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Kari Laurila
Senior Manager
NRC Advanced Systems Research
Contact

Background

I joined Nokia Reseach Center, Tampere, in 1993. In the beginning I studied automatic speech recognition (ASR) for eight years, during which time I finished my doctoral thesis. Together with my colleagues, we first concentrated on developing noise robust algorithms for speaker-dependent ASR for mobile phones, and later on we developed a small footprint engine for multi-lingual speaker-independent voice control of mobile devices as well as multi-lingual text-to-speech feedback covering tens of languages simultaneously.

In 2001, I moved to NRC Japan, and held a general manager position for two years. I led a very multidisciplinary unit with extensive co-creation projects with local key universities and companies, as well as contributed to Nokia Japan level leadership (including Board meetings). After Japan, I jumped back to my 'early roots' and studied advanced electronic gaming. My research program concentrated on next generation accessory devices, wireless game pads (with advanced 3D motion tracking) and motion bands being the main outcomes. These devices allowed gamers to use their body movements to control gaming characters. In addition, we made research e.g. on near-to-eye displays based on diffractive optics, which allows immersive gaming experience with a very lightweight form factor.

In 2006, I worked with NRC Office of Strategic Research. I headed Personal Content Experience (PCE) research program, and worked on technology transfer, account management and industrial collaboration process improvements in general. PCE was a versatile program exploring new opportunities in digital music, gaming, image & video applications, media formats & delivery, as well as mobile content creation & publishing.

In 2007, I headed NRC's biggest program called DigitalMe. The program aimed to improve the end-user experience of mobile devices by developing next generation smart applications utilizing metadata, context and associations.

In 2008, I worked as a distinguished Research leader in NRC Media Lab, leading Personal Content & Media Services team. This team extended the work of DigitalMe program, focusing on four selected Internet services in the domains of social networking, intelligent co-creation, personalized consuming and micropayments.

Now I am a Senior Manager in NRC Advanced Systems Engineering unit, which boosts selected technology transfers from NRC Research and third parties to Nokia Operating Units. In my Media Processing team, we are developing so-called Mobile Co-creation (MCC) Internet platform for third party innovation. In short, MCC platform will allow service providers to connect people for co-creation by description and context.

Future

In 2010, I will be available for new challenges outside Nokia. I decided to take a personal transformation hike by accepting the 15-year renewal option. I am open for suggestions...

Personal Information

Education

Doctor of Technology degree (2000) from Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. Thesis: "Robust Speech Recognition Methods for Voice Dialing"
Licentiate of Technology degree (1998) from Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. Thesis: "Improved Algorithms for Voice Dialling"
Master of Science degree (1993) from Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. Thesis: "Digital Signal Processing for the Wind Profiler"

Work History

11/1993... Nokia Research Center, Tampere, Finland: Research Engineer, Group Manager, Research Manager, Senior Research Manager
10/2001... Nokia Research Center, Tokyo, Japan: General Manager
10/2003... until now: Nokia Research Center, Tampere, Finland: Competence Area Manager, Senior Program Manager, Director, Distinguished Research Leader, Senior Manager

Other

I was the chairman and a co-organizer in an international workshop on robust methods for speech recognition in adverse conditions in Tampere, 1999
I was a panelist in "Role of Universities and Companies for Human Resources Development in the Area of Mobile Telecommunication", Yokosuka Research Park Workshop, March 7, 2002, Yokosuka, Japan
I gave an invited speech "New Growth Comes from Mobile Services" in Mobile Interactions and Navigation Conference, April 25-26, 2002, Tsukuba, Japan
I was an opponent at the public defence of dissertation by Jari Turunen, "Studies on Narrow-Band Speech Codec Related Applications", Tampere University of Technology, November 28, 2003, Pori, Finland
I am a member of The Finnish Nature Photographers Association: Personal profile & Nature photos (the latter link works only with MS Internet Explorer)
I highly recommend the following nature parks for recharging your batteries: Top 10 parks
My iPod often plays music from Queensryche, Kamelot & Tea Party as well as podcasts from YLE

