• 2000 Post-doctoral year at Center for Spoken Language Understanding / OGI (Portland/Oregon)

• 1999 Phd of the Université Henri Poincaré (Nancy/France) « Using suprasegmental acoustic cues for continuous speech recognition» presented on the 19th of November 1999. Prepared in the Dialog team of Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy.

• 1993 DEA in computer science with merit (Université Henri Poincaré)

• 1990-1993 Computer science engineer at ESIAL (Ecole Supérieure d'Informatique et Automatique de Lorraine)

• 1991 Cambridge First Certificate in English, grade B

• 1988-1990 DEUG Math Physics Computer science at Université Henri Poincaré

• 1988 Baccalauréat C (majoring in science), with merit

• 2008-now Head of R&D and Linguistic resources department at Acapela Group-Babel Technologies SA (Mons,BE)

• 2002-2007 TTS research and development at Babel Technologies SA (Mons,BE)
• Algorithms and databases for unit selection (BrightSpeech core engine)
• NLP (small footprints system for embedded applications)

• 2001 Research and development at MULTITEL asbl. (Mons,BE)
  
• Supervising NLP architecture of eLite TTS (Team: Richard Beaufort, Xavier Ricco, Alain Ruelle)
• Speech signal modification (Baris Bozkurt)

• 2001 Senior Research Associate with Dr Mike Macon and Prof. Jan Van Santen (CSLU/OGI)
• Unit selection synthesis:
• coverage of prosodic units in American English
• regular languages covering techniques (limited domain TTS)
• Teaching at OGI/Center for Speech and Language Understanding, "Text-to-Speech" class, 30h
  

• 1997 Co-founder of Babel Technologies SA (Mons/Belgium)

• 1996-2000 Speech synthesis research at Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium)
• Launch the MBROLA project with Prof. Thierry Dutoit (speech synthesis by diphone concatenation)
• Conception of the MBRDICO project. Related researches carried out with Kevin Lenzo (Carnegie Mellon University) and Alan Black (Edimburgh University)
• Teaching in 1997 at Faculte Polytechnique and interventions at Valencienne University, "Speech Processing", 30 hours

• 1994-1995 Phd Thesis at CRIN (URA-CNRS)
• Introducing suprasegmental cues in continuous speech recoginition in French (collaborate with a phonetician). Used neural networks and HMMs. Programs in C, C++ on Unix platforms, Motif + X-Window.
• Teaching in Nancy 2 University:
• Databases to students in Licence of Sciences-Economiques, 85hours
• Algorithmic and Pascal to Sciences-Economiques DEUG students, 80hours

• 1993 Developer with Tuuka Toivonen in the Timidity project

• 1993 DEA at Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy
• Automatic detection of breath groups in continuous speech (C/ Unix/X Window), speech processing (FFTs, LPC, F0 tracking...)

• 1992 Esial's second year training at MicroIntel (Montréal/Canada)
• Conception/implementation of a graphical Browser/Inspector for an object oriented language on Macintosh (PRISME= Lisp + OOP + Prolog engine)

• 1990 Student summer job: programming for an public hospital
• Overnight recording/analysis of expired CO² by asthmatic patients

Software Engineering and object oriented software conception (Eiffel)

Worked with: C, C++, Perl, Lisp, Prolog, Pascal, assembly languages (80x86), Trained with: 68000, HP9000 Risc architecture and micro-programming

Default tracking with Valgrind, Code profiling and optimisation with Cachegrind

GUI: multi-platform Tcl/Tk, used Motif under X11, some developments with MFC under Microsoft Visual C++

• Unix: system programming (HPUX and SUNOS) and system administration under Linux
• MSDOS: system programming

driving license, jazz-rock guitar (played for 2 years in a big band)

