Abstract: Speech involves huge amounts of information that only recently and still partly can be analyzed with a level of sophistication comparable to the human brain. For most languages, few progresses have been done in their detailed analysis using automatic means and many linguists and phoneticians still rely on their hearing in speech evaluation. An interdisciplinary group from four institutions in Iasi, Romania, has united their efforts during more than a decade for the advancement of tools for the understanding of spoken language processes like prosody, emotional speech and personal characteristics of the voice. A consistent repository for the Romanian language, with a vast section on emotional speech was created and is available on the web. Problems overviewed in this plenary talk are the analysis and description and recognition of emotions in voice, the comparison of emotional speech characteristics in different European languages, interaction of grammar and speech in specific grammatical constructions, spoken language statistics of the Romanian language, and pathologies’ effects on speech. We overview the principles of the computational tools developed and the results of speech analysis, with an emphasis on spoken language statistics and emotional analysis and recognition in speech. The tools presented include GRID applications for statistical analysis of voice, serial programs for automatic speech pattern identification with biometric and data mining applications, programs for precise determination of the prosodic traits like voice pitch, and programs for statistical characterization of emotional speech.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Prof. dr.dr.h.c. Horia-Nicolai L. TEODORESCU is a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy (since 1994) in the Science and Information Technology Section and IEEE Senior member. He is a professor at the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Dept. Applied Electronics and Intelligent Systems, The “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi. He is a Vice-Rector for International Relations and Academic Image. Also, he is the Director of the Institute of Computer Science, Romanian Academy.
He authored, co-authored, or co-edited more than 25 books and about 300 papers and holds 24 national and international patents (numerous gold, silver and bronze medals at invention fairs in Brussels, Geneva, Tunis etc.)
He acts as Vice-president of the Commission for the Informatisation of the Romanian Language, Chairman of the Commission for Fuzzy Systems and IA -Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch (since 2004), is a member of the Panel Information Technology, SPS-NATO (2008-2011). Prof. Teodorescu is Founding editor for many scientific reviews, member or former member of editorial committees for numerous journals from Romania or from abroad (former Associate Editor, IEEE Trans. Men, Systems, Cybernetics C; Fuzzy Sets and Systems; J. General Systems). He was the initiator and a promoter for many national and international scientific societies (SIGEF, AEDEM, the Romanian Society for Fuzzy Systems and the Balkan Union for Fuzzy Systems and Artificial Intelligence – BUFSA).