Andi Buzo

Lecturer, PhD, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology

Email: andi.buzo@upb.ro
Tel: +4021 402 4635
Office: B042, Leu Campus

Research Interests
Degrees and Professional Experience
- Degrees
- Professional experience
Academic Activity
- Teaching
- Teaching books
- Strategic programmes
- National collaborations
- Student supervising

Last update: June 2014

Scientific Activity
- Scientific traceroute and achievements
- National research projects
- International Collaborations
- National Collaborations
- Benchmarking
- Affiliation to scientific community
List of publications
- PhD Thesis
- Books and book chapters
- Journal and conference papers

Research Interests

Spoken Language Technology (Automatic Speech/Speaker Recognition, Speech Indexing, Spoken Term Detection)
Natural Language Processing (Statistical Language Modeling, Phonetization, Diacritics restoration)
Human-Computer Interaction

Degrees and Professional Experience

Degrees

PhD Degree, in Electronics and Telecommunications (September 2011), University “Politehnica” of Bucharest.
Engineer Degree, in Telecommunications (June 2007), University “Politehnica” of Bucharest.
Bachelor Degree (July 2001), “Ismail Qemali” High School, Tirana, Albania.

Prizes

Golden Medal for excellent academic results, Albania, 2001.
Third place at the National Physics Olympiad, Albania, 2001.
Third place at “Tudor Tanasescu” National Competion for Linear Circuits, Bucharest, 2005.
Honorable Mention at “Tudor Tanasescu” National Competion for Linear Circuits, Bucharest, 2006.

Professional experience

Lecturer (Oct 2012 – present) at Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest. Teaching Spoken Language Technology, Advanced DSP Techniques, Microcontrollers and Microprocessor Architectures. Supervising BSc and MSc projects in speech recognition and telecommunication networks.
Teaching Assistant (Oct 2007 – Oct 2012) at Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest. Teaching Speech Technology, Advanced DSP Techniques, Microprocessor Architecture, Microcontrollers, Networks Architectures, Wideband Networks, Measurement Instruments. Supervising BSc and MSc projects in speech recognition and telecommunication networks.
Senior Quality Assurance (Mar. 2007 – Feb. 2011) at IXIA, Bucharest. Designing and implementing testing strategies for Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions in both signaling and codecs. Elaborating and improving algorithms for the automatic estimation of video and speech quality in VoIP.
Member of the research team (Oct. 2009 – Sep. 2010) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in the government grant “IDEI” no. 114/207, code ID_930 by the National Research Authority CNCSIS. Research in spontaneous speech recognition. Building annotated database in the Romanian language and developing algorithms for speech recognition.
Member of the research team (Dec. 2008 – Aug. 2009) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in LINCOR (partnership project, registration no. 2596) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing a system for the management of bilingual knowledge.
Member of the research team (Dec. 2008 – Aug. 2009) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in SISEB (partnership project, registration no. 2660) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing a system for the security of the e-banking transaction by biometric signature.
Member of the research team (Mar. 2008 – Nov. 2008) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in PALIROM (innovation project, registration no. 1097) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing tools for Natural Language Processing.
Member of the research team (Mar. 2008 – Nov. 2008) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in BIOACS (innovation project, registration no. 1166) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing tools for a biometric system for the acquisition and the verification of the dynamic signature.

Academic Activity

Teaching

All my teaching activity takes place in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest.

Master curricula

Spoken Language Technology, laboratory (2008 – present).

Bachelor curricula

Microprocessors Architecture, course (2012 – present) and laboratory (2008 – present);
Microcontrollers, course (2012 – present) and laboratory (2008 – present);
Advanced DSP Techniques laboratory (2011 – present).

Teaching books

Electronic support for “Spoken Language Technology” laboratory.
Laboratory guide for “Speech Technology. Speaker Recognition”

Strategic programmes

2010-2013: implementing expert, project PROMISE (“An Integrated Master’s Degree Programme in the Fields of Sound, Image and Multimedia Engineering”), FSE – European Structural Funds POS-DRU project, owner University „Politehnica” of Bucharest, ID61178.

National collaborations

Romanian Association for Artificial Intelligence (ARIA): “HMMs: from Theory to Applications”, a 2-day hands-on workshop on some of the most well-known machine learning models used in symbol and speech recognition;
IXIA Romania: co-supervision of Bachelor of Science and Master of Science student projects;
Luxoft Romania: co-supervision of Bachelor of Science and Master of Science student projects;
Freescale Romania: common project in audio/speech transcoding.

