Tel Aviv University

The group is centered at the Department for Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University. Members are engaged in a number of ongoing research subjects related to the expression of emotion in speech and its manifestation in physiological measurements. The group also have particular expertise in data collection. They have put together a number of corpora of emotional speech, including a corpus recorded during event recollection, a corpus of anger in naturally occurring Hebrew speech and a corpus of sentence utterances recorded during a computer game that includes various degrees of risk, with the final objective of gaining a sum of money. In the latter, speech was recorded simultaenously with a number of physiological parameters. Acoustic analysis is being carried out.

Dr. Noam Amir is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the department of Communication Disorders in Tel-Aviv University. He received his D.Sc, M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel, in the field of Electrical Engineering. He spent 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d'Acoustique de l'Universite du Maine, in Le Mans, France. His research has always been interdisciplinary in nature, on the frontier between acoustics, speech and signal processing. Currently his research interests are the manifestation of emotions and depression in speech, accumulation and analysis of spontaneous speech corpora, various aspects of wave propagation in electromagnetic and acoustic waveguides, and the acoustics of musical instruments.

Dr. Samuel Ron is currently the Head of the psychophysiology research lab in a psychiatric hospital (Tel-Aviv Community Mental Health Center), working in the fields of perception, emotion and speech in healthy and psychiatric subjects. He has developed rehabilitation policies in treating patients in motor activity, speech, and sensory perception. He established the first Institution for research, clinical study, and Bio- Medical engineering in occupational health at a national level. He has conducted national and international studies in the field of physiology, psychology, sensory and motor perception, and bio-medical engineering. He has received numerous research grants, both national and international, and holds 5 patents in various countries (including on emotion in speech). He has actively participated in over 85 international symposium/conferences. He has written over 60 papers/monographs and about 20 chapters in books.

Dr. Ofer Amir is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the department of Communication Disorders in Tel-Aviv University. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and M.S. and B.A. from Tel-Aviv University. His research focuses on two major fields. The first is evaluation of voice quality utilizing acoustic analysis in different medical and clinical conditions. The second field is stuttering and other fluency disorders, with special interest in the relation between these disorders and speaking- and articulation-rate. He published and co-authored various articles as well as conducting several ongoing research projects on both topics.