Part C RTD Proposals: Description of Contribution to EC Policies, Economic Development

Part C – RTD Proposals: Description of contribution to EC policies, economic development, management and participants.

NB! PART C IS NOT ANONYMOUS

Part C describes the contribution of the proposed work to EC policies and social objectives, and to economic development, the project management plan, the consortium structure, the participating organisations in the consortium, the key personnel and individual and collective plans for dissemination and - if relevant - the exploitation of the results.

C1. 1 Title page SPeech Interface for weaRable mobIle assistanT SPIRIT (february 2002) IST-2001-37722

C2. 2 Content list (part C only)

1 TITLE PAGE...... 1

2 CONTENT LIST (PART C ONLY)...... 2

3 COMMUNITY ADDED VALUE AND CONTRIBUTION TO EC POLICIES...... 4

3.1 EUROPEAN DIMENSION OF THE PROBLEM...... 4 3.2 EUROPEAN ADDED VALUE OF THE CONSORTIUM...... 4 3.3 ADDRESSING PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH STANDARDISATION...... 5 4 CONTRIBUTION TO COMMUNITY SOCIAL OBJECTIVES...... 6

4.1 INTRODUCTION...... 6 4.2 OBJECTIVES OF THE “VOICE MAIL” FUNCTION...... 6 4.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE “SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION” FUNCTION...... 7 4.4 OBJECTIVES OF THE “SPEECH-TO-TEXT” FUNCTION...... 7 4.5 CONCLUSION...... 8 5 PROJECT MANAGEMENT...... 9

5.1 ORGANISATION...... 9 5.1.1 Project Manager...... 9 5.1.2 Workpackage Management...... 9 5.1.3 Administrative Management...... 9 5.1.4 Project Co-ordination Committee...... 10 5.2 DECISION PROCESS...... 10 5.3 INFORMATION FLOW...... 10 5.3.1 Documents handling...... 10 5.3.2 Deliverables Handling...... 10 5.3.3 Information broadcasting...... 10 5.4 PLANNING AND REPORTING...... 10 6 DESCRIPTION OF THE CONSORTIUM...... 12

6.1 THALES COMMUNICATIONS...... 12 6.2 BRNO UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY...... 12 6.3 DIUF...... 12 6.4 ELAN INFORMATIQUE...... 13 6.5 ENST PARIS...... 13 6.6 ESIEE...... 14 6.7 MULTITEL A.S.B.L...... 14 6.8 TELEFONICA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO...... 14 6.9 XPLORE TECHNOLOGIES INTERNATIONAL OY...... 15 7 DESCRIPTION OF THE PARTICIPANTS...... 16

7.1 THALES COMMUNICATIONS...... 16 7.1.1 Presentation...... 16 7.1.2 Short curriculum vitae...... 16 7.1.2.1 Frédéric CHARTIER...... 16 7.1.2.2 François CAPMAN...... 16 7.2 BRNO UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY...... 16 7.2.1 Presentation...... 16 7.2.2 Short curriculum vitae...... 17 7.2.2.1 Dr. Jan CERNOCKY...... 17 7.2.2.2 Prof. Hynek Hermansky...... 18 7.2.2.3 Team members at VUT Brno...... 18 7.3 DIUF...... 18 7.3.1 Presentation...... 18 7.3.2 Short curriculum vitae...... 18 7.4 ELAN INFORMATIQUE...... 18 7.4.1 Presentation...... 19 7.4.2 Short curriculum vitae...... 19 7.4.2.1 David Obadia...... 19 7.4.2.2 Jacques Toën...... 20 7.5 ENST PARIS...... 20

C3. 3 Community added value and contribution to EC policies. This section, which should not exceed two pages, should identify which issue at the European level the proposal is addressing. It should also describe why the proposed project should be carried out at European level instead of at national level, for example if there is a need to create a critical mass in human or financial terms, or whether the project will bring together complementary expertise existing in different organisations.

If appropriate, this section should also describe how the proposed project will contribute to the implementation or evolution of one or more of the EC’s policies or address problems connected with standardisation and regulation.

3.1 European dimension of the problem

The SPIRIT project will contribute to the economic development of the Community by providing innovative speech and text related features for mobile products, well-suited for multi-standard networks. These upmarket mobile terminals which will be used with current and future mobile networks should help operators increasing their offer in terms of new services... The objective of the European Commission through the IST program is to generate the same success as for the GSM mobile network, positioning European countries as major players (manufacturers, operators and service providers) in the UMTS upcoming market. To achieve that goal, various technologies and techniques have to be developed and controlled by European companies. Among these technologies, the definition of powerful mobile terminals, with enhanced capabilities in terms of Man Machine Interface, will help operators and manufacturers answering the needs for new services.

The SPIRIT project stems from a French project which will provide the background technologies, and validate the basic concept and assumptions. One major objective of the proposed project is to take advantage of the European synergy for a real dissemination of the technical knowledge, and to benefit from the added value of an international consortium. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to develop highly innovative telecommunication technologies at a national level. The SPIRIT project will be based on very different and complementary areas of speech processing, such as speech recognition, speech compression and speech synthesis. The required amount of technical resources, relevant databases, and scientific experience, should be found in a European wide-ranging project.

3.2 European added value of the consortium

The SPIRIT consortium will benefit from the European dimension of the IST program, with the best chance of succeeding. A European consortium will also facilitate the definition of the required equipments and infrastructures. In order to have an experienced and skilled team, THALES Communications has built the SPIRIT consortium with competencies and knowledge from various countries of Europe: o THALES Communications - TCF (F) is a major player in the speech processing area, especially in the low bit rate speech coding; o four academic entities - VUT Brno (CZ), DIUF (CH), ENST (F) and ESIEE (F) will bring to the project a high level of knowledge in the areas of signal and speech processing; o TELEFONICA - (I+D) (SP) will ensure that the project is in accordance with the user needs, when considering the application of speech related features and the need for low cost technologies. A good understanding of the rapidly evolving telecommunication market is highly valuable for the project; o Xplore Technologies (FIN), is a SME which will provide the project with its expertise in the development and manufacturing of telecommunication mobile products. Such a product or prototype will be used during the evaluation and field tests of the SPIRIT project; o Elan Informatique (F) is a major worldwide company designing, developing and manufacturing text-to-speech solutions under license agreement and in OEM sales; o MULTITEL (BEL) is a non-profit making research organization, founded by “la Faculté Polytechnique de Mons”, which aims at fostering the development and spreading of new technologies in the area of multimedia and telecommunications, and especially in the speech recognition and speech processing fields.

Looking at the distribution of partners across Europe, a valuable connection between North, South and East countries has been established. Most of these partners are or have been involved in International or European projects addressing the development of innovative speech features.

This diversity will ease the definition of language-independent solutions and their dissemination in the European Community. The potential coverage in terms of European languages within the SPIRIT project is the following:  Spanish and Portuguese, with TELEFONICA,;  German, Dutch and French with MULTITEL and francophone partners;  Eastern languages with VUT Brno;  Northern languages with Xplore Technologies;  English language for all international and technical exchanges.

3.3 Addressing problems connected with standardisation

The SPIRIT project falls clearly in the standardisation domain, and should drive the normalisation activities of the different partners.

