CV


Professor of Machine Learning and Speech Processing, Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark

Positions:
2017 – present: Full Professor, Dept. of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark
2016 – present: Co-founder and Co-head, Centre for Acoustic Signal Processing Research (CASPR), Aalborg University
2021 – present: Co-Lead, Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark
2012, 2017, 2022: Visiting Professor, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.
2003 – 2017: Associate Professor, Dept. of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University
2001-2003: Assistant Research Professor, Dept. of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University
2000-2001: Postdoc, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Dept. of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea.
1999-2001: Associate Professor and Deputy Head of Section for Circuits and Systems, Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

Education:
Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering, November 1999, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.
M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, April 1996, Hunan University, China.
B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, July 1990, Hunan University, China.
Research Management Course, Dec 2020-Jun 2021, Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

Research Interests
Machine learning, deep learning, speech and speaker recognition, noise-robust speech processing, multimodal signal processing, and social robotics.

Professional Membership
Member of IEEE Signal Processing Society Conferences Board, 2022-2024. 
Member of IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Directions Board, 2021-2022. 
Chair of IEEE Signal Processing Society Denmark Chapter, 2021–present.
Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee (MLSP TC), 2021-2022. (Vice Chair 2020 and Past Chair 2023)
Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society MLSP TC, 2018–present.
Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Data Science Initiative. 2019–present.
Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 2006–present.

Selected Research Projects
2021-2033; The Pioneer Center for Artificial Intelligence. The research center is funded by The Danish National Research Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Carlsberg Foundation, Villum Foundation and Lundbeck Foundation. Member universities are Aalborg University, Aarhus University, the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark and the IT University of Denmark.
2022-2025; Project: Self-Supervised Learning for Spoken Language Understanding in Medical Conversations. Industrial Postdoc project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and Corti A/S, and in cooperation with the University of Copenhagen and Pioneer Centre for AI.
2022-2025; Project: A Giant Leap for Keyword Spotting. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (H2020-MSCA-IF-2020).
2022-2025; Project: Novel Feedback Prevention for Hearing Assistive Devices. Industrial PhD Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and Oticon A/S. 
2021-2026; Centre for Acoustic Signal Processing Research II (CASPR II). Project funded Oticon Foundation, Oticon A/S and Aalborg University.
2021-2024; Vision-Assisted Hearing Aid Systems. Industrial Postdoc Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and Oticon A/S.   
2020-2023; Hearing Loss Compensation Using Deep Learning. Industrial PhD Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark, Oticon A/S and Eriksholm Research Centre.
2020-2022; Informed Adaptive Multi-Microphone Pre-Processing based Speech Enhancement for Wireless Speech Communication. Industrial PhD Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and RTX A/S.
2020-2022; Industry 4.0 – Intelligent Condition Monitoring based on Acoustic Signal Processing and Machine Learning (Acoustic Sensor Technology). Industrial Project funded by LEGO A/S and Grundfos A/S.
2019-2022; Nano-satellite Battery Monitoring. Industrial Postdoc Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and GomSpace A/S.
2018-2021; User-Symbiotic Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aids. Industrial PhD Project funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and Oticon A/S.
2016-2021; Centre for Acoustic Signal Processing Research (CASPR). Project funded Oticon Foundation, Oticon A/S and Aalborg University.
2016–2019; Automated Audiovisual Inference of the Intention of Multiple Users in the Home. Industrial PhD project funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD) and Bang & Olufsen A/S. 
2015-2018; Speech Enhancement for Hearing Aid Applications using Machine Learning Techniques. Project funded by Oticon Foundation. 
2015-2017; OCTAVE (Objective Control for TAlker VErification). European Commission Horizon 2020. 
2015; RARP- Robotech Auto Route Planning. InnoBooster project funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD). 
2014-2017; Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing Aid Systems. Project funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD) and Oticon Foundation. 
2014-2017; Sound Scene Analysis for Hearing Aid Applications. Project funded by Oticon A/S. 
2013-2017; Durable Interaction with Socially Intelligent Robots. Project funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research in Technology and Production Sciences.
2013–2017; COST Action IC1206 – De-identification for privacy protection in multimedia content. Project funded by European Commission.
2012–2015; Project: A Robust Audio-based Hybrid Recommendations Framework for Interactive TV. Project funded by ang & Olufsen A/S and The Danish Council for Technology and Innovation. 
2012–2015; Project: CoSound – A Cognitive Systems Approach to Enriched and Actionable Information from Audio Streams. Project funded by Danish Strategic Research Council. 

