Besides a message, speech carries information from a number of additional sources, which introduce irrelevant variability (noise).  As discussed in the talk, such noise comes in several distinct forms. Noise with predictable effects can be often suppressed analytically, and we discuss some techniques for doing so. Unpredictable effects of expected noise are typically successfully dealt with by extensive training of a machine using noisy data. Such multi-style training  is currently the technique of choice in most practical situations, which is often hard to beat. However, we argue for alternative adaptive multi-stream approaches, which could in principle also deal with noises that are unexpected. Our current efforts in this direction are discussed.

Hynek Hermansky is the Julian S. Smith Professor of the Electrical Engineering and the Director of Centre for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and a Research Professor at the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic. His main research interests are in bio-inspired speech processing. He has been working in speech research for over 30 years, previously as a Director of Research at the IDIAP Research Institute, Martigny and a Titular Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, a Professor and Director of the Center for Information Processing at OHSU Portland, Oregon, a Senior Member of Research Staff at U S WEST Advanced Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, a Research Engineer at Panasonic Technologies in Santa Barbara, California, a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and an Assistant Professor at the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.  He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of International Speech Communication, and an External Fellow of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. He is also the holder of the 2013 International Speech Communication Association Medal for Scientific Achievement, is a Member of The Board of the International Speech Communication Association, and a Member of the Editorial Board of Speech Communication. He was the General Chair of the 2013 ICASSP Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, a Member of the Organizing Committee at the 2011 ICASSP in Prague, Technical Chair at the 1998 ICASSP in Seattle and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Speech and Audio. He holds 10 US patents and authored or co-authored over 250 papers in reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Prof. Hermansky holds Dr.Eng. degree from the University of Tokyo, and Dipl. Ing. degree from Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.