 The involved partners have already a close relationship with standardisation activities. THALES Communications is a world-wide equipment provider for regulation authorities and network operators and a main contributor to standardisation bodies such as 3GPP or WWRF;  THALES Communications is a member of standardisation committees, such as IUT and ETSI; a particular attention is turned to the 3GPP and to the UMTS definition process,  TELEFONICA (I+D) is the major Spanish GSM and 3G operator, and has tremendous commercial interests in many South American countries. Proposal for 3G licences have been submitted and obtained in many European countries;  MULTITEL has started two months ago a national project (MODIVOC) for the definition of a distributed speech recognition system for wireless networks, addressing the need for efficient compression of spectral features for speech recognition, in conjunction with the ETSI AURORA activities.

Moreover this project will demonstrate the added value of the current and future standards such as EMS (Enhanced Message Service) or MMS (Multimedia Message Service). The first objective of the SPIRIT project is the development of high-performance Very Low Bit Rate (VLBR) solutions, with full compatibility with current 2G networks, such as the widespread GSM network, but also with 2.5G, 3G and even 4G future networks. C4. 4 Contribution to Community social objectives. This section, not exceeding two pages, should describe how the proposed project will contribute to meeting the social objectives of the Community such as: improving the quality of life and health and safety (including working conditions) and/or how it will contribute to improving employment, and/or to preserving or enhancing the environment and natural resources. This might include the contribution of the proposed work to meeting relevant regulatory requirements. Where applicable, the description should also cover the proposed project’s compliance with ethical requirements.

4.1 Introduction

The SPIRIT project will answer the need for a speech-driven and user-friendly interface for multimedia and communicable wearable or mobile terminals. Actually SPIRIT project aims at the integration in the same application of the following functions:  Voice messaging through VLBR compression of speech;  Speaker Verification (SV) and Language Identification (LI);  speech-to-text transcription;  text-to-speech synthesis.

These various functionalities will be based on a common algorithmic core, and they will address several objectives as explained in the following.

It is worthwhile pointing out that the targeted applications are based on SMS-derived (Short Message Service) technologies, such as the current and future standards for Message Services: EMS (Enhanced Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Message Service). All forecasting agencies or market studies predict a very large spreading of messaging demands in terms of financial revenues or of numbers of users. These studies anticipate a growth of about 700% in the next several years until 2005.

1000 s n

o 800 i l l i M

r 600 e s U

0 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Years

Figure 1. Forecasted number of users of messaging mobile service (cf. ARC Group study).

4.2 Objectives of the “Voice Mail” function

Today, the SMS market is successfully driven by the 15-25 years old generation . Here are the main reasons for this success:  The corresponding allocated communication budget is their 3rd item of expenditure;  They use traditionally quickly the new gadgets of communication (often by rejecting traditional brands);  the chat is also a significant part of the communication activities between friends.

On the other hand the SMS market did not develop yet in a similar way for the other generations. One of the fundamental reasons is that is not useful to write a message. We can note this is not a limitation for the young generation, on the contrary this aspect does strengthen the feeling to belong to a specific group of people with its own means of communication. This project will allow the widely broadcasting of the use of the EMS, because of the fact the creation of the message will not be made any more by the keyboard of the mobile phone, but directly by the speech. Thus the proposed system would provide more intuitive and natural navigation and interaction with advanced content and services.

Another objective is to supply a light and easily integrated solution on the existing generations of mobile phones. The strong ratio of compression of the vocal message allows to be directly compatible with existing networks such as GSM, and future GPRS networks (which offer mostly an identical rate for the up way (4+1)). For the future UMTS networks, this technology will allow to limit the used of band and thus to keep a low cost for the use of these new services (payment at fixed rate). Thus the proposed system would be flexible, dependable and predictable network independent, integrating heterogeneous elements in home and public networks, wire-line and wireless, for seamless open interactive services, including broadcasting. It would also improve the quality, affordability and usability of these systems and services to continually attract users of all ages and social backgrounds, especially with respect to the conflicting design requirements in wearable, mobile and large audience applications.

4.3 Objective of the “Speaker Identification” function

At the present day the number of thefts of mobile phones increases dramatically. Recent studies show that 117,000 complaints were lodged in 2001 concerning theft of mobile phone in France; these thefts represent 40% of all the thefts with violence in Paris. In the same time, the number of mobile phone thefts was multiply per three since 1995 in United Kingdom, and these acts affect essentially young people. The integration of a “speaker identification” function would allow to add a supplementary protection. If the system does not recognize any more the speaker at the end of given time, a requirement of identification could be then made by demanding the PIN code.

4.4 Objectives of the “Speech-To-Text” function

This function will allow, among other things, to remain compatible with mobile phones of previous generation. The transcription would make from the speech, compressed at the level of a server which is in charge to transmit EMS in text mode towards a subscriber possessing no compatible mobile phone with vocal functions. Moreover the system would offer a function of advanced vocal dictation, the user, having dictated his messages on the mobile, could convert directly in text the various messages by connecting for example to a PC equipped with the translation software.

The interest of these operations is to minimize the embedded memory on the mobile, and to profit of the pre-processing performed by the algorithm of compression.

So the proposed system would provide new displays, actuators, sensors and essential multi-modal hard and software information processing building blocks for advanced audio communication and distribution services for wearable, mobile and stationary applications.

In addition to this aspect, the project focuses on particular issues regarding the hardware of audiovisual systems interfaces, and also Standardised interfaces, storage and buffers for end-to-end delivery of audio-visual services accessing open networked consumer platforms and applications with strong requirements on reliability, timeliness, scalability and interoperability 4.5 Conclusion

This paragraph presents the different social aspect of the proposed project. Regarding several problem which are addressed, we consider that the key action IV.6.1 ” Networked audio-visual systems and services” corresponds to the most of objectives which the SPIRIT project focuses. Firstly the simplicity of the user interface is a major challenge: the acceptance and therefore the success of such a system depend on the design of a simple and user-friendly handling. Moreover the proposed system would provide more intuitive and natural navigation and interaction with advanced content and services. In addition it would be flexible, dependable and predictable network independent, integrating heterogeneous elements in home and public networks, wire-line and wireless, for seamless open interactive services, including broadcasting. It would also improve the quality, affordability and usability of these systems and services to continually attract users of all ages and social backgrounds, especially with respect to the conflicting design requirements in wearable, mobile and large audience applications. Finally the system would provide new displays, actuators, sensors and essential multi-modal hard- and software information processing building blocks for advanced audio communication and distribution services for wearable, mobile and stationary applications. C5. 5 Project management This section, not exceeding two pages, should describe how the proposed project will be managed, the decision making structures to be applied, the communication flow within the consortium and the quality assurance measures which will be implemented, and show how changes will be controlled and conflicts resolved. If applicable, this section should also show how legal and ethical obligations; for example concerning encryption or security of personal data will be met.