Journal Editorship

  • Associate Editor for the inaugural special series on AI in Signal & Data Science, IEEE Journal on Selected Topic in Signal Processing (JSTSP), 2023 – .
  • Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2019-2023.
  • Editorial Board Member, Elsevier Computer Speech and Language (ISSN: 0885-2308), 2009-2020.
  • Associate Editor, Elsevier Computers and Electrical Engineering (ISSN: 0045-7906), 2011-2014.
  • Editorial Board Member, Elsevier Digital Signal Processing (ISSN: 1051-2004), 2013-2015.
  • Guest Editor, Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2018), Special Issue of Springer Journal of Signal Processing Systems, 2018-2019.
  • Guest Editor, Machine Learning for Big Data Processing in Mobile Internet, Special Issue of Springer Wireless Personal Communications, 2017-2018.
  • Guest Editor, Machine Learning for Non-Gaussian Data Processing, Special Issue of Elsevier Neurocomputing, 2015-2017.
  • Guest Editor, Intelligent Acoustic Sensing Technology and Networks, Special Issue of Hindawi International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2015-2016. 
  • Lead guest editor, Speech Processing for Natural Interaction with Intelligent Environments, Special Issue of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (with guest editors R. Haeb-Umbach, University of Paderborn, Germany; S. Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; J.R. Glass, MIT, USA; M. Omologo, FBK, Italy), 2009-2010.
  • Guest editor, New Trends in Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering, Special Issue of Elsevier Computers and Electrical Engineering, 2010-2011. 
  • Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management (ISSN (Online): 1759-1171 – ISSN (Print): 1759-1163). From the inception in 2008 – 2014.