T. Dutoit, V. Pagel, N. Pierret: U.S. Patent Number 5,987,413 " Envelope-invariant analytical speech resynthesis using periodic signals derived from reharmonized frame spectrum" et European patent EP97870079, BE9600524 "Method for audio synthesis" (méthode de synthèse MBROLA)

B. Bozkurt, T. Dutoit, R. Prudon, C. d'Alessandro, V. Pagel, 2002, "Improving Quality of MBROLA Synthesis for Non-Uniform Units Synthesis" , proceedings of the IEEE TTS 2002 Workshop, Santa Monica, sep. 2002

Richard Beaufort, Thierry Dutoit, Vincent Pagel, "Analyse syntaxique du français. Pondération par trigrammes lissés et classes d'ambiguïté lexicales", proceedings Journées d'étude de la Parole, Nancy, jun. 2002

B. Bozkurt, T. Dutoit, V. Pagel, "Re-defining intonation from selected units for non-uniform units based speech synthesis" , proceedings of SPS-2002 IEEE Benelux Signal Processing Symposium, Leuven, mar. 2002.

J. van Santen, M. Macon, A. Cronk, P. Hosom, A. Kain, V. Pagel, J. Wouters, "When Will Synthetic Speech Sound Human: Roles of Rules and Data," proceedings ICSLP2000, Beijing, vol. III, pp. 402-409, oct. 2000

Thèse de doctorat de l'Université Henri Poincaré - Nancy 1 : « De l'utilisation d'informations acoustiques suprasegmentales en reconnaissance de la parole continue», pp. 249, soutenue publiquement le 19 Novembre 1999. Rapporteurs: Didier Galmiche (Loria), Henri Méloni (Université d'Avignon), Piet Mertens (Université de Louvain).

V. Pagel, K. Lenzo, A. Black, "Letter to Sound Rules for Accented Lexicon Compression", proceedings ICSLP98, pp. 252-255, Sydney, 1998

A. Black, K. Lenzo, V. Pagel, "Issues in Building General Letter to Sound Rules", proceedings 3rd ESCA/COCSADA Workshop on Speech Synthesis,  pp. 77-81, Jenolan Caves, Australie, 1998

F. Yvon,  ARC-B3 Partners, "Objective Evaluation of Grapheme-to-Phoneme conversion for Text-to-Speech Synthesis in French", Computer Speech and Language, vol 12, pp 393-410, 1998

T. Dutoit, V Pagel, N Pierret, F. Bataille, O. Van der Vrecken, "The MBROLA project: Towards a set of high quality speech synthesizers free of use for non commercial purposes", proceedings ICSLP96, Vol. 3, pp. 1393-1396, Philadelphia, Novembre 1996

T. Dutoit, V. Pagel, "Le projet MBROLA : vers un ensemble de synthetiseurs vocaux disponibles gratuitement pour utilisation non-commerciale", actes des Journées d'Etudes sur la Parole, pp. 441-444, Avignon, 1996

V. Pagel and N. Carbonell and Y. Laprie, "A new method for speech delexicalization, and its application to the perception of French prosody"; proceedings ICSLP96, Philadelphia, Vol. 2, pp. 821-824, Novembre 1996

V. Pagel and N. Carbonell and Y. Laprie and J. Vaissière, "Spotting prosodic boundaries in continuous speech in French", proceedings ICPHs95, Vol. 4 pp. 308-312, Stockholm, Suède, Août 1995

V. Pagel and N. Carbonell and Y. Laprie, "Perception de l'accent et des marques prosodiques structurelles en français: premiers résultats", proceedings GDR-PRC Communication Homme-Machine, pp. 31-46, Mar. 1994

V. Pagel, "Detection automatiques d'indices prosodiques en parole continue", computer science DEA, Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy, sept. 1993

V. Pagel "Mathematical errors handling" in Pascalissime (Pascal programmer mag.), PASCAL Institute editor, Paris, Vol. 49, pp. 93-98, Janvier 1992

Vincent.Pagel@free.fr
sep 2002