5.1 Organisation

In order to maintain a high degree of flexibility in project management, yet to ensure sufficient control the following project management organization has been decided. The project structure of SPIRIT centers on core Workpackages led by different Partners. The project management structure to be established within the project is based on two regions of management: Technical and Administrative. 5.1.1 Project Manager A Project Manager will be nominated by the Coordinator for the duration of the project. He/she will act as the focal point for all activities in the project, and as the primary interface between the project and the Commission. The Project Manager will lead the project, keep regular contacts with the Partners to ensure that the project direction is maintained, interface with the Commission for all matters associated with the Project, hold regular meetings with all Workpackage Managers, hold Management meetings with Administrative Managers, where deviations from the project plan cannot be solved by Workpackage Managers, co-ordinate with Workpackage Managers the preparation and distribution of all major deliverables, maintain accurate records of costs, resources and time scales for the project, co-ordinate the preparation of reports and ensure their delivery to the Commission, ensure that the project maintains its technical objectives ,as well as its relevance within the programme. 5.1.2 Workpackage Management For each Workpackage, a Workpackage Manager will be nominated to co-ordinate all activities by the Company/Research Institute responsible for the Workpackage . They will meet quarterly with the Project Manager and arrange regular technical meetings, ensure programme times, costs and resources are maintained and flag any discrepancy immediately to the Project Manager, initiate corrective action for programme deviations, prepare Reports, ensure the objectives and results of activities within the Workpackage are achieved, ensure deliverables are available according to plan, attend all relevant meetings, and in exceptional circumstances send a substitute, co-ordinate activities for the nominated Workpackage, arrange regular technical meetings as required for their Workpackage. Each Activity in a Workpackage is led by a Partner. The Activity leader reports to the Workpackage manager, co-ordinates technical work for his/her activity according to the project and Workpackages objectives, assists in the preparation of reports. 5.1.3 Administrative Management The Coordinator will nominate a General Administrative Manager that will assist the Project Manager for all administrative matters. The General Administrative Manager will report to the Project Manager. Each Partner/Associated Partner will nominate an Administrative Manager, whose role is to oversee all activities within his/her organization, and ensure the necessary contractual and cost information is supplied to the General Administrative Manager once every three months to review time scales and resolve any operational difficulties that are beyond the scope of the Workpackage Manager. He/she will ensure any resources and facilities required for the project are made available, participate in the contractual negotiations on behalf of the Company or Institution he/she represents, attend regular meetings with the Project Manager and General Administrative Manager to review progress and resolve any programme deviation that have not been corrected by Workpackage Managers, serve as a contact for any project administrative matters that relate to his/her Company or Institution. 5.1.4 Project Co-ordination Committee The Partners and Associated Partners will set up, within 15 days after the start of the contract, a Project Co-ordination Committee (PCC) encompassed of one representative of each of them, of the Project Manager and of the General Administrative Manager. Each representative will also have a deputy, to replace the representative, provided notice is given to Partners. The PCC member will be the contact person for his/her organization. The PCC will be chaired by the Project Manager or by his/her company deputy. It will meet at least quarterly in principle, at the request of its chairman, or when necessary, at the request of a Partner. The PCC will cover all technical and administrative matters.

5.2 Decision Process The nature of the work undertaken here requires the development of technical and scientific ideas and specifications, which need to be agreed. The method for reaching this agreement will be discussion, followed by an initial written confirmation in the form of fax, telex, letter, email or accepted meeting minutes. This will be stated by information presented in reports which have to be agreed. Any potential conflict will be brought to the immediate attention of the Project Manager by any Workpackage Manager / Administrative Manager. The Project Manager can then resolve this by discussion or by calling of a Technical or Administrative Meeting. If necessary, a vote will be held and the decisions will be taken by the majority of Partners. If the meeting cannot resolve the potential conflict, then this must be minuted and each company notified urgently to the level of management above that of Workpackage Manager / Administrative Manager. If the management of each company cannot produce a written resolution of the potential conflict within four weeks, the Commission will be notified straightforward.

5.3 Information Flow 5.3.1 Documents handling Any meeting will be followed by associated minute which will point out the major decisions undertaken and the list of actions to be developed. For the purposes of document distribution amongst the different partners in the project, it is necessary to adopt a uniform set of document designators. Documents will be generated using a Word text processing and will be transmitted to the related Workpackage Manager who will have to approve it, then to the Project Manager, whenever possible by e-mail. 5.3.2 Deliverables Handling Deliverables will be a joint effort between the partners involved into the related Workpackage. Their completion will be under the Workpackage Manager responsibility who will require assistance from other Partners. Their content in a draft version has to be approved by all the Partners involved in the related Workpackage and the Project Manager. Once approved, their fall in a project-approved version.

5.3.3 Information broadcasting The Project Manager will centralize any document provided, classify it and attribute serial numbers. Once approved, he/she will forward them to all the Partners. A broadcasting email list will be set up for the project and will be used to a large extent for any information to be sent.

5.4 Planning and reporting

The project will be monitored using conventional time recording techniques. The Project Manager will collect reports, via the Workpackage Managers, and, from this, maintain PERT charts and cost summaries under a project management tool. Reports will be made available to the Commission in a consolidated form. Any document provided within the project will be transmitted by the Partners to the Project Manager which will register it under an appropriate identification including a version management. Programme control will be based on Critical Path Analysis Techniques to ensure the primary objectives are met on time and resource demands correctly anticipated. Moreover, along the project, indications upon the exploitation plans of the project results will be prepared by the Partners. This topic will progressively be re-enforced along the project to come out with a business plan by the end of the project. C6. 6 Description of the consortium One page description of the consortium stating who the participants are, what their roles and functions in the consortium are, and how they complement each other.

6.1 THALES Communications

66, rue du Fossé Blanc 92231 Gennevilliers Cedex France

François CAPMAN Email: [email protected]

THALES Communications will act as Project and technical Co-ordinator and will also be responsible of the WP1 for the project management and the WP6 for the algorithm development concerning the robustness to environmental conditions. THALES Communications will be also involved in the WP2 for the analysis of needs, some marketing objectives and the valorisation, WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system and the technology improvements of the core, WP7 for the adaptation to real-time constraints and the realisation of a demonstrator and WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases. THALES Communications will bring to the project all the management expertise and the experience of the world leader in low bit rate speech coding and speech processing and its previous experience and leadership with the French national research project.

6.2 Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology

Bozetechova 2, 612 66 Brno, Czech Republic

Jan CERNOCKY, Dr. Ing. Email: [email protected], [email protected]

VUT Brno will be involved essentially in the WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system and the technology improvements of the core, but it will also participate in WP4 and WP6 for the speaker verification, language identification and the robustness to the environmental conditions.

6.3 DIUF

Département d'Informatique, Université de Fribourg Ch. du Musée 3, 1700 Fribourg, Suisse Dijana PETROVSKA-DELACRETAZ Email : [email protected]

The computer department of the University of Fribourg will be involved essentially in the WP4 for the development of the speaker verification system and the module of language identification, but it also participates in WP3 and WP8 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system and the evaluation and the definition of databases.

6.4 Elan Informatique

4, rue Jean Rodier 31400 TOULOUSE

Jacques TOËN Directeur de Recherche Email : [email protected]

ELAN Informatique will be involved essentially in the WP5 for modules of the text-to-speech synthesis and speech-to-text transcription, but it will also participate in WP2 and WP3 for the analysis of needs, some marketing objectives and the valorisation, and the definition of the VLBR baseline system. ELAN Informatique is a major worldwide developer of text-to-speech solutions. Elan designs, develops, manufactures and markets its text-to-speech technology under license and in OEM sales.

