Kartik Audhkhasi

Ph.D. Student
Advisor: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL)
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering
Viterbi School of Engineering
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California, USA

Welcome to my USC homepage!! Since Fall 2008, I am an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student at the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) at USC. Prior to this, I completed my Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Master of Technology in Information & Communication Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi (India).

Resume (PDF)

Last updated: 19^th November, 2009

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Fall 2008-Present
• Master of Technology in Information & Communication Technology, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, 2003-2008
• Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, 2003-2008

Research Interests

• Very Specific: Speech-to-Speech Translation, Multi-lingual Speech Recognition
• Specific: Speech Recognition and Processing, Human Language Technologies
• General: Machine Learning, Signal Processing

Publications

1. Kartik Audhkhasi, Panayiotis Georgiou, Shrikanth Narayanan, "Lattice-based lexical cues for word fragment detection in conversational speech", Accepted in IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Merano, Italy, December 2009. (Preprint).
2. Kartik Audhkhasi, "Automatic evaluation of fluency in spoken language" (Review Article), IETE Technical Review, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 108-114, March-April 2009. (IETE Tech. Rev.).
3. Kartik Audhkhasi, Kundan Kandhway, Om Deshmukh and Ashish Verma, "Formant-based technique for automatic filled-pause detection in spontaneous spoken English", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Taipei, pp. 4857-4860, April 2009. (Preprint).
4. Om Deshmukh, Kundan Kandhway, Ashish Verma, Kartik Audhkhasi, "Automatic evaluation of spoken English fluency", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Taipei, pp. 4829-4832, April 2009. (Preprint).
5. Kartik Audhkhasi and Ashish Verma, "Keyword search using modified minimum edit distance measure", Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Honolulu, vol. 4, pp 929-932, April 2007. (Preprint), (IEEE Xplore).

Projects at SAIL

• SpeechLinks (Speech-to-Speech Translation)
  I am part of the SpeechLinks acoustic modeling team. My tasks involve writing Bash scripts for data and dictionary cleaning, training Acoustic Models (AMs), evaluating the performance of the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, and improving it by varying various training parameters.
• Detection of Spoken Language Disfluencies
  I am working on combining acoustic-prosodic and lexical knowledge for robust detection of word fragments and repetitions in conversational speech.
• Iraqi Arabic/American English Multi-lingual ASR
  I am involved with the training and testing of an Iraqi Arabic/American English multi-lingual ASR. In addition, there are some interesting research directions in multi-lingual acoustic modeling which we plan to pursue.

Some Course Projects at USC

• Piecewise linear pitch stylization (EE596: Wavelets, Fall 2008).

Some Prior Academic Projects (at IIT-Delhi)

• Master's Thesis, May 2008: "Non-intrusive speech quality evaluation".
• Multimedia Systems Term Project, April 2008-May 2008: "Query by example retrieval of audio files".
• Mini Project, January 2006-May 2006: "Non-linear dynamical analysis of speech".
• Cryptography Term Project, January 2006-May 2006: "Chaos-based cryptography".
• Embedded Systems Design Project, July 2005-December 2005: "Robot navigation using computer vision".
• Summer Undergraduate Research Award (SURA), May 2005-July 2005: "Design of an Ultra-WideBand transceiver".

Industrial Experience

• IBM India Research Laboratory (Delhi), May 2008-July 2008: "Automatic evaluation of fluency in spoken English".
• IBM India Research Laboratory (Delhi), May 2006-July 2006: "Keyword spotting in speech using phone lattice search".
• Kritikal Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (Delhi), December 2005-January 2006: "Automatic detection of defects in automobile parts using image processing techniques".

Hobbies

• I like to keep myself fit by going to the USC Lyon Recreational Centre (LRC). I can be found pumping iron at the ground floor gym at LRC on most evenings. Besides, I like to bike a lot, which is another good way to keep fit (and a necessity for being punctual). In addition, I have been learning Ninjitsu (martial art of the Japanese ninjas) since the start of Fall 2009. You can find more information about Dux Ryu Ninjitsu at USC here. I appeared for the yellow belt test on 7^th November 2009 and passed.
• I am also a mild but regular reader of books, with no particular choice of genre.
• I started writing a blog few months ago: Kartik Audhkhasi's Musings. Though I am very infrequent in my posts, comments (good or bad) are welcome.
• I love to follow cricket matches. In fact, I claim to have watched the live telecast of more than 95% of India's matches since the 1996 World Cup!! When I am not near a TV during a match day, I am probably logged onto Cricinfo, an excellent site for a cricket fanatic like me.
• For humorous breaks, I often visit PhD Comics. Here are their 200 Most Popular Comics.
• I used to be a part of my high school choir, debating team, quizzing and painting club. I seriously hope to restart pursuing these activities after a 5 year hiatus. For a start, I performed with the Indian music group Anubhavam ("Experience") at the USC AIS (Association for Indian Students) Annual Diwali Show at Bovard Auditorium on 9^th November, 2008. I was part of an classic Hindi film duet song!!
• I go on hikes occasionally. The recent ones include Mishe Mokwa and Alta Dena mountains.

Office

3740 McClintock Avenue, Room EEB405
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering
Viterbi School of Engineering
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA

Email:
Phone (O): 1-213-740-4660