News and Events
December 5, 2014
"Karl Wiegand successfully defended his PhD dissertation"
Karl Wiegand successfully defended his PhD dissertation. His dissertation committee comprised Prof. Rupal Patel, Prof. Javed Aslam, Prof. David Smith, and Prof. Shaun Kane. [read more]
November 25, 2014
"Mansoor Pervaiz gave a talk at NYMEDTALKS"
"Mansoor Pervaiz gave a talk on "Use of Smart Devices to motivate speech behavior change" at NYMEDTalks in New York Medical College, Valhalla,..." [read more]
October 22, 2014
"Staff members present at The Boston Home's Mind Over Matter: Brain Science and the Power of the Human Spirit"
"Heather Kember and Kathryn Connaghan presented CADLab projects for The Boston Home's Mind Over Matter: Brain Science and the Power of the Human Spirit Event at The Dante Alighieri Cultural Center, Cambridge,..." [read more]
October 16, 2014
"Staff members present at Empower DC"
Rupal Patel, Heather Kember and Mansoor Pervaiz presented CADLab projects at Northeastern's Empower campaign in Washington D.C. [read more]
July 10, 2014
"CadLab and collaborators at SMILE lab at Northeastern and the bionics lab at Georgia Tech award NSF grant to develop a multimodal speech translation system."
May 1, 2014 -- news@Northeastern
"Dr. Patel gives a keynote speech at Doctoral Hooding Ceremony of 2014"
"Dr. Patel lauded graduates in her keynote address at the Doctoral Hooding Ceremony (2014) for their hard work and dedication to earning their doctorate. She noted that the graduates will achieve great things from discovering new pharmaceuticals to battling cancer and creating behavioral treatments for dementia to designing innovative ways to..." [read more]
April 30, 2014
"Dr. Patel promoted to Full Professor"
"Dr. Rupal Patel has been promoted to Full Professor in both the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology & in the College of Computer and Information Sciences."
April 10, 2014 -- news@Northeastern
"Staff Members present at RISE 2014"
"Cadlab staff members presented three posters at Northeastern University Research Innovation and Scholarship Expo (RISE 2014): 1) Inducing speech errors in dysarthria using tongue twisters. 2) MIST: A Google Glass application for ubiquitous speech monitoring, 3) The Park Scene Childhood Speech Assessment..." [read more]
February 16, 2014 -- The 11TH WEB FOR ALL CONFERENCE
"Karl Wiegand won Google Student Award"
"Karl Wiegand was awarded one of two Google Student Awards to attend the 11th Web for All (W4A) Conference in Seoul, Korea, where he will talk about Intelligent Assistive Communication and the Web as a Social..." [read more]
February 13, 2014 -- TED Blog
"Everything you need to know about donating your voice: Why you should help The Human Voicebank Initiative"
"At TEDWomen, I introduced the audience to VocaliD — a project aimed at designing personalized synthetic voices so that people with severe speech impairments can use a voice that fits their body and personality. This is a project that I’ve been working on for several years, along with my students and my collaborator, Dr. Tim Bunnell of Nemours..." [read more]
February 13, 2014 -- TED Woman
"Rupal Patel: Synthetic voices, as unique as fingerprints"
"Rupal Patel introduced the audience at TED to VocaliD — a project that combines real human voices with the characteristics of individual speech patterns and gives people who can't speak the ability to communicate in a voice all their..." [read more]
December 30, 2013 -- CPIRF News
"Kathryn Connaghan awarded the Ethel and Jack Hausman Clinical Research Scholars Award"
"Kathryn Connaghan is awarded the Ethel and Jack Hausman Clinical Research Scholars Award through the Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation. This funding will support her research project entitled "Prosodic Differences and Their Impact on Speech Intelligibility in Cerebral..." [read more]
December 12, 2013 -- FAST COMPANY
"A New Kind Of Voice Prosthetic Will Eliminate Generic Robo-Voices"
"Physicist Stephen Hawking has long dealt with a degenerative disease that leaves him unable to speak. Instead, he uses a speech synthesizer that bellows out his words in a now-recognizable robotic male..." [read more]
December 11, 2013 -- All Things D
"Putting the Self in Self-Expression: Rupal Patel Creates Personalized Prosthetic Voices"
