Kari Laurila

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. After Japan, I jumped back to my 'early roots' and studied advanced electronic gaming. We concentrated on motion tracking input devices, wireless game pads 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.

Recently I have been working with NRC Office of Strategic Research. I'm now heading Personal Content Experience research program, and working on technology transfer, account management and industrial collaboration process improvements in general.

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

Patents

10 granted patents, several pending.

Personal Info

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... Nokia Research Center, Tampere, Finland: Competence Area Manager, Senior Program Manager, Director

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