HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE
Department of Computer Science Colloquium
2016 Series
Linguistic Key Tools for Knowledge and Innovative Applications
Prof. Carlo Schirru
Associate Professor of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering
University of Sassari
Italy
Date: November 24, 2016 (Thursday)
Time: 10:30 - 11:30 am
Venue: SCT909, Cha Chi Ming Science Tower, Ho Sin Hang Campus
AbstractThe linguistic dimension allows an extraordinary observation of man and his relationships whose many aspects are generally conveyed by spoken and written speech communication. Inside the linguistic domain, the phonetic field and the related phonological one characterize the speech on the base of different levels of analysis reflecting the historical period, the geographic area, as well as the psychological, sociological, cultural and professional spheres of the individuals. The presentation will propose a synthesis on the topic, mainly referring to the many years of personal research that began with the degree thesis in 1973 and which deals with a set of European languages, namely Sardinian, Italian, French, English, German and Ladin, as well as the tonal African Chadic Musey. Ultimately, it will essentially focus on current experimental procedures mostly concerning the acoustic analysis of linguistic units, which permit, as known, a numerical «translation», together with a set of different shape representations, of the auditory sensations produced by the related sounds. Experimental procedures, whose utility covers a wide range of applications in current different fields rotating around the speech communication, such as the linguistic domain (from the Dialectology to the modern Language Teaching), the advertising, the industry (i.e. the telecommunications, the security, the robotics), the medicine, the forensic, and so on.
BiographyCarlo Schirru is Associated Professor and he teaches
General and Applied Linguistics as well as International Communication
at the University of Sassari in Italy. In 1973, he received the Italian
Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and later the Teaching
Diploma for English Language and Literature in Medium and High Schools.
Permanently hired at the Italian University in the eighties, he transferred from
Cagliari to Padua, and then to Sassari, teaching as well Phonetics and
Phonology, and French Linguistics. He was director of several degree
theses, as well as member of international doctoral dissertation committees, and
of scientific and management committees at the Universities of Padua and Sassari.
He carried out functions as Project Technical Assistant for various European
Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and mobility). He researched for several
years in foreign phonetic laboratories, starting from those of Grenoble and of
Aix-en-Provence, in France, where he received as well the Diplôme d'Etudes
Supérieures de Phonétique Française, the Maîtrise de Linguistique and
the D.E.A. de Linguistique et de Phonétique. During the same period he
also taught French to foreign students of different levels (included one
pedagogical stage for French teachers), at the Centre Universitaire d'Etudes
Françaises - Laboratoires d'Enseignement Audio-Visuel, and at the Comité
de Patronage des Etudiants Etrangers of the University of Grenoble, as well
as at the Cours d’été pour Etudiants Etrangers of the University of
Aix-en-Provence. Afterwards he carried out research at the Romanisches Seminar
of the University of Zurich (in Switzerland), then at the Department of
Rehabilitation Sciences, School of Health Related Professions, of the University
of Birmingham (USA, AL), where he spent over one year as Visiting Professor,
also thanks to a specific USA NIH grant. During this period, he also made a
conference at the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of
Tallahassee, Florida, entitled Interference in Pronunciation among Italian,
French and English. Focusing on speech, his studies mainly relate to several
of the segmental and prosodic acoustic phonetic/phonological features of
languages like Sardinian, Italian, French, English, German, African Chadic Musey,
and Italian Northeast Ladin. At present, he is spending a period of three months
as Visiting Professor, investigating the relationships between acoustic and
visual contributions in speaker recognition under the 2016-2019 Marie Curie
IDENTITY project, at HK Baptist University, guest of Professor Yuen Pong Chi,
Head of the Department of Computer Science.
********* ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ***********
(For enquiry, please contact Computer Science Department at 3411 2385)
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=398&lang=sc