6.5 ENST Paris

Département Traitement du Signal 46 rue Barrault 75634 PARIS cedex 13

Gerard CHOLLET, PhD, Dr. Email : [email protected], [email protected]

ENST Paris will be responsible of the WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system and the technology improvements of the core. It will also participate in the WP2 for the valorisation, WP4 for the speaker verification, WP5 for the text-to-speech synthesis, WP6 for the robustness to the environmental conditions and WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases. 6.6 ESIEE

Département Signal et Télécommunications Cité Descartes - 2, Boulevard Blaise Pascal BP 99 - 93162 NOISY LE GRAND CEDEX

Geneviève BAUDOIN Responsable du département Signaux et Télécommunications Email : [email protected]

ESIEE will be involved in the WP2 for the valorisation, WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system, WP5 for the text-to-speech synthesis, WP6 for the robustness to the environmental conditions and WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases.

6.7 MULTITEL A.S.B.L.

Parc INITIALIS, Av. Copernic, 7000-MONS, BELGIUM

Stéphane DEKETELAERE Dr.Ir. Head of Speech Application Group Email : [email protected]

MULTITEL will be responsible of the WP4 for the speaker verification for secured-access to the terminal, and language identification. It will also participate in the WP2 for the valorisation, WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system, WP5 for the text-to-speech synthesis, WP6 for the robustness to the environmental conditions, WP7 for the adaptation to real-time constraints and the realisation of a demonstrator, and WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases. MULTITEL is a research organization which aims at fostering the development and spreading of new technologies in the area of multimedia (speech synthesis, speaker and speech recognition) and telecommunications (optical telecommunications and network access).

6.8 TELEFONICA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO

S.A. Unipersonal 6, Emilio Vargas 28043 Madrid - SPAIN

Ismael CORTAZAR Speech Technology group Email: [email protected] TELEFONICA (I+D) will be responsible of the WP5 for the text-to-speech synthesis and speech-to- text transcription. It will be also responsible the WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases. It will be involved in the WP2 for the analysis of needs, some marketing objectives and the valorisation, WP3 for the definition of the VLBR baseline system and the development of technology improvements of the core, WP6 for the algorithm development concerning the robustness to environmental conditions and WP7 for the adaptation to real-time constraints and the realisation of a demonstrator. TELEFONICA (I+D) will bring to the project also all the knowledge of Telefonica in speech processing and technologies, and also in radio-communication networks.

6.9 Xplore Technologies International Oy

Vapaalantie 2A FIN-01650 Vantaa, Finland

Patrick ROYNETTE VP International Email : [email protected]

Véronique TONNOIR Area Manager Email : [email protected]

XPLORE Technologies will be responsible of the WP2 for the analysis of needs, some marketing objectives and the valorisation. It will also participate in the WP7 for the adaptation to real-time constraints and the realisation of a demonstrator, and WP8 for the evaluation and the definition of databases. C7. 7 Description of the participants Short description of the participating organisations including (no more than two pages per organisation): The expertise and experience of the organisation, Short CVs of the key persons to be involved indicating relevant experience, expertise and involvement in other EC projects. (Each CV no more than 10 lines)

7.1 THALES Communications 7.1.1 Presentation THALES Communications (TCF) has made a significant contribution to the worldwide development of low bit rate speech coding, both in the defense and the civilian fields, in the last three decades.

Among the major THC achievements in the very low bit rate speech coders is the STANAG (Standard NATO Agreement) 4479 in 1994 with vocoder rate at 800 b/s and global (source and channel protection) rate at 2400 b/s. This coder has been found extremely adequate in operational situations with difficult propagation conditions.

In analysis-by-synthesis coders (ACELP technique), THC has been selected for the ETSI TETRA standard for Private Mobile Radio (speech rate 4567 b/s and global rate 7200 b/s).

THC is also very active in the fields of channel coding, speech enhancement, vocal activity detection that are used in conjunction with speech coders.

THC has recently put a lot of efforts in the HSX (Harmonic Stochastic eXcitation) technique. This new technique, that applies to parametric speech coders, clearly outperforms standard LPC techniques. Coders at bit rates of 1200 b/s, 2400 b/s and 3200 b/s have been designed. The HSX algorithm reaches consumer quality and has been selected and integrated by customers in various civilian applications : vocal paging system and FM sub-carrier broadcast system. Very recently, THC licensed a semi-conductor manufacturer to integrate the HSX on a chip to address a wide range of telecom applications.

7.1.2 Short curriculum vitae

7.1.2.1 Frédéric CHARTIER Frederic Chartier has been graduated Engineer from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Radio- Electicité de Bordeaux (F) in 1992. He joined the Communications subsidiary of THOMSON-CSF in 1994 as R&D engineer in speech processing activity. During this period he was responsible of speech product department (ETSI TETRA speech coder and HSX speech coder). His main technical background deals with system design, hardware and software integration (with a large experience around Digital Signal Processors). Since November 1999, he took the head of the Multimedia Laboratory of the Signal and Image Processing Department. This laboratory is mainly involved in R&D tasks concerning image processing (Watermarking, JPEG2000) and speech coding (wideband and very low bit rate speech coders).

7.1.2.2 François CAPMAN

7.2 Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology 7.2.1 Presentation The Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) at Brno University of Technology was established on 1st January 2002. It was developed from the former Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Brno University of Technology. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering was established in 1964 and has had a long tradition in teaching computer science and informatics in the framework of the former Faculty of Electrical Engineering, later called Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FEECS). At present, the Faculty of Information Technology provides education to future specialists in the Bachelor study program and the Master study program in Computer Science and Engineering and the Doctoral study program in the scientific branch Information Technology. Starting from the academic year 2002/2003, the Faculty will offer two new study programs: a three-year Bachelor study program Information Technology (Bc.), and a two-year follow-up Master study program Information Technology (Ing.). These study programs respect the principles of the Bologna Declaration for the development of tertiary education in Europe. The structures of both study programs are fully compatible with the European space for higher education. Research, development and publishing form specific activities of fundamental importance at the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT). These activities open space for creative basic, as well as applied research, prototype development, both inland and international cooperation, and they are also essential for scientific and professional growth related to habilitations, promotion for professorship, and the postgraduate doctoral study program. They also bring the finance necessary for the development of the FIT. The scientific and research activities at the FIT are directed towards up-to-date research areas concerning the theory, methods and applications of information technologies. Typical research areas at the FIT are the following: Information and Database Systems, Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Computer Architecture, Intelligent Systems, System Modeling and Simulation, High Performance Computing, and Petri Nets.

