An interactive session was arranged at Razak Tower UTM KL on Thursday, 22nd March 2018. The session focused on Pioneering multi-disciplinary research at Stirling, is exploring the potential of cognitively inspired Big Data Informatics for engineering the intelligent systems of tomorrow. On-going research into multi-modal speech perception has led to the development of a novel context-aware, audio-visual speech processing system. The proposed framework exploits cognitively-inspired use of both audio and visual (including lip-tracking) information, with potential applications in next-generation multimodal hearing aids, listening devices and related assistive technology. We present comparative results using real noisy, audio-visual datasets, benchmarked against state-of-the-art audio only, and audio-visual speech enhancement approaches. An overview of related case studies, exploring the role of context-aware multi-modal processing for enhanced sentiment analysis and deception detection, is also presented. Finally, we outline some future research directions and challenges. At the end of the session, these focal points are decided:
- Consideration of Prof Amir Hussain for keynote at our conferences
- Arranging a hands workshop at Razak Tower on Big Data Informatics
- Proposing co-researcher
Amir Hussain is full Professor of Computing Science, founding Director of the Cognitive Big Data Informatics (CogBID) Research Laboratory, and Head of the Data Science Research Group at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK. Professor Hussain’s research interests are cross-disciplinary and industry focused, aimed at pioneering brain-inspired, cognitive Big Data technology for solving complex real-world problems. In 2017, he was ranked, in an independent survey published in Elsevier’s leading Information Processing and Management Journal, as one of the world’s top two most productive, highly cited researchers in the sentiment analytics field (since 2000). He has (co)authored more than 320 publications (with approximately 120 journal papers, over a dozen Books, including the world’s first research monographs in multi-disciplinary areas of: cognitively-inspired audio-visual speech filtering, sentic computing, and cognitive agent based computing). He has led major multi-disciplinary research projects (worth over $3 Million, including over $0.5 M of currently held grants), as Principal Investigator, funded by national and European research councils, local and international charities and industry, and has supervised more than 30 PhDs to-date. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of (Springer Nature’s) Cognitive Computation journal (ISI SCI Impact Factor: 3.44) and BMC Big Data Analytics journal. He also serves as Associate Editor of several other leading journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is Vice-Chair of the Emergent Technologies Technical Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and Chapter Chair of the IEEE UK & RI Industry Applications Society Chapter. He is a Senior Fellow of the Brain Sciences Foundation (USA).
