PhD student Liming Shi has received an Elite Research travel grant of DKK 200,000 which gives particularly talented PhD students the opportunity for an extended stay in the very best research environments in the world. Liming Shi’s research deals with the analysis of speech signals for diagnosing and treating Parkinson's disease.
COMBINING DIFFERENT RESEARCH AREAS
– The Elite Research travel grant allows me to work with new research groups and experts in other countries. I plan to visit leading research groups in my area at the University of Cambridge in England and Aalto University in Finland. I’d like to work with world-renowned researchers in statistical methods and models of speech organs. By combining these, I hope to be able to create new knowledge and new methods. In addition, the grant will enable me to take part in the largest and most important scientific conferences and workshops in the area, which is important for spreading knowledge of my results, says Liming Shi.
BETTER METHODS FOR ANALYZING SPEECH SIGNALS
Parkinson's disease is an incurable neurological disorder that affects millions of people all over the world. Studies have shown that it is possible to detect the disease very early and then monitor it with the noninvasive analysis of vocal sounds. But the existing methods work poorly under noisy conditions with poor sound quality, explains Liming Shi.
– My PhD project deals with finding better methods for analyzing speech signals and finding good and (physically) meaningful ways to describe their properties. In this way, Parkinson's disease not only can be diagnosed, but also studied with the methods. More specifically, my research focuses on statistical models of speech organs and methods for estimating the parameters based on signals that have been affected by factors such as background noise, reverberation and coding errors.
Liming Shi was born and raised in Henan, China and moved to Aalborg in 2016 to be a PhD student at the Audio Analysis Lab.