"There are 2.5 million people in the U.S. with severe speech disorders, and some 40 percent of them use speech devices to express themselves. But those devices offer an extremely limited..." [read more]
November 30, 2013 -- Asha Foundation
"Kathryn Connaghan awarded ASHF - New Century Scholars Research Grant"
"Kathryn Connaghan was awarded the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Research Grant for her project "Prosodic Categories in Speakers with Dysarthria Due to Cerebral Palsy". This grant encourages innovative scientific studies and talented investigators who will advance the field's research..." [read more]
September 21, 2013 -- Discovery News
"Giving Speechless People a Unique Voice"
"Perhaps the two most famous speechless individuals are physicist Stephen Hawking and the late Robert Ebert, a film critic. To communicate with other individuals, both men used computers that generated synthesized voices, which sounded tinny, stilted and unnatural. Now new technology could give speechless people a natural voice as unique to them..." [read more]
September 12, 2013 -- American Australian Association
"Emerging Australian Stars Receive Top Prizes"
The American Australian Association's Education Fund has appointed Heather Kember as one of eighteen new Fellows promoting intellectual alliances and ground breaking research collaboration between Australia and the US. [read more]
September 9, 2013 -- The Huffington Post
"Cutting-Edge Tech Gives a Synthetic Voice to the Voiceless"
"A tech breakthrough is letting people who are physically unable to speak talk out loud in their own, unique voice. When a person can't use audible speech to communicate, technology already exists that can allow some people to talk using a computerized voice. Generally people need to use apps or computer programs where you type..." [read more]
June 21, 2013 -- Thesis Proposal Defense
"Disambiguation of Imprecise User Input Through Intelligent Assistive Communication"
Karl Wiegand successfully defended the proposal of his thesis: "Intelligent interfaces can mitigate the need for linguistically and motorically precise user input to enhance the ease and efficiency of assistive communication." [read more]
April 18, 2013 -- news@Northeastern
"Rupal Patel receives Excellence in Teaching Award"
Students and faculty at Northeastern University selected Rupal Patel to receive the Excellence in Teaching Award during the Academic Honors Convocation. [read more]
March 11, 2013 -- National Public Radio (NPR)
"New Voices for the Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets an Upgrade"
"Ever since she was a small child, Samantha Grimaldo has had to carry her voice with her. Grimaldo was born with a rare disorder, Perisylvian syndrome, which means that though she's physically capable in many ways, she's never been able to speak. Instead, she's used a device to speak. She types in what she wants to say and the..." [read more]
February 24, 2013 -- Prime Access
"The Exciting Future of Icon-Based AAC"
"I'd like to tell you about my friend Karl Wiegand and his amazing research. He's one of the smartest and most capable researchers I know, and it doesn't hurt that he spends his valuable time and immense brain power on making the world a truly better place. Karl Wiegand is a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University in..." [read more]
February 21, 2013 -- Accessible Insights Blog
"Novel approaches to icon-based AAC presented by Karl Wiegand"
"One can easily argue that few are as keenly interested in the well-being of a person with a disability as is a parent. Expanding from that core of support one can also include siblings, guardians, educators, social workers and health care professionals. One can further include advocates, friends, spouses and co-workers, all of whom..." [read more]
February 20, 2013 -- news@Northeastern
"Researcher gives subjects their voice"
"Stephen Hawking and a 9-year-old girl with a speech disorder most likely use the same synthetic voice. It's called Perfect Paul and it's easy to understand, especially in acoustically chaotic environments like classrooms full of children. While new, more natural-sounding voices are available, Perfect Paul remains the most..." [read more]
January 1, 2013 -- The ASHA Leader
"The Future Present"
