{"id":927,"date":"2020-06-19T07:09:01","date_gmt":"2020-06-19T07:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/website.prod.unilu.spikeseed.cloud\/fr\/news\/article-series-the-experts-behind-luxembourgs-covid-19-fight-10\/"},"modified":"2020-06-19T07:09:01","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T07:09:01","slug":"article-series-the-experts-behind-luxembourgs-covid-19-fight-10","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fr\/news\/article-series-the-experts-behind-luxembourgs-covid-19-fight-10\/","title":{"rendered":"[Article series] The experts behind Luxembourg’s COVID-19 fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vladimir Despotovi\u0107, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg, is co-principal investigator of the COVID-19 research project: \u201cCovid-19 Detection by Cough and Voice Analysis (CDCVA)\u201d.<\/p>

In this project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)<\/a>, Dr. Vladimir Despotovi\u0107\u00a0will combine audio technologies with artificial intelligence<\/strong> to analyse voice, breathing and cough of\u00a0healthy and non-healthy participants, in order to\u00a0identify respiratory symptoms related to COVID-19<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>

1) Could you tell us more about your background and expertise?<\/strong><\/p>

I joined the University of Luxembourg in September 2019 as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the\u00a0Department of Computer Science<\/a>, Knowledge Discovery and Mining (MINE) research group.\u00a0Previously I held academic positions at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Paderborn University,\u00a0Germany.<\/p>

My research lies at the intersection of machine learning and speech\/audio signal processing<\/strong>, with the\u00a0special focus on eHealth applications. I am working on development of voice-based medical assistive\u00a0technologies<\/strong> for people with speech and motor disabilities due to neurological disorders, such as\u00a0multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, stroke or Parkinson\u2019s disease. Recognition and understanding of\u00a0severely disordered speech that deviates from standard pronunciation poses many challenges, and\u00a0requires learning speech representations in an unsupervised way, without a transcription of the spoken\u00a0data, or the pronunciation lexicon. The applications are broad, ranging from voiced controlled home\u00a0automation that helps patients in performing daily activities, to entertainment applications, such as\u00a0voice-driven computer games.\u00a0<\/p>

Currently, I act as the Management Committee member for Luxembourg for the COST project\u00a0Multi3Generation: Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation<\/a>, which deals with\u00a0development of language generation models used in human-computer interaction, based on multi-modal\u00a0processing and reasoning (e.g. using textual, auditory and visual inputs, or sensory data streams).\u00a0<\/p>

2) How is your expertise relevant in the current COVID context?<\/strong><\/p>

COVID-19 is a respiratory condition, affecting breathing and voice, and causing, among other\u00a0symptoms, dry cough, sore throat, excessively breathy voice and typical breathing patterns. These are\u00a0all conditions that can make patients\u2019 voices distinctive, creating recognizable voice signatures.\u00a0<\/p>

Applying state-of-the-art techniques to analyse the voice beyond what the human ear can hear, the aim\u00a0of our project is to discover the vocal signatures that repeat in voices and coughs of COVID-19 patients<\/strong>,\u00a0and to provide additional low-cost and easy-to-use tools that don\u2019t require an in-person visit to hospital\u00a0or laboratory<\/strong>, and avoid potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2 of both the individuals being tested and\u00a0the medical stuff.\u00a0<\/p>

While the proposed solution is not intended to be a replacement for standard medical\u00a0tests, it can provide monitoring of people on a very large scale, in a short period of time. It might be\u00a0used as a recommender system for selection of candidates that will have priority to standard laboratory\u00a0testing, when the number of medical tests is limited, and need to be used sparely.\u00a0<\/p>

3) What is your specific role in ongoing COVID projects?<\/strong><\/p>

I am a Co-Principal Investigator of the project Covid-19 Detection by Cough and Voice Analysis\u00a0<\/i>(CDCVA). The project is realised in cooperation with the Luxembourg Institute of Science and\u00a0Technology (LIST)<\/a>, and with the support of the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH)<\/a>.<\/p>

The objective of the project is two-fold: (i) we will lunch\u00a0web-based platform for collection of voice\u00a0and cough recordings of COVID-19 patients and healthy individuals; <\/strong>and ii) develop\u00a0AI-driven voice\u00a0technologies to identify respiratory symptoms related to COVID-19<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/p>

The results will be cross-validated with the voice data collected within the Predi-COVID study cofunded\u00a0by FNR and Andr\u00e9 Losch Foundation which, within one of research axes, aims to identify vocal\u00a0biomarkers of frequently observed symptoms in people with COVID-19, that could be used for the\u00a0remote monitoring of patients at home.\u00a0<\/p>

4) Could you tell us more about your collaborators?<\/strong><\/p>

We are a team of speech, computer vision and data scientists and engineers<\/strong> who will work on profiling\u00a0patients from their voices, a research field that intersects Signal Processing with Artificial Intelligence\u00a0and Machine Learning.\u00a0<\/p>

Dr Muhannad Ismael<\/a>, the Principal Investigator, works as the Research Associate at LIST. He has\u00a0background in computer vision, mixed reality and machine learning. Dr Roderick McCall<\/a> is the Lead\u00a0Researcher at LIST, Chair of working group on social and ethical issues in entertainment computing at\u00a0the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and PI and\/or coordinator of several EU\u00a0(H2020), FNR (Luxembourg) and BMBF (Germany) funded projects. He has background in augmented\u00a0and mixed realities, human-computer interaction, serious games and behaviour change technologies.\u00a0Ma\u00ebl Cornil<\/a> is the Research Engineer at LIST, with the background in mixed reality and data mining.\u00a0The project is supported by Dr Guy Fagherazzi<\/a>, Research Leader of the \u00ab\u00a0Digital Epidemiology Hub\u00a0\u00bb at\u00a0the Department of Population Health, LIH. He has a strong expertise in the analysis of large population based studies making use of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence methods.<\/p><\/div><\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vladimir Despotovi\u0107, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Luxembourg, is co-principal investigator of the COVID-19 research project: \u201cCovid-19 Detection by Cough and Voice Analysis (CDCVA)\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"featured_image_focal_point":[],"show_featured_caption":false,"ulux_newsletter_groups":"","uluxPostTitle":"","uluxPrePostTitle":"","_trash_the_other_posts":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"news-category":[3],"news-topic":[],"organisation":[25,226],"authorship":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n[Article series] The experts behind Luxembourg's COVID-19 fight - 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