The speech processing group headed by Prof. Hynek Hermansky and Dr. Jan Cernocky was formed in 1997 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as a part of Signal Processing Laboratory, sponsored by the Czech Ministry of Education. The group has recently joined the Computer Graphics and Multimedia Department of FIT. Its main expertise is in very low bit rate coding, automatic determination of speech units, speech recognition and large scale speech database collection. Recently, in cooperation with OGI Portland, it has broadened its expertise to robust feature extraction for speech and speaker recognition and speech enhancement by noise suppression. The group participated at the following projects:  Speech Telephone Databases for Czech. Collection of isolated and connected numbers from 1000 speakers over the telephone. in cooperation with Siemens, Corporate R&D, Munich. The database is distributed by the European language resources association (ELRA);  SpeechDat-E sponsored by the EC by the INCO-Copernicus project No. 977017. The database has passed the validation procedure by SPEX and is distributed by ELRA;  AURORA Advanced Front End Evaluation For Distributed Speech Recognition (in cooperation with OGI) conducted by European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI);  SPINE – Speech in Noisy Environments (in cooperation with OGI) organized by the US Naval Research Laboratory.  The group has fruitful cooperation with the Anthropic Speech Processing Group of Prof. Hynek Hermansky, at the OGI School of Science and Technology, OHSU, Portland, Oregon (long-term stays of PhD students and Jan Cernocky). Hynek Hermansky has recently become a faculty member of the Faculty of Information Technology, VUT Brno and is heading the Speech group together with Jan Cernocky. 7.2.2 Short curriculum vitae

7.2.2.1 Dr. Jan CERNOCKY Jan CERNOCKY is graduated Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of VUT Brno in 1993 with a "red diploma" (award for excellent results). He obtained PhD from Universite Paris XI (Faculte des Sciences d’Orsay) in December 1998 with ”felicitations du jury”. From 1997, he was with the Inst. of Radio-electronics, VUT Brno (Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) as assistant professor. Since February 2002, he is with the Faculty of Information Technology, VUT Brno as the Deputy Head of the Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia. With Hynek Hermansky, he is leading the Speech processing group. He supervises 5 PhD students. Research interests of Jan Cernocky encompass signal processing, speech processing (very low bit rate coding, verification, recognition), segmental methods, data-driven determination of speech units and speech corpora. Jan Cernocky has coordinated telephone databases projects SPEECHDAT-E: Creation of East- European Speech Databases for Voice Driven Teleservices. (Inco-Copernicus Project 977017 – Czech database) and ”Cislovky” (in cooperation with Siemens A.G. Munich). In 1998 and 1999, he participated at International speaker recognition evaluation campaigns NIST 98 and 99 (at EPF Lausanne in 98 and at VUT Brno in 99). He is a co-founder and participates at the Signal processing laboratory financed by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic (project leader prof. Vladimir Sebesta). In 2001, he was 7 months with the Anthropic speech processing group of OGI School of Science and Technology, OHSU, Portland, Oregon, USA.

7.2.2.2 Prof. Hynek Hermansky Education: Ing. (MS equivalent), electrical engineering, Technical University Brno, Czechoslovakia. 1967-1972, Doctoral graduate studies, electrical engineering, Technical University Brno, Czechoslovakia. 1973-1978, Doctor of Engineering, electrical engineering, University of Tokyo, Japan. 1980-1983. Previous employment (shortened): 1983-1987, Research Engineer, Panasonic Technologies, STL, S. Barbara, California 1988-1991, Member of Technical Staff, US WEST Advanced Technologies, Boulder, Colorado. 1991-1993, Senior Member of Technical Staff, US WEST Advanced Technologies, Boulder, Colorado. Current position: Professor and Director, Center for Information Technology, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , Department of Computer Science and Engineering, at Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, Portland, Oregon. Senior Research Scientist and Fellow, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California. Faculty member Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. Prof. Hermansky is Member of the Board, International Speech Communication Association, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Associate Editor, of IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio, member of Editorial Board of Speech Communication, Elsevier Scientific, and member of Acoustical Society of America.

7.2.2.3 Team members at VUT Brno Team members are post-graduate students Lukas Burget and Petr Motlicek (3rd year), Frantisek Grezl (2nd year), Petr Schwarz, Martin Karafiat and Pavel Matejka (1st year). The students in 2nd and 3rd years have gained professional experience abroad, at the Anthropic speech processing group of OGI, under the direction of Hynek Hermansky. Petr Motlicek was for 5 months with the Departement Signal et Telecommunications of ESIEE Paris.

7.3 DIUF 7.3.1 Presentation

7.4 ELAN informatique 7.4.1 Presentation Elan Informatique is a major worldwide developer of text-to-speech solutions. Elan designs, develops, manufactures and markets its text-to-speech technology under license and in OEM sales. It has started text-to-speech specialization in 1986 and has widely invested since then to provide the highest quality of the market. Now, elan has set up close working relationships with technological and business partners and is present in Europe, North and Souh America, Australia and in Japan. Thanks to its deep expertise in text-to-speech, elan has become a key text-to-speech supplier in all domains of applications of this technology. Elan offers robust, cost-effective operational text-to- speech solutions to any application in telecoms, fixe and mobile PC, and embedded systems. Due to its geographical situation and its internal competencies, elan is in good conditions to provide multilingual top-level quality text-to-speech products adapted to the European market. All its products exist in English, American, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian, Polish and Russian version. All elan's products are compatible with the main standards of the market and work on Unix and Windows operating systems. Elan constantly adapts its solutions to the evolution of the standards. Compatibility with MPEG 4 is currently focused by elan's technical team. Elan has proved many times its strong innovative capacity and its ability to integrate text-to-speech in pioneer applications : In 1997, elan designs and manufactures the first multilingual e-mail reader Dial & Play. In 1998, elan presents its cutting-edge multilingual text-to-speech interface for embedded systems in the car. In 1999, elan launches the first Brazilian text-to-speech version and in 2000 the first Polish TTS system. The Elan research lab was created in 1996, elan's internal research laboratory gathers 10 high-level multidisciplinary research engineers fully dedicated to text-to-speech technology. Competencies available go from electronics, computing, signal processing, to text-to-speech technologies, and last but not least linguistics engineering. The spirit of innovation and creativeness leads the motivation of elan's research team which always keeps in mind the need for relevant quality and adaptation to the constraints of the market evolution. This team has recently gained new competencies in linguistics and is able to design an outstanding quality of text-to-speech in terms of synthesized voice naturalness-sounding and creation of new languages and personalized voices. Our focus on best quality has brought elan's research team to build close cooperation with renown specialized research laboratories all around the world. We have worked with C.N.E.T. Lannion (France), E.N.S.T. (France), ICP (France), UAB (Spain), E.T.S.I. (Spain), CPqD (Brazil), University of St Petersburg … And we are looking for new research cooperations with laboratories eager to enhance text-to-speech technology. elan has been actively participating in the European research programs since 1995. elan asserts text- to-speech in Europe at three levels :  in demonstration actions (see Convergence workshop 1998, DGXIII, and the main European websites on which elan proposes demonstration windows),  in European projects (VODIS, Euromap, Interface)  in scientific think tanks on the European future research axes to follow (COST 258 program).

Text-to-speech technology being mature, elan is eager to make significant technology improvements in the framework of European projects of the IST programme, in order to make this technology available for all.

7.4.2.1 David Obadia Born in 1964, got his degree in Computing engineering at the University of Toulouse, France, and has wide experience of designing linguistic and specific tools to adapt TTS technology to a complex application on Internet. Designing of pre-processing tools for e-mail reading in four languages, pitch- marking of acoustic units in the diphone databases, and TTS designing for HTML page reading are among his last achievements.. 7.4.2.2 Jacques Toën Post-graduate in electronics, and having a sixteen-year experience in text-to-speech technology, Mr Jacques Toën, is the director of the Research Department at ELAN. Design of boards for TTS, and of complete software TTS systems. J. Toën is already involved in the EC project “INTERFACE”.

7.5 ENST Paris 7.5.1 Presentation The Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST) was founded in Paris a hundred years ago, and remains a pionner for research in the Groupement des Ecoles de Télécommunications (GET). The school cooperates with Paris Universities at the doctoral level. About 300 research- professors belong presently to the scientific departments.