Student supervising

Since 2010, I co-supervised/coordinated several Bachelor of Science and Master of Science projects in Spoken Language Technology, Telecommunication Networks:

2013

Mihai Cătălin Safta, “Spoken Term Detection for Romanian Language”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.

2012

Bogdan Radu, “Carrier Grade Architecture”, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Alexandra Jica, “Topic-Based Language Model Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Adrian Liţă, “Multi-Processor 6-Propeller Tridimensional Flying Apparatus”, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Florin Matei, “Home Automation System Using Speech Recognition on an Embedded Platform”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Cătălin Stănculescu, “Continuous Speech Recognition Agent for Mobile Devices”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Iulia Stănoiu, “Noisy Speech Enhancement in Automatic Speech Recognition for Romanian Language”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Vanessa Voinic, “Continuous Speech Recognition in Romanian Language for Medical Applications”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.

2011

Daria Ion, “Speaker-dependent speech recognition: An in-depth analysis of speech features”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Aniela Milea, “Time-domain analysis and compression methods applied to the speech signal”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Radu-Mihai Pană-Tălpeanu, “Language models in speaker-dependent speech recognition”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.

2010

Tudor Mihailescu, Ioana Rolea, “Speaker recognition systems”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
Adina Popa, Diana Uzum, “Speaker-dependent speech recognition”, SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.

Scientific Activity

Scientific research trace-route and achievements

Automatic speech recognition for Romanian (2008 – present). Supervised and semi-supervised methods for annotated data acquisition. Uncertainty-based algorithms for noise reduction.
Spoken Term Detection (2012 – present). Multilingual acoustic modeling for under-resourced languages. Scalable searching algorithms.
Transcoding (2006 – 2007). Comfort Noise Generation (CNG) module for the G.723.1 to AMR conversion with a mean degradation of only 0.1 in PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality, ITU-T P.862 standard) score.

National research projects

2013-2014: researcher, project LVCSR-ROM (“Noise-robust, domain-adaptable, large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition system for the Romanian language”), funded by Romanian-American Foundation through the Applied Research, Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ARTIE) Fellowship Program.
Member of the research team (Oct. 2009 – Sep. 2010) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in the government grant “IDEI” no. 114/207, code ID_930 by the National Research Authority CNCSIS. Research in spontaneous speech recognition. Building annotated database in the Romanian language and developing algorithms for speech recognition.
Member of the research team (Dec. 2008 – Aug. 2009) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in LINCOR (partnership project, registration no. 2596) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing a system for the management of bilingual knowledge.
Member of the research team (Dec. 2008 – Aug. 2009) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in SISEB (partnership project, registration no. 2660) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing a system for the security of the e-banking transaction by biometric signature.
Member of the research team (Mar. 2008 – Nov. 2008) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in PALIROM (innovation project, registration no. 1097) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing tools for Natural Language Processing.
Member of the research team (Mar. 2008 – Nov. 2008) at University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, in BIOACS (innovation project, registration no. 1166) in partnership with Softwin Group (http://www.softwinresearch.ro). Developing and implementing tools for a biometric system for the acquisition and the verification of the dynamic signature.

International collaborations

Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technology Institute, with Florian Metze co-organization of the Spoken Web Search task at MediaEval 2013;
Telefonica Research, with Xavier Anguera co-organization of the Spoken Web Search task at MediaEval 2013;
Speech@FIT, Brno, with Igor Szoke co-organization of the Spoken Web Search task at MediaEval 2013;
University of the Basque Country, with Luis Javier Rodriguez Fuentes co-organization of the Spoken Web Search task at MediaEval 2013;

National collaborations

Softwin R&D: several research projects in digital signal processing and natural language processing;
LAPI: collaboration for the MediaEval 2012 & 2013 benchmarking.

Benchmarking

MediaEval 2013 (Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation): Spoken Web Search Task with LAPI & SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
MediaEval 2012 (Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation): Spoken Web Search Task with LAPI & SpeeD, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.

Affiliation to scientific community

Organizer of the Spoken Web Search task at MediaEval 2013;
Member of the SpeeD laboratory since 2007;
Member of EURASIP, Aug 2011 – present;
Member of Brain Romania.
Peer reviewer for IEEE Signal Processing Letters since 2014;
Peer reviewer for IARIA Journals since 2011;
Peer reviewer for International Journal of Speech Technology since 2013;
Peer reviewer for ICDT since 2011;
Peer reviewer for SpeD since 2011;
Peer reviewer for EUSIPCO 2012;
Peer reviewer for INCER 2013;
Peer reviewer for SLAM 2013;
Peer reviewer for ICME 2014.