The VocaliD project was included in the American Speech Language and Hearing Association's special issue highlighting 11 up-and-coming technologies that could revolutionize diagnosis and treatment of speech, language, and hearing disorders. Please see project #10, "Giving Synthetic Voices a Personal Touch..." [read more]
November 19, 2012 -- news@Northeastern
"Technology to improve health care"
This semester, professors Matthew Goodwin, Rupal Patel, Stephen Intille, and Timothy Bickmore launched the nation's first program devoted to Personal Health Informatics. Personal health technologies amount to more than just your smartphone apps. A group of Northeastern researchers, who are leading a new doctoral program... [read more]
May 16, 2012 -- news@Northeastern
"Designing a 'star-making' foreign-language learning program"
"In one past interdisciplinary collaboration, Rupal Patel and Isabel Meirelles teamed up to develop a web-based tool that teaches children how to read with appropriate expression using visual cues. Their newest project, funded by a Provost's Tier 1 Inter-disciplinary Seed Grant, targets a trickier population: teenagers who want to learn English..." [read more]
April 12, 2012
Dr. Patel gives a talk entitled, "Prosodic control in healthy & Impaired speakers: Scaffolding not just suprasegmental," as an invited guest at the Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, CT.
March 4, 2012
Dr. Patel and other lab members give talks as invited guests at the National Conference on Speech Motor Control and Motor Speech Disorders in Santa Rosa, CA.
November 19, 2011
Dr. Patel gives a talk entitled, "Cutting Edge Approaches for Working with Children with Cerebral Palsy," as an invited guest at the American Speech and Hearing Association Convention in San Diego, CA.
November 1, 2011
Sara Natale is awarded the Progressus Therapy Future Leaders In School-Based Speech-Language Pathology Scholarship in the amount of $3,000. This award is in partnership with the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders.
October 1, 2011
CadLab is awarded a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant from the Computer and Information Sciences Division for Modeling Acoustic and Articulatory Features for Hybrid Synthesis.
June 11, 2011
Dr. Patel gives a talk entitled, "Motor and Linguistic Bases of Prosodic Cue Trading Relations in Dysarthria," as an invited guest at the Speech Motor Control Conference in Groningen, Netherlands.
June 1, 2011
CadLab is awarded a new interdisciplinary grant, the Northeastern University Provost's Research Award for Visualizing Speech Melody to Improve Second Language Expressive Fluency in Adolescents.
February 1, 2011
CadLab is awarded a new grant from the National Institute on Child and Human Development (NICHD) for Acquisition of Prosodic Control in Typically Developing Children.
June 24, 2010 -- news@Northeastern
"For child readers, 'once more with feeling'
"Rupal Patel, an associate professor of speech-language pathology and audiology at Northeastern, is developing innovative reading software that helps youngsters learn to read aloud with more expression in their voices via a novel interactive computer program. Her research in speech disorders led to a discovery that those..." [read more]
April 6, 2010 -- The ASHA Leader
"Inspiring the Next Generation of Teacher-Scholars"
"ASHA introduced the Students Preparing for Academic and Research Careers (SPARC) in 2004, a mentoring program named for the spark of inspiration it was designed to provide for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing research-oriented careers. The program was one of several responses to the shortage..." [read more]
December 13, 2008 -- The Globe and Mail
"Someone to Watch Over Me"
"Every move, every burble, every stage of development of their young son is being recorded as two university professors study how humans learn to speak — and whether robots can be taught the same way. It all started with a dare. The first parry came from Deb Roy, now an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute..." [PDF]
May 3, 2005 -- The Northeastern Voice
"Are You Talking to Me?" — Speech synthesis research brings new hope to the impaired
"It seems unfair that the computerized voice in an automobile navigation system speaks more concisely and legibly than individuals who rely on speech synthesizers — sounding no better than the computer HAL from '2001: A Space Odyssey' to communicate their thoughts and desires. Sentences from synthesizers are as basic..." [PDF]