Within ENST, the “ Traitement et Communication de l’Information ” research unity employees 100 full time equivalent researchers. This unity is associated to CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) as URA 820 and includes the following research groups : Algorithms and models for Telecommunications, Signal and Images, Systems for the Information Processing and Communications. The speech team is part of the Signal and Images group and mainly works on speech and speaker recognition. Some researcher of the artificial intelligence team are also working on natural language processing and language understanding. The activities of the group are related to national and international projects. Among the national projects the team is involved in, we may mention the “ AUPELF evaluations ”, a competition on a dictation task, for which we are developing, in collaboration with other French universities, a large vocabulary speech recognition system. The speech team is involved in the EU-supported CaVe and Picasso LE projects focusing on speaker authentication and in the Onomastica LSE project for which a grapheme-to-phoneme transcriber was developed for the transcription of proper names. The transcriber developed for this project was also used to design an automated directory enquiry service over the telephone in a project partially supported by Swisscom. In the field of speaker verification, the laboratory participated to the last three NIST evaluations. The laboratory is a member of the COST 249 action for speech recognition over the telephone.

7.5.2.1 Gérard CHOLLET Gérard Chollet obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Linguistic from the University of California. Since 1978, he is a full time researcher at the CNRS (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique, the french public research agency), affected at ENST since 1983. During his stay at IDIAP from 92 to 96, he was involved in the Polyphone project which came up with two large telephone speech databases, Polyphone and Poly Var. He participated in various EU-supported projects such as SPIN, P26, ARS, SpeechDat, M2VTS, ELSNET, EAGLES, SOCRATES, CaVe and Picasso. He is also engaged in the COST actions 249 and 250.

7.6 ESIEE 7.6.1 Presentation

7.6.2.1 Geneviève BAUDOIN

7.7 MULTITEL A.S.B.L. 7.7.1 Presentation

7.7.1.1 Expertise MULTITEL is a non profit making research organization which aims at fostering the development and spreading of new technologies in the area of multimedia and telecommunications. MULTITEL is composed of a multidisciplinary team of about 60 peoples including engineers, scientists and technical staff which may be assisted by a commercial structure able to elaborate any form of collaboration for International, European or private projects. The R&D domains of MULTITEL for the multimedia area are (We have also a activity in optical telecommunications and network access) :  Speech technologies (Speech synthesis, speaker and speech recognition);  Sound, speech and image coding;  Signal processing (biomedical signal, laser welding, …);  Character recognition.

The MULTITEL’s team can help you in the following domains of interest:

7.7.1.1.1 Speech recognition

Robustness in speech recognition combining Artificial Neural Network and Hidden Markov Model. We have also initiated some works in multiband speech recognition and implementation of these algorithms on embedded platform with restricted hardware resources.

7.7.1.1.2 Speech synthesis

We are at the origin of the MBROLA synthesizer which belongs to a new generation of diphone concatenation software. MBROLA relies on language & speaker dependent databases that allow the program to produce any sentence in the given language with the given voice. 29 languages are now available. See http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html for detailed information. 7.7.1.2 Experience Although it is a young research centre, it was created with the new century in 2000, MULTITEL builds on the strong R&D experience of the Electromagnetism and Telecommunication Department for telecommunication area and from the Circuit Theory and signal processing Department of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (FPMS) in Belgium (http://www.fpms.ac.be/) for multimedia area. This domain capitalizes the experience gained by the university during the past 20 years in the field of signal processing in general and speech processing in particular. Speech synthesis is part of its research interest since 1980, text to speech synthesis since 1981 and speech coding and speech recognition since 1983. More recently the laboratory has been involved in research on automatic printed and hand-written character recognition. Industrial partnerships with telecommunication companies has been initiated in parallel. A partnership with SAIT electronics has led laboratory to participate in the development of the communication system of the European spacecraft HERMES (study of noise cancellation to maintain voice communication during take-off) as well as in the conception of low bit rate speech coders for marine communication using Multiband excited vocoders (INMARSAT standards). The laboratory took also part to the development of a security system of new generation for TGV (in collaboration with ALSTHOM Charleroi, Belgium).

Studies on speech recognition and speech synthesis started in collaboration with RUG (University of Ghent, Belgium), UCL (University of Louvain la neuve, Belgium). In 1991, the laboratory also realized a speech recognition system for the Belgian television for a game by telephone (Quizzline) in collaboration with Lernout&Hauspie, Belgium. Our partnership with this company was successfully extended to speech coding and speech recognition from 1992 to 1995. After this date, the laboratory grows up much more thanks to European aids “Objectif 1”, received for 5 years, to reinforce its activities and to boost the industrial activity in the region for multimedia and telecommunication. This has led to the creation of MULTITEL research group and, in 2000, the MULTITEL independent research centre.

To acquire its competences, the laboratory have also benefit from international collaborations with first-class institutions (International Computer Science Institute Berkeley, CA USA, ATT Labs-research, Murray hill,USA) and involvement in several European projects (coordination of HIMARNET ESPRIT-6438 project), ESPRIT LTR-20077 SPRACH " Speech Recognition Algorithms for Connectionist Hybrids” ,RESPITE “REcognition of Speech by Partial Information Techniques”, ESPRIT Long Term Research RTD Project Ref. 28149. We have also participated to several COST actions : COST 232, COST 249,COST 250 and COST 278. Most of these references are accessible on both websites http://www.multitel.be and http://tcts.fpms.ac.be.

7.7.2.1 Stéphane DEKETELAERE In 1988, Stéphane DEKETELAERE received a diploma of Civil Engineer in electromechanical engineering (option electronics) from the Université Libre from Brussels, Belgium. In 1989, after military service, he joined the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, and prepared a Ph. D. in speech coding. He mainly studied Vector Quantization techniques to improve low bit rate speech vocoders. After successful presentation in 1994, he joined SAIT S.A company, Belgium, and worked as speech technology specialist (algorithm, hardware and firmware) in low bit rate vocoders for satellite telecommunication applications, mainly for European Spacecraft HERMES and INMARSAT speech coders. In 1998, he fruitfully developed a QPSK modem for satellite communication used in SATELNET project (collaboration with GILLAM S.A. and European Space Agency). He was responsible of the design and project management (Budget 0.3 M€). In 1999, he prepared an proposal and start to manage a ESA project for design of a hybrid GNSS receiver able to decode GPS, GLONASS, EGNOS and LORAN-C signals (Budget 3 M€). In October 2000, he joined MULTITEL A.S.B.L. acting as project manager for applications dedicated to speech technologies. During this first year, he works on the FASTY IST-2000-25420 project [Faster Typing For Disabled People] , the Regional INTIATIVE MODIVOC project [Systèmes MObiles et DIstribués à interface VOCale] and lot of development for private companies in speech and wireless applications. He also participates to the COST-278 Action “Spoken Language Interaction in Telecommunication”.

