Best Student Paper Award

In his doctoral work, supervised by Prof. Sharon Gannot and Prof. Yaakov Goldberger, Shlomi Chazan focuses on processing speech signals and deep learning. “I am currently working on technologies for speech-enabled appliances, such as tablets and smartphones and smart home devices, such as Google Home or Amazon Echo, which currently show very low quality of speech recognition in the presence of noise. My goal is to clean out external noises and leave only the required speaker’s voice, thus enhancing speech recognition”, he explains. “There are two main methods for signal processing. One is statistical processing, based on mathematical and statistical models, and the other is deep learning-based processing, the goal of which is to recognize patterns by practicing on many solved and known samples. In my work, I integrate these two methods.” Chazan presented his work in the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), held last summer in Xi’an, China. Each year the conference attracts hundreds of participants, and dozens of papers are submitted. Ten students with the most interesting papers are chosen to present their research at the conference.  “I was one of those ten”, says Chazan, who is in the first year of his doctoral studies. “After I presented my research, there was a lot of interest in my paper. At the end of the conference, I won the Best Student Paper award and a monetary award”. Chazan attributes his success to the Faculty, among other factors. “The faculty is on a very high level, and also has a very familial atmosphere. There is a special and personal relationship between the students and lecturers, and especially with the advisors, who are always available for the students”.