EPSRC grant for speech study

A major project in natural speech technology has been awarded more than £7 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The project is a collaboration between Edinburgh and the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.

Technological advances

The research seeks to significantly advance speech technology by making it more natural, approaching human levels of reliability, adaptability and conversational richness.

The project, led by Professor Steve Renals of the School of Informatics, will run for five years, from May 2011.

Professor Simon King, the University’s Director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research, is also part of the project team.

Awards successes

This award was one of 28 awarded to the College of Science & Engineering in May, figures from ERI reveal.

In the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine, a grant of almost £445,000 from the Scottish Funding Council was secured to establish the Scottish School of Public Health.

This project pulls together expertise from the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee, St Andrews and Glasgow to investigate the key issues that have an impact on the health of people in Scotland.

HSS strong

The College of Humanities & Social Science had a successful month.

Among the awards made to HSS, two were worth more than £1 million each.

These were granted to Professor Ian Deary for his Disconnected Mind project and to Professor Charlie Jeffery for the Scottish Graduate School for the Social Sciences.