Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede

Britta Wrede received her Masters degree in Computational Linguistics and the Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) in computer science from Bielefeld University in 1999 and 2002, respectivley. From 1999 till 2002 she pursued a Ph.D. program at Bielefeld University in joint affiliation with the Applied Computer Science Group and the graduate program Task-oriented communication . After her Ph.D. she received a DAAD PostDoc fellowship at the speech group of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley, USA where she started her research on Hot Spots in Meetings within the Meeting Recorder Project. She has recently re-joined the graduate program Task-oriented communication as a postdoctoral fellow for another two years and is continuing her research on Hot Spots and other aspects of acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition. Her research interests lie in the fields of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and understanding. In her Ph.D. thesis she investigated the influence of speech rate variation on ASR with a special focus on the acoustic-phonetic degradation of the speech signal. During her visit at ICSI she extended these insights on acoustic and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous speech to Hot Spots in meetings which are characterised by emotionally and thus prosodically marked utterances. Further research interests are acoustic modeling of speech for speaking rate variations and data-driven subword units, prosodic characteristics of emotional speech in general and their impact on information retrieval and summarization. Britta Wrede is a member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) .