Speech Technologies for Health will provide the students with knowledge on: · the speech production and perception mechanisms and the linguistic categories of the voice · the state of the art and fundamentals of speech and audio coders, speech recognition, speech synthesis or text-to-speech, speaker recognition and dialogue systems · their applications to health They will also acquire abilities to: · initiate research work in speech and audio coding, speech recognition, speech synthesis or text-to-speech, speaker recognition and natural language processing · to apply the previous knowledge to pose research questions on their applications to health

Unit 0. Introduction to Speech Technologies Unit 1. The Auditory System and Speech Perception. Unit 2. The Speech Production System and Phonation. Speech and Audio Coding Unit 3. Speech recognition: · Feature extraction · Acoustic & Language models · End-to-end recognition and deep learning models Unit 4. Speaker recognition and biometrics Unit 5. Text-to-Speech synthesis Unit 6. Clinical Speech Analytics and paralinguistics. Unit 7. Conversational AI for assistive technology. Unit 8. Speech disorders and neuroprostheses. Unit 9. Hearing disorders and aids.

The following learning activities and methodologies are employed: Combined master and lab classes (AF3) included guided lab assignments (AF4 and AF6), debates about key state of the art issues based on paper readings and audiovisual clips (AF6-AF7-AF8) and final project (AF6). Teachers are available during 2 hours per week for office hours (AF5). Methodologically, we will use class lectures (MD1), flipped classrooms (MD2) and problem based learning (with varying amount of supervision and scope, MD3) and gamification (MD4 and MD5). Combined master and lab clases: Master classes provide an overview of the main theoretical & mathematical concepts of the representation and processing of speech processing along with the analytic tools employed for their processing. In these classes, lab examples will be introduced as part of the theoretical expositions: all the formative sessions (lab availability provided) will take place in the lab to imbricate practical examples within the explanations to add dynamism to the class. This is also beneficial to solve different background issues. Moreover, every unit will begin with a debate of its technological implications. For this purpose, flipped classroom methodologies will be employed. In particular, students will be provided with some selected videos in advance to motivate the debate together with a list of questions (sometimes controversial) that the instructor will not answer categorically to encourage discussions. In this way, we expect to awake the curiosity of the student on the materials that will be subsequently explained. GAMIFICACIÓN The process of acquiring scientific knowledge will be illustrated through an Oxford-style debate. Students will form teams in which they will take on the roles of either proponent or opponent of a motion related to a topic discussed in class. Guidelines will be provided with requirements and forms for carrying out the tasks specific to each role. Students will be required to argue their positions based on scientific evidence acquired through reading articles or other reliable sources. This promotes teamwork and incorporates the active and critical reading of research articles. FINAL PROJECT Students will work on a project in which they will program a complete modular system of one of the tools explained in class. The students will be provided with some guidelines and some preparatory sessions by using problema-based learning.