User:Pierocosi

“BioSketch”

Piero Cosi

Director/Coordinator

ISTC CNR, UOS Padova

Istitute of Science and Tecnologies of Cognition

National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)

Unità Organizzativa di Supporto di Padova

Via Martiri della Libertà, 2

35137 Padova (Italy)

Born in Padua, in 1956. He received the Degree on Electronic Engineering from Padua University in 1981. He is currently a speech technology researcher of ISTC CNR, UOS Padova (“Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione - Unità Organizzativa di Supporto di Padova of the National Research Council”) of which He is the Director/Responsible. He is author or co-author of more than 200 papers published in Books, International Journals and Conferences, and he is leading, with the role of Scientific Responsible of Operative Unit, many International, European and Italian Projects. His scientific activity has been mainly concerned with: signal processing, speech analysis, auditory modelling, automatic speech recognition, neural networks, emotional text-to-speech, facial animation, interactive talking robot. He is responsible for the "Speech and Multimodal Communication Laboratory" in which various research and development activities concerning the implementation of the Italian versions of various SOFTWARE systems are carried out: CSLU Speech Toolkit, SONIC, SPHINX, JULIUS, BAVIECA and KALDI for automatic speech recognition, FESTIVAL, MBROLA and MaryTTS for synthesis from written text and BALDINI, and LUCIA for the creation of expressive and emotional speaking virtual agents. He is the project manager of ILT (Italian Literacy Tutor) an integrated and interactive program for Italian language teaching. He is and he has been responsible for various national and international projects (EU FP6, FP7) related to speech technologies and robotics (e.g. FP/ PF-STAR, ALIZ-E). He is a member of the following international associations: ASA, IEEE, ISCA and  INNS. He was President of AISV (Italian Association of Science Voice) and he is a member of the Forum TAL (Natural Language Processing) of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, and member of the International Advisory Committee of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association). He has been the Conference Chair of INTERSPEECH 2011 – 12thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Florence, 27-31 August 2011.