Speech Science Forum - Josh McDermott (MIT)

Abstract:

This talk will describe our group’s recent efforts to leverage contemporary machine learning to build neural network models of our auditory abilities and their instantiation in the brain, with a focus on speech and voice recognition. Such models have enabled a qualitative step forward in our ability to account for real-world auditory behavior, to understand its dependence on peripheral neural coding, and to illuminate function within auditory cortex. But they also exhibit substantial discrepancies with human perceptual systems that we are currently trying to understand and eliminate.