The Alliance for Language Technologies (ALT-EDIC)

Speechtek, togheter with NLP, TeV and MT, is involved in the ALT-EDIC initiative. An Europena effort dedicated to language technologies, towards providing tools and infrastructure to European SME for an efficient use and development of large language models
Withint the ALT-EDIC, SpeechTek is involved in 2 projects:

  • LLMs4EU: The goal is to make LLMs and all the tools necessary for their exploitation in all EU languages available in an open manner by capitalising on existing European programmes and competencies.
  • ALT-EDIC4EU: a CSA dedicated to the development of the ALT-EDIC global infrastructure, the consolidation of a European centre for the evaluation of Language Technologies, the dynamic mapping of European Language Technologies and Large Language Models, and the organisation of training sessions, workshops and events.

ELOQUENCE

ELOQUENCE is focused on the research and development of innovative technologies for collaborative voice/chat bots. Key objective is to better comprehend those unstructured  dialogues and translate them into explainable, safe, knowledge-grounded, trustworthy and bias-controlled language models. 

 IPCEI-CIS 8ra: the CAITE project

The Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services, or IPCEI-CIS, represents a pivotal digital policy initiative designed to enhance Europe’s digital and technological autonomy. Officially endorsed by the European Commission in December 2023, this project encompasses 12 EU Member States and engages approximately 120 industry and research partners. These partners are collaboratively working on 19 distinct projects to establish the first EU-wide, interoperable Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum. Additionally, around 100 indirect partners, which include large corporations, SMEs, start-ups, and research institutions, are contributing to the project, thereby amplifying its influence throughout Europe. With a total funding allocation of 3.5 billion euros for these initiatives, the IPCEI-CIS aims to create significant technological advancements and market opportunities that will ultimately benefit a broader range of stakeholders across Europe. The initiative emphasizes priorities such as digital sovereignty, interoperability, sustainability, and security, addressing the unique challenges faced by Europe in the realm of cloud computing.

The IPCEI-CIS is a cornerstone of the 8ra Initiative, providing the necessary funding, framework, and collaborative structure to bring the vision of a European Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum to life. The projects within the IPCEI-CIS directly contribute to building a decentralised, federated cloud infrastructure that aligns with the 8ra Initiative’s objectives of interoperability, security, and sustainability.

Speechtek contributes with other labs of FBK to the Caite project . which addresses the EU objectives promoted in the Green Deal and Cybersecurity strategies by innovating the multi-provider cloud-edge continuum.

MeeTween

In “Meetween”, rather than artificial intelligence (AI) getting in the way of the human experience, we harness its power to make human-human interaction more seamless and
natural, eliminate language barriers, replace the techno-clutter with support, and permit our participation even across great distances. Meetween is a meeting space of the future, where AI serves to bring us closer.

PATTERN

The PATTERN project is focused on revolutionising road infrastructure management through innovative technologies and strategic collaborations. PATTERN, which is an acronym for ‘Planning a Digital Twin for Greener Road Infrastructure’, is a collaborative effort involving a consortium of partners from various European countries dedicated to driving positive change in the transportation sector.

Previous Projects

  • MARVEL: MARVEL delivers a disruptive Edge-to-Fog-to-Cloud ubiquitous computing framework that enables multi-modal perception and intelligence for audio-visual scene recognition, event detection in a smart city environment.
  • AGEVOLA: The goal of the project was the development and validation of advanced algorithms, with special attention to Machine Learning based solutions, for the following tasks: voice activity detection, speech enhancement, and speaker diarization. In particular, the application case study is focused on call-center communications. The project was partially funded by Fondazione CariTro and involved as partners PerVoice spa and Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche.
  • AUDIO VISUAL SCENE ANALYSIS – This project is part of a wider cooperation between FBK-ICT and the Centre for Intelligent Sensing of Queen Mary University London. In particular, the research activities focus on advanced solutions for audio-visual processing, using heterogeneous devices in challenging and unconstrained environments. Specifically, the 2 institutions have allocated 2 joint PhD grants on these tasks.
  • CITY SENSING – One of the goals of the Smart Cities and Communities is high impact initiative is to help administrators and citizens understand their city and how it evolves. Therefore, the research line is developing of pervasive, collaborative, multi-source, multi-level monitoring of the city. In particular, at SpeechTek we are working on neural solutions for the detection and classification of acoustic events in public open spaces.
  • SMARTERP – The goal of SmarTerp  is to reduce inefficiencies in interpreting by developing a set of AI-powered tools embedded in a Remote Simultaneous Interpreting system that automates the human task of extracting information in real-time to prevent the mistakes and loss of quality derived from the adoption of remote technologies.
  • EIT CONVERSATIONAL BANKING – The project aims to develop conversational agents interacting, by voice and text, with users asking financial information. Therefore, SpeechTeK will develop ASR systems, in English and Hungarian, capable of dynamically activating proper language models for human-machine interaction.
  • IPRASE – The goal is to automatically estimate the language proficiency in English and German of Italian native-language students in Trentino.
  • PERVOICE-SD – This project investigates on speaker diarization solutions based on DNN embedded representations of speaker identities. PerVoice has partially funded this project with a post-doc grant.
  • Smart Subtitling and Dubbing System (SSDS) – The goal of the project is the development of solutions for automatic translation and dubbing of TV products in different languages. In thigh collaboration with the HLT-MT research unit, SpeechTek efforts will focus on extracting audio features that can improve the quality of both the translation and the dubbing. The project, partially funded by Regione Lazio, is lead by the Italian companies Translated and Sedif.