The following is the last in a series of three blogs on the contributions of the Microsoft Research Asia Joint Lab Program (JLP), which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. The JLP brings together the resources of Microsoft Research and major Chinese universities, facilitating collaboration on state-of-the-art research, academic exchange, and talent incubation. This blog focuses on the joint lab operated by Microsoft Research Asia and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)—officially, the China Ministry of Education–Microsoft Key Laboratory of Human-Centric Computation and Interface Technologies Laboratory, Chinese University of Hong Kong—which we’ve abbreviated as the CUHK-MSRA joint lab in this blog.
Computing involves more than sitting at a keyboard writing code. Interactions with computer technology have become an integral part of many everyday activities, from driving a car, to learning new skills, to monitoring one’s health. These scenarios require technology with a human touch—computing that recognizes natural human gestures and voice commands and responds accordingly. Adding that human touch to computing is what distinguishes the CUHK-MSRA joint lab.
The CUHK-MSRA joint lab started in 2005, and within just a year, it had earned designation as a “key lab,” the highest level of recognition conferred by China’s Ministry of Education (MoE). For 10 years now, CUHK faculty and students have been working with Microsoft Research Asia’s top researchers on vision, speech, multimedia, and other aspects of human-centric computing.
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Professor Helen Meng plays a critical role in directing research at the
CUHK-MSRA joint lab.
Speech recognition and processing is a prime area of research at the CUHK-MSRA joint lab. Professor Helen Meng, the lab’s associate director of research, is currently working closely with Microsoft researcher Frank Soong on a project to develop speech signal processing and phonetic recognition technologies that can identify and analyze speech and voice problems. Once perfected, these technologies could assist speech clinicians in assessing and treating people with speech disorders. Their joint research team includes both CUHK doctoral students and Microsoft Research interns, which typifies the joint lab’s commitment to nurturing talented young computer scientists.
This research has also helped Soong and fellow Microsoft researcher Yao Qian in modeling the accents of native Mandarin speakers who are learning English. By using cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) training, they have mapped the acoustic-phonetic differences between Mandarin and English, a feat that a popular YouTube video (opens in new tab) highlighted (over a million views!) showing real-time speech-to-speech translation from English to Mandarin in the speaker’s own voice. Now Soong and Professor Meng are co-supervising a doctoral student who is working on the next generation of cross-lingual TTS. Their joint paper will be presented this April at the 2015 IEEE ICASSP International Conference (opens in new tab) in Brisbane, Australia.
This project is just one example of the collaborative nature of the CUHK-MSRA joint lab framework, notes Professor Meng. She points to other valuable outcomes, such as the recognition of CUHK students as Microsoft Fellows, the availability of Microsoft Research grants that allow the faculty to develop their own research ideas, and the opportunities for CUHK faculty and students to visit Microsoft Research Asia labs and be part of their research groups, all while exploring the latest technologies and research findings.
Professor Meng at the Fifth Microsoft Research Asia Joint Laboratory Symposium in 2013, seated next to Hsiao-Wuen Hon, managing director of Microsoft Research Asia
Amidst all this support, Professor Meng asserts that freedom is what she and her CUHK colleagues most appreciated about their collaborative association with Microsoft Research Asia. “They never dictate how the project should be done,” she says, “so we really have the freedom, the space, to engage in blue-sky research. But at the same time, they’re always there to support us. This relationship is what has made our joint lab really successful.”
Based on their solid achievements, we look forward to an even brighter future for the CUHK-MSRA joint lab
—Tim Pan, Director of University Relations, Microsoft Research Asia
Learn more
- CUHK MoE-Microsoft Key Laboratory of Human-Centric Computing and Interface Technologies (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Research Joint Research Centers – Asia-Pacific (opens in new tab)
- Building the talent pipeline: the HKUST joint lab story (opens in new tab)
- Joint lab marks 10 years of collaborative research in natural language processing (opens in new tab)
- Microsoft Research Asia (opens in new tab)
- Opportunities at Microsoft Research (opens in new tab)