Conference Organization

  • TPC Vice-Chair for the 49th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP-2024), Seoul, Korea, April 14-19, 2024.
  • Publicity Co-Chair of the Inaugural IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), Santa Clara, California, USA, June 7-8, 2023. 
  • Area chair of The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023), Kigali, Rwanda, May 1-5, 2023.
  • Publicity Chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) 2023, Taipei. 
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of IEEE 33rd International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2023), Rome, Italy, 2023. 
  • Organizer of 2022 Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning for Signal Decoding, Aalborg, Denmark, October 13-14, 2022. 
  • Co-organiser of Session “Deep Learning for Speech Processing” at the 24th International Congress on Acoustics (ICA2022), Gyeongju, Korea, October 24-28, 2022.
  • Panellist and co-organizer of Panel Session on The Signal Processing Perspective of Data Science at the 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022), Singapore, May 21-27, 2022.
  • Member of Organizing Committee of Grand Challenge “Multi-Channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription” at the 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022), Singapore, May 22-27, 2022.
  • Track Chair, Machine Learning for the 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022), Singapore, May 22-27, 2022.
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of IEEE 31st International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2021), Gold Coast, Australia, October 25–28, 2021. 
  • Track Co-Chair, Machine Learning for the 46th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2021), Toronto, ON, Canada, June 6-12, 2021.
  • Co-organiser of Special Session / Challenge “Real-time Far-field Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement Challenge for Video Conferencing (ConferencingSpeech 2021)” at INTERSPEECH 2021. Brno, Czech Republic, August 30 – September 3, 2021.
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of IEEE 30th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2020), Espoo, Finland, September 21-24, 2020. 
  • Finance Co-Chair, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2020), Shenzhen, China. 
  • Track Co-Chair, Machine Learning for the 45th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020), Barcelona, Spain, May 4-8, 2020. 
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of IEEE 29th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2019), Pittsburgh, USA, October 13-16, 2019. 
  • General Co-chair of International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing (AISP 2020), Amaravati, India, 10-12th January 2020.
  • Co-organiser and co-chair of Special Session “AI for Sound: A Session Honoring Jan Larsen” at 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2019), Brighton, UK (with Tulay Adali, the University of Maryland), May 12-17, 2019.
  • General Chair of IEEE 28th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP2018, Aalborg, Denmark), September 17-20, 2018.
  • Area/Track Chair in Speech Processing and Human Language Technology and TPC member of the 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2018), Rome, Italy, September 3-7, 2018.
  • Chair of The International Workshop on Sensing, Processing and Learning for Intelligent Machines (SPLINE2016), Aalborg, Denmark, July 6-8, 2016.
  • Co-organiser of the 8th Management Committee meeting and Working Group meeting of EU COST Action IC1206, Aalborg, Denmark, July 6-7, 2016. 
  • Technical Co-Chair for 2016 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT 2016), San Diego, USA.
  • Area chair in Speech and Language Processing, The 23rd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2015), Nice, France, August 31 – September 4, 2015.
  • Member of the Organizing Committee for the 1st Training School of COST Action IC1206, 7-11 October 2015, Limassol, Cyprus.
  • Member of Program Committee for the Satellite Workshop on “De-identification for Privacy Protection in Multimedia”, The 11th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2015), Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 4-8, 2015.
  • Chair of the 3rd AAU Workshop on Robotics, Aalborg, Denmark, 2014. 
  • TPC Co-Chair of the 2nd International Conference on Communications, Connectivity, Convergence, Content and Cooperation, Aalborg, Denmark, May 11-14, 2014. Co-chaired a session.
  • Area Chair in Multimedia Signal Processing, The 21st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2013), Marrakech, Morocco, September 9-13, 2013.
  • Special Sessions Chair of the 1st International Conference on Communications, Connectivity, Convergence, Content and Cooperation (IC5-2013), Mumbai, India, December 16-19, 2013.
  • Member of steering committee of International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP) Series. 2010-2012. 
  • Program Co-Chair of the 3rd International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP 2010), Yantai, China, 16-18 October 2010 (2,000+ submissions). 
  • Member of organising committee and area chair in Multimedia Signal Processing of EUSIPCO 2010 – the 18th European Signal Processing Conference, Aalborg, Denmark, Aug. 23 – 28, 2010 (ca. 600 submissions).
  • Co-organiser of Special Session “Person Tracking for Assistive Working and Living Environment” at EUSIPCO 2010, Aalborg, Denmark. 
  • Co-organiser and co-chair of Special Session “Speech and Audio Processing in Intelligent Environments” at INTERSPEECH 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.
  • Organiser and chair of Special Session “Speech recognition in ubiquitous networking and context-aware computing” at INTERSPEECH 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005 (with P. Dalsgaard and B. Lindberg, Aalborg University).
  • Member of organising committee of ITRW and COST Final Workshop ASIDE 2005 – Applied Spoken Language Interaction in Distributed Environment. Aalborg, Denmark, November 2005.

