Representation with Redundancy-Compensated Bigrams”, Proc. of the International Workshop on
Feature Selection in Data Mining, pp 9-16.
Boulis, C., Ostendorf, M. September 2004. “Combining Multiple Clustering Systems”. Proc. of the 8th
European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD), LNAI
3202, pp. 63-74.
Boulis, C. May 2004. “Speaker Recognition with Mixtures of Gaussians with Sparse Regression Matrices”,
Proc. of the Student Research Workshop of Human Language Technology/North American Chapter of
the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT/NAACL), companion volume, pp. 55-60.
Riskin, E., Boulis, C., Otterson, S., Ostendorf, M. September 2001. “Graceful Degradation of Speech
Recognition Performance Over Lossy Packet Networks”. Proc. of the 7th European Conference on
Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 2001), pp. 2715-2719.
Boulis, C., Digalakis, V. June 2000. “Fast Speaker Adaptation of Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech
Recognizer Using a Basis Transform Approach”, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 989-992.
Digalakis, V., Bocchieri, E., Boulis, C., Byrne, W., Collier, H., Corduneanu, A., Kannan, A., Khudanpur,
S., Sankar, A. May 1999. “Rapid Speech Recognizer Adaptation to New Speakers”, Proc. of the IEEE
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 765-768.
Bocchieri, E., Digalakis, V., Corduneanu, A., Boulis, C., May 1999. “Correlation Modeling of MLLR
Transform Biases for Rapid HMM Adaptation to New Speakers”, Proc. of the IEEE International
Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 773-776.
Major Citations
The following papers have been cited in peer-reviewed journals, conferences and workshops more than 5
times:
"Graceful Degradation of Speech Recognition Performance Over Packet-Erasure Networks" (22 citations).
"Rapid Speech Recognizer Adaptation to New Speakers" (20 citations).
Patents
Droppo, J., Acero, A., Boulis, C. Method of Reducing Index Sizes Used to Represent Spectral Content
Vectors (granted May 27 2004, #20040102972)
References
Professor Mari Ostendorf
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle,
[email protected]
Dr. Jasha Droppo
Researcher, Microsoft Research, Speech Technologies group,
[email protected]
Professor Eve Riskin
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle,
[email protected]