7.7.2.2 Christophe RIS Christophe RIS obtained the Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering degree from Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (FPMs), Mons, Belgium, in 1993. From 1993, I'm working in the signal processing lab of Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in the field of speech recognition. From 1992 to 1995, I was involved in the ESPRIT P6488 HIMARNNET project entitled " Study of Hidden Markov Models and Neural Networks for Robust Isolated Word Recognition " which goal was to compare pure HMM and ANN techniques against the Hybrid HMM/ANN approach for an isolated word recognition task. My work consisted in developing front-end tools for the speech recognizers. From 1995 to 1998, I was involved in the ESPRIT LTR-20077 SPRACH project entitled " Speech Recognition Algorithms for Connectionist Hybrids ". This project is dedicated to the development of new theories, algorithms, hardware and software tools for the extension of hybrid HMM/ANN systems. I was more particularly concerned by the study of transition based models and discriminant training of hybrid systems. More recently, I co-founded BaBel Technologies with a group of researchers. BaBel is a spin-off company of FPMs, devoted to the development of applications in speech synthesis, speech recognition, speech coding and optical character recognition. From 1998, I'm working for the ESPRIT LTR-28149 RESPITE project entitled " Recognition of Speech by Partial Information Techniques ". This project will focus on the research and development of new methodologies for robust automatic speech recognition based on missing-data theory and multiple classification streams. Moreover it will provide a link between ASR and models of hearing, and more particularly work on computational auditory scene analysis. My current interests include signal processing, stochastic models, neural networks, software engineering (development of Strut, software dedicated to the creation of applications in speech processing, several publications). I am author/co- author of about 15 papers. [http://www.multitel.be/~ris/ris.html]. 7.8 TELEFONICA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO 7.8.1 Presentation

7.8.1.1 Qualifications of Telefonica Telefónica de España S.A. and its group is the major supplier of telecommunications services in Spain. Recently, Telefónica has been expanding and diversifying operations both in Spain and overseas, preparing for the new global scenario. The company employs over 60.000 persons.

Telefónica is the leading telecommunications operator in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world. Its most important markets are Spain and Latin America, although in the last few years it has begun to expand into other regions, such as Europe and the Mediterranean Basin (Morocco), mainly through mobile telephone licenses and corporate services. In addition, and although less significant in terms of sales, Telefónica is present in Asia, in South Africa and in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), in almost all cases linked to internet activities (Terra Lycos), CRM (Atento) or media and content (Telefónica Media). Telefónica is currently present in 49 countries.

As a global operator in the telecommunications, internet and media sectors, Telefónica provides a wide range of services for an extensive group of activities: fixed telephony; mobile telephony; business services; the creation and distribution of internet content and services; the creation and distribution of audiovisual media content; sale and marketing of directories and guides; CRM services and e-commerce. As a result, it can respond to practically any requirement in the communications field, both for businesses and individuals. Furthermore, conscious of the speed at which new communication-related technology develops, Telefónica takes a very active part in R&D, whilst through its foundation, Fundación Telefónica, the Company plays an active social and cultural role in many countries.

The base of customers for fixed telephony, mobile telephony and pay TV amounted to 71.2 million customers at the end of September 2001 (75.9 million customers in all), 10.5 million more than in the same period of last year. This represents a growth of 17.2%. All forecasts suggest this figure will gradually increase in coming years, based on the strong growth potential of the markets where Telefónica operates. Another fact which indicates by itself the size of the company is the number of employees, which totalled over 148,000 on a global basis at the end of December 2000.

Telefónica is organised by centrally-coordinated global business lines. Telefónica SA is the parent and flagship company of Grupo Telefónica. It operates through ten subsidiary companies, which depend directly on it, but which also act in turn as the parent companies for other entities in the same business area. For example, the Spanish fixed telephony business is managed by Telefónica de España, whilst Telefónica Latinoamericana is in charge of this activity in Latin America. The group's worldwide mobile communications businesses all form part of Telefónica Móviles; the directories and guides businesses are managed by TPI (Telefónica Publicidad e Información); the internet businesses come under the umbrella of Terra Lycos; data and corporate services, Telefónica DataCorp; the CRM business is managed by Atento; and audiovisual media content production and broadcasting are run by Telefónica Media. Emergia, another Telefónica business line, has been set up to offer broadband communications services in Latin America via a high-capacity fibre optic submarine ring. Telefónica B2B was formed to roll out B2B or Business to Business e-commerce activities, and there are two companies dependent on it: Katalyx and Adquira.

To strengthen the market positioning and market share of its different business units, Telefónica gives special attention to technological innovation. Research and development are key areas in identifying the factors which will influence the performance of Telefónica's different business areas. For this reason, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (Telefónica's R&D arm) has been set up to lead the group's activities in this field.

Full information on Telefónica activities may be found at http://www.telefonica.es. 7.8.1.2 Telefónica I+D qualifications Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo's mission is to help improve Telefónica's competitiveness through technological innovation, broadening the range of services on offer and reducing operating costs. Its natural clients, therefore, are group companies. Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo has four main business lines: the roll-out of new differentiating services in the current competitive environment, both for fixed and mobile telephony and internet; the development of activities focused on optimising business processes, especially those dedicated to customer relations services and management; the roll out of network and services management systems, and the development of those activities which make up the so-called Innovation Programme, set up to identify, develop and apply aspects, opportunities or technologies which could have an impact on Telefónica's future business growth. These areas have acquired an international dimension, with the solutions developed having been transferred to those countries.

Telefónica I+D is active in the following major areas:  Broadband, intelligent network, data communications, narrowband ISDN, speech technology and public use telecommunications.  Network and services management, using solutions based on the latest TMN standards.  Network innovation, with the purpose of supporting Telefónica in its effort to offer the widest possible range of services.  Service Creation. Telefónica I+D has developed an Intelligent Peripheral platform to develop intelligent network voice services.  Information Technology solutions. Telefónica I+D is providing Telefónica a large number of IT solutions for internal management and operation including Datawarehousing and knowledge expert systems.  Mobile and fixed network planning. Several propagation and frequency planning tools developed by Telefónica I+D are in use by Telefónica. Also a comprehensive set of network planning for fixed and IP networks, developed by Telefónica I+D are in use by different Telefónica departments, including Telefónica Móviles.

Of all the European actions in which Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (from now on, Telefónica I+D) has taken part, the following will be mentioned because of its relation with the present proposal. Telefónica I+D has participated in numerous European projects: eight RACE I, eighteen RACE II, seven ESPRIT II, four ESPRIT III, and several TEN-IBS, TEN-ISDN, CTS, COST and BRITE. Telefónica I+D has participated, among others, in the following ACTS projects related to broadband technologies: INSIGNIA, MULTICUBE, CANCAN, JAMES, NICE and BONAPARTE. Telefónica I+D is also member of Eurescom, being an active member of several consortia dealing with Intelligent networking, Broadband, TMN, New CTM and UPT services, WLL solutions, etc. In UMTS and mobile related projects, Telefónica I+D participated in CODIT (leading propagation activities and the SIG comparing TDMA and CDMA approaches), MoNet, Saint (satellite Integration), Rainbow (leading the development of a UMTS emulator together with the UPC) and Storms (Telefónica I+D supplied the project Technical Manager). It has also participated in many ETSI meetings and has close contacts with standardisation bodies. Telefónica I+D is now member of the ACTS ANTIUM consortium, developing a low cost radiofrequency front-end.