Tutorial

  • Zheng-Hua Tan, “Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Data: From Models to Loss Functions,” Short Course at University of Oulu, Finland, May 15-17, 2023. 
  • Zheng-Hua Tan, “Self-Supervised Learning: Training Targets and Loss Functions,” Tutorial at Northern Lights Deep Learning Conference, Tramsø, Norway, 10-12 January 2023. 
  • Iván López-Espejo, Zheng-Hua Tan, and John H. L. Hansen, “Deep Spoken Keyword Spotting,” Tutorial at INTERSPEECH 2022, Incheon, Korea, September 18-22, 2022. 
  • Zheng-Hua Tan, “Self-Supervised Learning: Training Targets and Loss Functions,” Expert Talk (invited) at the 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022), Singapore, May 21-27, 2022. 
  • Daniel Michelsanti, Zheng-Hua Tan, Jesper Jensen, and Dong Yu, “Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement and Separation Based on Deep Learning,” Tutorial at the 46th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2021), Toronto, ON, Canada, June 6-12, 2021.  
  • Zheng-Hua Tan, “Multimodal Biometrics, Anti-spoofing and De-identification,” Lecture at the Second COST IC1206 Training School: De-identification for privacy protection in multimedia content, 13-16 February 2017, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
  • Zheng-Hua Tan and Neeli Prasad, “Internet of Things: Opportunities and Challenges,” Tutorial at WPMC 2010 – The 13th International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications 2010, Recife, Brazil, Oct. 2010. 
  • Zheng-Hua Tan and Miroslav Novak, “Speech Recognition on Mobile Devices: Distributed and Embedded Solutions,” Tutorial at INTERSPEECH 2008, Brisbane, Australia, Sep. 2008 (INTERSPEECH is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference in speech processing. The tutorial attracted the largest number of participants among the tutorials given at the conference.) 

Paper Awards, Data Competitions 

  • The 2022 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award. Morten Kolbæk, Dong Yu, Zheng-Hua Tan, and Jesper Jensen, “Multitalker speech separation with utterance-level permutation invariant training of deep recurrent neural networks,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, October 2017
  • Daniel Michelsanti is the recipient of the 11th Christian Benoit Award based on his PhD thesis work for which I was a supervisor. 
  • The 5th place in Task-1 Short-Duration Text-Dependent SV of the Short-duration Speaker Verification (SdSV) Challenge 2020, a special session at Interspeech 2020, October 25-19, Shanghai, China. 
  • Our unsupervised noise-robust voice activity detection (rVAD) method (out of the box) ranks the 4th place (out of 27 supervised/unsupervised systems) in the Fearless Steps Speech Activity Detection Challenge, which consists of audio data from the Apollo-11 mission. 
  • Best Student Paper Award. Morten Kolbæk, Dong Yu, Zheng-Hua Tan, and Jensen, Jesper, “Joint Separation and Denoising of Noisy Multi-Talker Speech Using Recurrent Neural Networks and Permutation Invariant Training,” The IEEE 27th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), Tokyo, Japan, 25-28 September 2017. 
  • Best Paper Award. Ibrahim A. Hameed, Zheng-Hua Tan, Nicolai B. Thomsen and Xiaodong Duan, “User Acceptance of Social Robots,” The 9th International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (ACHI 2016), Venice, Italy, April 24-28, 2016. 
  • Best Paper Award Runner-up. Sally Grindsted Nielsen, Anja Christoffersen, Elizabeth Jochum and Zheng-Hua Tan, “Robot Future: Using Theatre to Influence Acceptance of Care Robots,” The New Friend 2015 Conference, Almere, The Netherlands, October 22-23, 2015. 
  • The Ganesh N. Ramaswamy Memorial Student Grant and Award. Sven Shepstone, Kong Aik Lee, Haizhou Li, Zheng-Hua Tan and Søren Holdt Jensen, on “Source-Specific Informative Prior for I-Vector Extraction,” The 40th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2015), April 19 – 24, 2015, Brisbane, Australia. 
  • Best Paper Award. Jesper Jensen and Zheng-Hua Tan, “Theoretically Consistent Method for Minimum Mean-Square Error Estimation of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Features,” The 4th IEEE International Conference on Network Infrastructure and Digital Content (IEEE IC-NIDC2014), Beijing, China, September 19-21, 2014.  

Technical Review

A reviewer for numerous journals, conferences and publishers