List of publications

PhD thesis

Andi Buzo, “Automatic speech recognition over mobile telecommunication channels”, PhD Thesis, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest, Oct 2011 (scientific coordinator: prof. Corneliu Burileanu).

Books and book capters

Andi Buzo, “Tehnologia vorbirii. Recunoașterea vorbitorului”, Îndrumar de laborator, Editura Politehnica Press, București 2013, ISBN 978-606-515-485-8.
Corneliu Burileanu, Cristina Sorina Petrea, Andi Buzo, and Horia Cucu, “Speech Recognition Experiments Starting from Isolated Words for Spoken Romanian Language”, book chapter in D. Tufiş, Corina Forăscu (Eds.), “Multilinguality and Interoperability in Language Processing with Emphasis on Romanian”, Publishing House of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest 2010, pp. 229-242, ISBN: 978-973-27-1972-5.
Corneliu Burileanu, Cristina-Sorina Petrea, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu and Alina Pasca, “Report on building a tool for Romanian spontaneous speech recognition” in “The Phonetician”, Number 97 / 2008-I-II, 2008, pp. 68-98, ISSN 0741-6164.

Journal and conference papers

2014

Horia Cucu, Andi Buzo, Laurent Besacier, Corneliu Burileanu, “SMT-based ASR Domain Adaptation Methods for Under-Resourced Languages: Application to Romanian”, in Speech Communication Journal, Vol. 56 – Special Issue on Processing Under-Resourced Languages, pp. 195-212, 2014, ISSN: 0167-6393.

2013

Xavier Anguera, Florian Metze, Andi Buzo, Igor Szoke and Luis J. Rodriguez-Fuentes, “The Spoken Web Search task at Mediaeval 2012“, SLTC Newsletter, February 2013.
Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Text Spotting In Large Speech Databases For Under-Resourced Languages”, in the Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD), Cluj-Napoca, 2013, pp. 77-82, ISBN: 978-1-4799-1065-6.
Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Mihai Safta, Corneliu Burileanu, “Multilingual Query by Example Spoken Term Detection for Under-Resourced Languages”, in the Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD), Cluj-Napoca, 2013, pp. 83-88, ISBN: 978-1-4799-1065-6.
Radu-Sebastian Marinescu, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Extensive Evaluation Experiments for the Accumulated Cross-Power Spectrum Methods for Time Delay Estimation”, in the Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD), Cluj-Napoca, 2013, pp. 29-34, ISBN: 978-1-4799-1065-6.
Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Iris Molnar, Bogdan Ionescu and Corneliu Burileanu, “SpeeD @ MediaEval 2013: A Phone Recognition Approach to Spoken Term Detection”, in Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2013 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, 2013, ISSN: 1613-0073.
Xavier Anguera, Florian Metze, Andi Buzo, Igor Szoke, Luis Javier Rodriguez-Fuentes, “The Spoken Web Search Task”, Overview paper, in Proceedings of the MediaEval 2013 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain, 2013, ISSN: 1613-0073.
Horia Cucu, Andi Buzo, Laurent Besacier, Corneliu Burileanu, “Statistical Error Correction Methods for Domain-Specific ASR Systems”, in A.-H. Dediu et al. (Eds.): “Statistical Language and Speech Processing 2013”, LNAI, vol. 7978, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, Tarragonna, Spain, 2013, pp. 83–92.
Radu-Sebastian Marinescu, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Fast Accurate Time Delay Estimation Based on Enhanced Accumulated Cross-Power Spectrum Phase”, in the Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Marrakech, Morocco, 2013 (accepted, in press).
Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Investigating Image Processing Based Aligner for Large Texts”, in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Digital Telecommunications (ICDT), Venice, Italy, 2013, pp. 50-54, ISBN: 978-1-61208-262-2.
Radu-Sebastian Marinescu, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “New Considerations for Accumulated ρ-Cross Power Spectrum Phase with Coherence Time Delay Estimation”, in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Digital Telecommunications (ICDT), Venice, Italy, 2013, pp. 55-59, ISBN: 978-1-61208-262-2.