More detailed information on Telefónica I+D activities is found in http://www.tid.es

7.8.2.1 Ismael CORTAZAR

7.9 Xplore Technologies International Oy 7.9.1 Presentation Xplore is a global innovator in the ruggedized mobile wireless computing industry. Our durable, or rugged, computing systems are designed and commercialized for well-defined customer needs in a rapidly expanding worldwide market. Our products enable the extension of traditional computing systems to a range of field and on-site personnel regardless of location or environment. Using a range of wireless communications technologies, our customers are able to share information on a timely basis.

Xplore Corp is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE Symbol: XPL) and have worldwide operations. Our Austin, Texas facility houses Engineering, Manufacturing, Customer Support, Marketing and our North American Sales Teams. International Operations held by Xplore International Oy is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland and Mississauga, Ontario is home to Finance, Administration and Investor Relations. Xplore also has regional sales office locations throughout the United States and in Stockholm, Sweden.

We have a family of rugged mobile computing and wireless-enabled products including the GeneSys® super rugged, rugged Ramline™ family, pen/touch tablet computer and X-PAD a super rugged PDA. In addition, we have a variety of mounting systems that are adaptable to specific applications. Our core products are configured during the manufacturing process to meet the exacting mobile computing needs and specific wireless network requirements of our customers.

Additionally, our core technology, flexible designs and industry partnerships allow us to quickly and effectively adapt our products to the specific requirements of major account customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs). The result is a powerful, rugged, mobile wireless communications system that meets the exacting needs of a well- defined customer application.

Xplore Technologies main R&D center is located in Vantaa, Finland. The Finnish R&D center is responsible to the next generation development work in Xplore. The future products will be based on the smart solution on electronic and case design in order to maximize the product customization flexibility which has been ranked one of the main mission in the company and approved to create the winning edge to the company In 1998, the GeneSys System was awarded a Bronze medal in the Industrial Design Society of America’s annual Design Excellence Awards competition. Our product line was awarded best of show at CeBit by Byte magazine in 1999.

7.9.2.1 Patrick ROYNETTE Mr. Roynette brings an impressive track record gained from more than 15 years of high-tech management experience at Thomson-CSF, exclaimed Xplore Technologies CEO, Brian Groh. Patrick Roynette, appointed Vice-President International, was most recently a member of the board in charge of the strategy at THOMSON-CSF TEXEN, a subsidiary of THOMSON-CSF and a European leader for rugged computers. Prior to this position, Patrick Roynette served on the Venture team at the THOMSON-CSF' Headquarter in Paris. He also brings a wealth of experience from his work with Optronic Group where he was recognized for his proactive and creative approaches in the creation of several new products C8. 8 Economic development and scientific and technological prospects This section, which should not exceed five pages, should highlight the usefulness and range of applications, and describe the plans for the dissemination and -if relevant – exploitation of the results for the consortium as a whole and for the individual participants in concrete terms. It should describe the tools and/or means to be used to disseminate the results (user groups and how they will be involved, plans for dissemination through open source software when applicable). The consortia should clearly identify the conditions required to maximise the exploitation of successful results. The shorter the time to market, the more precise the exploitation plan should be. It should detail the exploitation strategies in particular for the commercial/industrial organisations involved in the proposal. Strategic impact of the proposed project in terms of improvement of competitiveness or creation of markets and of market opportunities for the participants and for users of the results should be described. This could, where appropriate, include assessment of market size, competition, the benefits from using the products or services based on the results, pricing and potential sales.

8.1 Plan for exploitation

The use of the proposed system bear not only on existing networks but could also be used on future networks and emerging technology. EMS (Enhanced Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Message Service) can be seen as an existing technology and its successor. But they are different according the technology. Differences of culture, way of life and treatment of new technology can lead to a complete different acceptance of new services.

The proposed system could be used on a great variety of devices on 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 4G networks. Phones, smart phones and personal assistants (PDA) are examples of existing devices.

An exploitation plan will be described in the Deliverable D.X.X. This deliverable will prepare the productive use of the results. It will contain a description of the market, consider pricing and business opportunities and an identification of the future competition.

The end of the project will see a maturated technology, tested and validated on compatible networks with future mobiles. The final form of the system will can be seen only as a plug-in software which can be easily download on the mobile phones.

THALES Communications is present on numerous professional electronic and telecommunication domains. These products will be complete real-time systems (tele-surveillance, remote sensing on- board image coding….) and multi-platform software modules (DSP, generic processor with or without SIMD core, FPGA). The hardware reference implementation will also serve as a basis for future low-cost chip developments (ASIC with a DSP core).

Brno University of Technology, an academic institution, is not directly aiming at a specific market. It is willing to provide the industrial partners with the cutting-edge technology developed in academic environment and see the algorithms applied in real products. As this University has sufficient experience with speech database collection, and it knows, how it is difficult to obtain a simple orthographic annotation of a database (not speaking about phonetic labeling), it is aware of the industrial consortium partners’ needs to evaluate approaches based on automatic search of speech units. Brno University of Technology can however foresee further applications as for example a meeting recorder with available sequences for indexing, courses for tele-education, and even communication with a space mission on a very low bandwidth channel.

The idea of transcribing speech without having large annotated corpora is interesting from the viewpoint of our geographic location: for many languages in the Eastern Europe, such corpora are insufficient in size and/or quality, or do not exist at all. The proposed approaches would therefore allow for quicker and less painful adoption of speech technologies in those countries. The benefits of the proposed projects for all the consortium partners are:  cooperation with the leading European industries and Universities will keep us not only informed but working on the latest technologies available. Without the participation on such projects and just by studying the literature and attending conferences, the knowledge flow is never of such intensity than while working on common tasks, attending brain-storming meetings, writing reports, etc.  the European projects constitute an important opportunity to get and especially keep the best students in laboratories, and, as consequence, improve the quality of education.  by participating on European projects, the consortium is working toward the full integration of Czech republic to the European Community, a goal, which will take place in the following few years. Such a European project with educational programs, as Erasmus-Socrates, it will give our pre- and post-graduate students an opportunity to improve their language skills, but especially become familiar with work and management standards of the EC.  working on a speech-project, the consortium promotes the Speech and language processing (a topic often considered too complex) among our colleagues, and students.  active contribution to the scientific and technical progress.

8.2 Dissemination strategies

The project will validate the technology of a previous French research project in critical and real time applications, and especially at the European level, and promote the use normalized systems of communications. The dissemination of the project has a strategic importance both for ethical and commercial reasons, at the point where we are in the developments of the electronic commerce activity. SPIRIT will be for all partners a way to show their customers and prospects how much they are concerned with the basic and specific issues that have to be considered in the near future to give digital images the dissemination and importance they deserve in the multimedia market. A well built web site and a strongly visible consortium are key success issues. The dissemination will be based upon the three following items:

 Publications. Several publications to conference and scientific magazines (signal and image processing, medical, aerospace…) will be made during the project time-life.

 Demonstrations. The SPIRIT system will be used in order to demonstrate the advantage of the existing and future technologies (EMS, MMS,…).

8.3 Strategic position gained by consortium

The SPIRIT consortium will demonstrate its ability to manage in a integrated way the potentialities offered by the existing and future networks. This will enforce the partners of the SPIRIT consortium not only in related markets but also in the related standardisation bodies.

8.4 Contribution to the Scientific and Technical progress

SPIRIT will increase the understanding of very low bit rate speech technology, and also of speech recognition, speaker verification and language identification in harsh condition. Another important aspect is the development of text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology and its usefulness.