Staff Profile
Dr Iain McCowan
Project Leader
Networking
Technologies Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre
Contact Details
CSIRO ICT Centre
Corner of Vimiera and Pembroke Streets,
Marsfield, NSW 2122
PO Box 76 Epping NSW 1710 Australia
E-mail: Iain.McCowan@csiro.au
Telephone: +61 7 3024 1626
Research Overview
My research interest lies in the application of signal
processing, natural language processing, and machine learning
technologies to observe and improve human-human and human-computer
interactions. A focus of much of my work has been the use of
microphone arrays in this context, benefiting from their spatial
discrimination to track and acquire speech from distant speakers.
This has application, for instance, to automated transcription of
business meetings or within systems to support remote collaboration.
Recently, I have also conducted research in the health domain,
applying natural language processing and machine learning to
automate the collection of cancer staging data from free-text
pathology and radiology reports.
Bio
Iain McCowan received the B.Eng. and B.InfoTech. from the
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, in 1996. In
1997, he worked as a Software Engineer in the Australian office of
DASCOM, a US-based start-up in the area of intranet security
(subsequently acquired by IBM Tivoli).
From 1998 to 2001, Iain completed his PhD in Robust Speech
Recognition using Microphone Arrays at QUT, including a period as
a researcher at France Telecom R&D. He was a Research
Scientist at the IDIAP Research
Institute, Switzerland from 2001-2005. While there, he worked on a
number of applied research projects in the areas of automatic
speech recognition, content-based multimedia retrieval and
multimodal event recognition, in collaboration with a variety of academic and
industrial partner sites. From January 2004, Iain was
Scientific Coordinator of the AMI (Augmented Multi-party
Interaction) project, a multi-disciplinary project involving 15
international sites, jointly managed by IDIAP and the University
of Edinburgh.
Iain joined the CSIRO e-Health Research Centre in May 2005 as a
Research Scientist in the area of multimedia content analysis, and
was Project Leader of the Cancer Stage Interpretation System
project in collaboration with the Queensland Cancer Control and
Analysis Team in Queensland Health.
Since November 2007, Iain has been a member of the CSIRO ICT
Centre Networking Technologies Laboratory, working on R&D of
microphone array technologies and managing CSIRO's participation
on the EU FP6 AMIDA project.
Current Projects
Augmented Multi-party
Interaction with Distant Access (AMIDA)
Commercialisation of Microphone Array
Past Projects
Cancer Stage Interpretation
System (CSIS)
Selected Recent Publications
Full publications list
| [1]
|
I. McCowan, M. Lincoln, and I. Himawan.
Microphone Array Calibration in Diffuse Noise Fields.
To appear in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language
Processing, January 2008.
|
| [2]
|
D. Gatica-Perez, G. Lathoud, J.-M. Odobez, and
I. McCowan. Audio-Visual Probabilistic Tracking of Multiple
Speakers in Meetings. IEEE Transactions on Speech and
Audio Processing, 15(2):601-616, February 2007.
|
| [3]
|
H. K. Maganti, D. Gatica-Perez, and
I. McCowan. Speech Enhancement and Recognition in Meetings
with an Audio-Visual Sensor Array. IEEE Transactions
on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2007.
|
| [4]
|
I. McCowan, D. Moore, A. Nguyen, R. Bowman,
B. Clarke, E. Duhig, and M-J. Fry. Collection of Population
Cancer Stage Data by Classifying Free-text Medical Reports.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA),
14(6):736-745, November-December 2007.
|
| [5]
|
D. Zhang, D. Gatica-Perez, S. Bengio,
I. McCowan, and G. Lathoud. Modeling Individual and Group
Actions in Meetings With Layered HMMs. IEEE
Transactions on Multimedia, 8(3):509-520, June 2006.
|
| [6]
|
I. McCowan, D. Gatica-Perez, S. Bengio, G. Lathoud,
M. Barnard, and D. Zhang. Automatic Analysis of Multimodal
Group Actions in Meetings. IEEE Transactions on
Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 27(3):305-317,
March 2004.
|
| [7]
|
I. McCowan and H. Bourlard. Microphone
Array Post-filter based on Noise Field Coherence. IEEE
Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 11(6),
November 2003.
|
| [8]
|
I. Himawan, S. Sridharan, and I. McCowan.
Dealing with Uncertainty in Microphone Placement in a
Microphone Array Speech Recognition System. In To
appear in Proceedings of ICASSP 2008, 2008.
|
| [9]
|
I. McCowan and H. Harden. Towards Automated
Observational Analysis of Leadership in Clinical Networks.
In Third International Conference Information Technology
in Health Care (ITHC2007): Socio-technical approaches,
August 2007.
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