About us
The division was founded in 1951 by Professor Gunnar Fant, one the great pioneers in speech communication. This year we celebrate 60 years of continuous research on communication and interaction between humans via speech and music.
Research at the division is truly multi-disciplinary including linguistics, phonetics, auditory perception, vision and experimental psychology. Rooted in an engineering modeling approach, our research forms a solid base for developing multimodal human-computer interaction systems in which speech, music, sound and gestures combine to create human-like communication. Conveying emotions and exchanging social interaction cues are elements of truly human behavior which are included in such systems. Spoken dialogue systems and software for breeding expressive content into automatized music performances are prominent examples of our cutting-edge knowhow in human-like communication with a wide range of applications in mobile communication and computing.
Ever since the early days the department has had a strong research orientation. Undergraduate education is presently offered mainly within the MSc programs in Computer Science and Media Technology. Our PhD students are enrolled in the EECS doctoral programmes in Computer Science and Mediated Communication.