

Improving Naturalness and Intelligibility of Text-to-Speech Systems
The latest generation of speech synthesis techniques has recently increased the quality of Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems as regarding the naturalness and the intelligibility of the voice. Such systems are often referred in the literature as corpus-based TTS. The unit-selection method is one of the technologies for corpus-based TTS that accumulates human speech (natural speech) in a database of reusable units, and generates synthesized speech by properly concatenating the units


Efficient Human-like Dexterous Grasping under Uncertainty for Robotics
Imagine that you are reaching into the fridge to grasp an object you can only partially see. Rather than relying solely on vision, you must use touch in order to localise it and securely grasp it. However, humans would not poke the object to localise it first and then grasp it. We compensate for the uncertainty by approaching the object in a way such that if a contact occurs it will generate enough information about where the object is and the object will be grasped with a mi