Bio
Leonardo Badino is a postdoc researcher at the Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh (2006-2010). Before moving to Edinburgh he worked as software engineer/ researcher / project manager in Loquendo, a speech technology company (2001-2006). He received a 5-year degree (BEng + MEng) in Electronic Engineering form the Universita’ di Genova (1994-2000).
His research interests include text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine learning for speech and language processing, and analysis of non-verbal communication.
Since he joined IIT he has been working on the use of measured articulatory information in ASR. He collaborates with the neuroscientists of his lab (Mirror Neurons and Interaction Lab) to 1) investigate the role of the motor cortex in speech perception though neurophysiological experiments and 2) to try to build acoustic models that take into account motor information and are inspired by these neurophysiological experiments.
In IIT he also works on the analysis of non-verbal communication (i.e., sensory-motor communication) within ensemble musicians (SIEMPRE European project).
During his PhD he worked on the identification and generation of prosodic prominence patterns for English TTS synthesis with a particular focus on the mechanisms by which context (i.e., discourse and "sentence" context) affects prosodic prominence and on the automatic detection of discourse-context related factors (e.g. focus, contrast) from text.
Other Publications
[15] D'Ausilio A, Badino L, Li Y, Tokay S, Craighero L, et al. (2012) Leadership in Orchestra Emerges from the Causal Relationships of Movement Kinematics. PLoS ONE 7(5): e35757. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035757
[14] Castellini C, Badino L, Metta G, Sandini G, Tavella M, Grimaldi M, Fadiga L. (2011). The Use of Phonetic Motor Invariants Can Improve Automatic Phoneme Discrimination. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024055.
[13] D’Ausilio, A., Badino, L., li, Yi., Tokay, S., Craighero, L., Canto, R., Aloimonos, Y., Fadiga, L. Communication in orchestra playing as measured with Granger Causality. Intetain 2011 (Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment), Genova, 25-27 May.
[12] Leonardo Badino. Identifying prosodic prominence patterns for English text-to-speech synthesis. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 2010.
[11] J. Sebastian Andersson, Joao P. Cabral, Leonardo Badino, Junichi Yamgishi, Robert A.J. Clark. Glottal Source and Prosodic Prominence Modelling in HMM-based Speech Synthesis for the Blizzard Challenge 2009 . In Proc. Blizzard Challenge Workshop 2009, Edinburgh, UK, 2009.
[10] Leonardo Badino, J. Sebastian Andersson, Junichi Yamgishi, Robert A.J. Clark. Identification of Contrast and Its Emphatic Realization in HMM based Speech Synthesis . In Proc. of Interspeech, Brighton, UK, 2009.
[9] Leonardo Badino, Robert A.J. Clark. Automatic labeling of contrastive word pairs from spontaneous spoken English. In 2008 IEEE/ACL Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Goa, India, 2008.
[8] Leonardo Badino, Robert A.J. Clark and Volker Strom. Including Pitch Accent Optionality in Unit Selection Text-to-Speech Synthesis. In Proc. of Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia, 2008.
[7] J. Sebastian Andersson, Leonardo Badino, Oliver S. Watt and Matthew P.Aylett. The CSTR/Cereproc Blizzard Entry 2008: The Inconvenient Data. In Proc. Blizzard Challenge Workshop (in Proc. Interspeech 2008), Brisbane, Australia, 2008.
[6] Matthew P.Aylett, J. Sebastian Andersson, Leonardo Badino, and Christopher J. Pidcock. The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2007: Are small database errors worse than compression artifacts? In Proc. Blizzard Challenge Workshop (in Proc. SSW6), Bonn, Germany, 2007.
[5] Leonardo Badino and Robert A.J. Clark. Issues of optionality in pitch accent placement. In Proc. 6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Bonn, Germany, 2007.
[4] Leonardo Badino. Chinese text word segmentation considering semantic links among sentences. In Proc. ICSLP 2004, Jeju, Korea, 2004.
[3] Leonardo Badino, Claudia Barolo, and Silvia Quazza. Language independent phoneme mapping for foreign TTS. In Proc. 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Pittsburgh, USA, 2004.
[2] Leonardo Badino, Claudia Barolo, and Silvia Quazza. A general approach to TTS reading of mixed-language texts. In Proc. ICSLP 2004, Jeju, Korea, 2004.
[1] Enrico Zovato, Stefano Sandri, Silvia Quazza, and Leonardo Badino. Prosodic analysis of a multi-style corpus in the perspective of emotional speech synthesis. In Proc. ICSLP 2004, Jeju, Korea, 2004.