Publications

C. Dobrin, P. Haavisto, K. Laurila, J. Astola, "Speech recognition experiments in a noisy environment using auditory system modelling", EUROSPEECH, Madrid, 1995
P. Salmela, S. Kuusisto, J. Saarinen, K. Laurila, P. Haavisto, "Isolated Spoken Number Recognition with Hybrid of Self-Organizing Map and Multilayer Perceptron", International Conference on Neural Networks, ICNN'96, Washington D.C., USA, June, 1996, Vol. 4, pp. 1912-1917
K. Laurila, M. Majaniemi, R. Yang, P. Haavisto, "Speech Recognition with State Duration Constrained Maximum Likelihood HMMs", NORSIG'96, Espoo, Finland, September 24-27, 1996, pp. 103-106
J. Iso-Sipilä, K. Laurila, P. Haavisto, "Optimal Adaptive Garbage Modeling in Speech Recognition", NORSIG '96, Espoo, Finland, September 24-27, 1996, pp. 107-110
P. Salmela, S. Kuusisto, J. Saarinen, K. Laurila, P. Haavisto, "The Hybrid of Self-Organizing Map and Multilayer Perceptron in Isolated Spoken Number Recognition", World Congress on Neural Networks, WCNN'96, San Diego, CA, USA, September, 1996, pp. 63-68
O. Viikki, K. Laurila, P. Haavisto, "A Confidence Measure for Detecting Recognition Errors in Isolated Word Recognition", SST96, Adelaide, Australia, December, 1996, pp. 67-72
O. Viikki, K. Laurila, "Noise Robust HMM-Based Speech Recognition Using Segmental Feature Vector Normalization", ESCA-NATO Workshop on Robust Speech Recognition on Unknown Communication Channel, Pont-á-Mousson, France, April, 1997, pp. 107-110
K. Laurila, "Noise Robust Speech Recognition with State Duration Constraints", ICASSP'97, Munich, Germany, April 21-24, 1997, Vol 2, pp. 871-874
H. Ramalingam, J. Suontausta, J. Häkkinen, K. Laurila, "Noise Robust Segment-based Word Recognition using Vector Quantisation", Eurospeech'97, Rhodes, Greece, September 22-25, 1997
P. Salmela, M. Lehtokangas, K. Laurila and J. Saarinen, "Discriminative Isolated Digit Recognition in Noisy Environments using Multilayer Perceptron Networks", International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP'97, Dunedin, New Zealand, November, 1997, Vol 2, pp. 1116-1119
O. Viikki, K. Laurila, "Cepstral Domain Segmental Feature Vector Normalization for Noise Robust Speech Recognition", Speech Communication, Vol. 25, No. 1-3, pp. 133-147, 1998
K. Laurila, M. Vasilache O. Viikki, "A Combination of Discriminative and Maximum Likelihood Techniques for Noise Robust Speech Recognition", ICASSP'98, Seattle, USA, May 12-15, 1998, Vol 1, pp. 85-88
O. Viikki, D. Bye, K. Laurila, "A Recursive Feature Vector Normalization Approach for Robust Speech Recognition in Noise", ICASSP98, Seattle, USA, May, 1998, Vol. 2, pp. 733-736
J. Suontausta, M. Vasilache, K. Laurila, "SCHMMs in digit dialing", NORSIG'98, Vigsö, Denmark, June 8-11, 1998, pp. 109-112
J. Tian, K. Laurila, R. Hariharan, I. Kiss, "Front End Design by Using Auditory Modeling in Speech Recognition", NATO ASI Workshop on Computational Hearing, Tuscany, Italy, July, 1998, pp. 185-188
K. Laurila, M. Mettälä, "Noise Robust Voice Activated Dialling", AVIOS'98, San Jose, California, September 15-17, 1998, pp. 63-76
J. Tian, R. Hariharan, K. Laurila, "Noise Robust Two-Stream Auditory Feature Extraction Method for Speech Recognition", The 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP98), Sydney, Australia, 31 Nov. - 4 Dec., 1998
O. Viikki, K. Laurila, "Incremental On-line Speaker Adaptation in Adverse Conditions", International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP98), Sydney, Australia, 31 Nov. - 4 Dec., 1998, pp. 1779-1782
J. Häkkinen, J. Suontausta, R. Hariharan, M. Vasilache, K. Laurila, "Improved Feature Vector Normalization for Noise Robust Connected Speech Recognition", EUROSPEECH'99, Budapest, Hungary, 5-10 Sept, 1999, pp. 2833-2836
J. Iso-Sipilä, K. Laurila, R. Hariharan, O. Viikki, "Hands-Free Voice Activation in Noisy Car Environment", EUROSPEECH'99, Budapest, Hungary, 5-10 September, 1999, pp. 2375-2378
C. Dobrin, P. Boda, K. Laurila, "On Usability of Name Dialling", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), Keystone, Colorado, USA, 14-16 December, 1999
K. Laurila, P. Haavisto, "Name Dialling -- How Useful Is It?", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 4179-4182, Istanbul, Turkey, June 5-9, 2000
K. Laurila, T. Pylvänäinen, Samuli Silanto, Antti Virolainen, "Wireless Motion Bands", position paper at UbiComp’05 Workshop on "Ubiquitous computing to support monitoring, measuring and motivating exercise", Tokyo, Japan, September 11-14, 2005
A. Lugmayr, T. Risse, B. Stockleben, K. Laurila, J. Kaario,"Semantic Ambient Media - An Introduction, http://springerlink.com/content/5616q8274l340375/, Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer US, 06.05.2009, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 337-359

Patents

10 granted patents, several pending.