2012

A. Buzo, H. Cucu, M. Safta, B. Ionescu and C. Burileanu, “ARF @ MediaEval 2012: A Romanian ASR-based Approach to Spoken Term Detection”, in Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy, 2012, ISSN 1613-0073.
Horia Cucu, Laurent Besacier, Corneliu Burileanu, Andi Buzo, “ASR Domain Adaptation Methods for Low-Resourced Languages: Application to Romanian Language”, in the Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Bucharest, Romania, 2012, pp. 1648-1652, ISSN: 2076-1465.
Miruna Stănescu, Horia Cucu, Andi Buzo, Corneliu Burileanu, “ASR for Low-Resourced Languages: Building a Phonetically Balanced Romanian Speech Corpus”, in the Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Bucharest, Romania, 2012, pp. 2060-2064, ISSN: 2076-1465.
Miruna Stănescu, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Statistical Phonetic Analysis of the Romanian Language for Speech Recognition and Synthesis Tasks”, in the Proceedings of 54th International Symposium “ELMAR 2012”, Zadar, Croatia, 2012, pp. 219-222, ISBN: 978-953-7044-13-8.
B. Ionescu, I. Mironica, K. Seyerlehner, P. Knees, J. Schlüter, M. Schedl, H. Cucu, A. Buzo, P. Lambert, “ARF @ MediaEval 2012: Multimodal Video Classification”, Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy, October 4-5, 2012, CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-927/mediaeval2012_submission_7.pdf

2011

Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Improving Automatic Speech Recognition Robustness for the Romanian Language”, in the Proceedings of the 19th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Barcelona, Spain, 2011, pp. 2119-2122, ISSN 2076-1465.
Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Corneliu Burileanu, Miruna Paşca, Vladimir Popescu, “Word error rate improvement and complexity reduction in automatic speech recognition by analyzing acoustic model uncertainty and confusion”, in the Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue (SpeD), Braşov, 2011, pp. 67-74, ISBN 978-1-4577-0439-0.
Horia Cucu, Andi Buzo, Corneliu Burileanu, “Optimization methods for large vocabulary, isolated words recognition in Romanian language”, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest Scientific Bulletin, Series C, vol. 73, issue 2, Bucharest, 2011, pp. 179-192, ISSN: 1454-234x.
Horia Cucu, Laurent Besacier, Corneliu Burileanu, Andi Buzo, “Enhancing Automatic Speech Recognition for Romanian by Using Machine Translated and Web-based Text Corpora”, in the Proceedings of The 14th International Conference “Speech and Computer” (SPECOM), Kazan, Russia, 2011, pp. 81-88, ISBN: 978-5-88983-395-6.
Horia Cucu, Laurent Besacier, Corneliu Burileanu, Andi Buzo, “Investigating the Role of Machine Translated Text in ASR Domain Adaptation: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Methods”, IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), 2011, Hawaii, USA, pp. 260-265, ISBN: 978-1-4673-0366-8.

2010

Corneliu Burileanu, Vladimir Popescu, Andi Buzo, Cristina Petrea, Diana Ghelmez-Hanes, “Spontaneous Speech Recognition for Romanian in Spoken Dialogue Systems”, in the Proceedings of the Romanian Academy Series A-Mathematics, Physics, Technical Sciences, Information Science, Vol. 11. No. 1, pp. 83-91, 2010, ISSN 1454-9069.
Corneliu Burileanu, Andi Buzo, Cristina Sorina Petre, Diana Ghelmez-Hanes, Horia Cucu, “Romanian spoken language resources and annotation for speaker independent spontaneous speech recognition”, in the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Digital Telecommunications (ICDT), Athens, Greece, 2010, pp. 7-10.
Cristina Petrea, Andi Buzo, Horia Cucu, Miruna Pasca, Corneliu Burileanu, “Speech Recognition Experimental Results for Romanian Language”, in the Proceedings of The 6th European Conference on Intelligent Systems and Technologies (ECIT), Iaşi, Romania, 2010, Invited Plenary Session I.

2009

Cristina Petrea, Diana Ghelmez-Hanes, Andi Buzo, Vladimir Popescu, Corneliu Burileanu, “Spontaneous Speech Database for the Romanian Language with Medical Applicability”, in the Proceedings of BIOSTEC, pp. 78-86, 2009, ISBN 978-989-8111-78-4.
Cristina Petrea, Diana Ghelmez-Hanes, Andi Buzo, Corneliu Burileanu, “Statistical Results in the Context of Romanian Spontaneous Speech Recognition”, in the Proceedings of SPECOM, pp. 126-129, 2009, pp. 458-463, ISBN 978-5-8088-0442-5.

2008

Cristina Petrea, Diana Ghelmez-Hanes, Vladimir Popescu, Andi Buzo, Corneliu Burileanu, “Spontaneous Speech Database for Romanian Language”, in the Proceedings of The 6th European Conference on Intelligent Systems and Technologies (ECIT), Iasi, 2008, CD, 15p, Session X: Natural Language & Speech Technology.