Hearing Valley: An RDI Infrastructure and Business Ecosystem in Audiology and Signal Processing, Strengthening the Adoption of Smart Technology and Foster New Innovations (investment)
Heikki Uimonen ([email protected])
PhD Heikki Uimonen is holding a post of research director at the University of Eastern Finland. He has worked as professor at the University of the Arts (2012–2017) and at the University of Eastern Finland (2020–2021, 2022–2023).
Uimonen is an ethnomusicologist and a docent on acoustic communication and soundscape studies at the University of Eastern Finland and University of Tampere and recording and performing musician. He has published and co-published extensively articles, monographs and edited anthologies on music consumption, radio music, compact cassettes, background music and transforming sensory environments. His research interests include sonic construction of place, mediated music, social use of music, transforming sensory environments and how all these intertwine. He is a board member of Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology.
Uimonen is currently directing Academy of Finland and Niilo Helander foundation financed project SOMECO – Sonic Mediations and Ecocritical Listening (2024–2027) investigating soundscapes of six European villages and a research project on social use of jukeboxes in Finland. He is a member of COST project Architecture and Urban Ambiance of European Cities CitySenZ (2024–2028).
He has directed project ACMESOCS. Auditory Cultures, Mediated Sounds and Constructed Spaces (2019–2022) and European Commission financed Finnish team on multinational B-Air Art Infinity Radio Creating Sound Art for Babies, Toddlers and Vulnerable Groups project (2020–2024). He has examined how contemporary audio technology can be used in soundscape participatory research and led projects Muuttuvat suomalaiset äänimaisemat (Transforming Finnish Soundscapes, 2014–2015) and sub-project on Health Supporting Multisensory Food Environment (2015–2017).
Uimonen was a member of management committee of COST project Soundscapes of European Cities and Landscapes (2009–2013); member of project group European Acoustic Heritage (2011–2013) defining, describing and analysing sound cultures of Europe; and in Sensotra team (2018–2019) studying sensory environments of cities of Turku, Brighton and Ljubljana.
Scientific and societal impact of research: Total number of publications: 148 consisting of 55 peer-reviewed articles on books and journals; 45 editor-refereed publications; 17 monographs, edited anthologies and proceedings; 2 publications intended for professional communities; 27 articles and publications popularising research; 2 theses (see https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7318-1776 and attachments below).
Tel. +345 50 345 1900
Ira Virtanen ([email protected])
I provide, study and train supportive communication for relationships in which support is an essential part of shared goals. My research has also focused on the experiences of vulnerability, friendships, intergroup contact, and immediacy in initial interactions on virtual platforms.
At the Doctoral School, I coach peer mentors from doctoral researchers (UEF) and from postdoctoral researchers (YUFE pilot). I teach in courses Research Supervision, Research Project Management and From Science to Decision-Making. I create and maintain supportive materials for doctoral researchers who prepare to defend their dissertation in public defence (Moodle: Support for Communication in Public Defence). For doctoral supervisors, we have created an online platform to strengthen supervision competencies. I provide supervision training for all our research staff.
For the past decade, I have coached researchers from different fields in interpersonal communication competence such as skills in sharing and presenting their academic work, science communication, having constructive, critical discussions on research and beneficial feedback conversations as well as creating supportive networks. I have studied and worked in New Zealand, Belgium, France, Romania and the United Stated (Fulbright alumna of Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University, 2010–2011). I have supervised a little over 100 theses and a doctoral dissertation.
In addition to my academic career, I coach companies and third sector organisations in their various communication needs (e.g., media interviews, supportive communication in helplines). I will be a certified solution-focused brief-therapist in May 2025.
Feel free to make use of the audiovisual materials I have created to support for communication competence in public defence, or watch my TEDx Talk on friendships.
On science communication, media engagements and societal interaction, see the Finnish profile page.
Pasi Fränti ([email protected])
Home page: http://cs.uef.fi/pages/franti/
Pasi Fränti received his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Turku, 1991 and 1994 in Science. Since 2000, he has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF). He has published 79 journals and 167 peer review conference papers, including 14 IEEE transaction papers. His main research interests are in machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition including clustering algorithms and intelligent location-aware systems. Significant contributions have also been made in image compression, image analysis, vector quantization and speech technology.
Pasi Fränti is the head of the Machine Learning group at the school of computing at UEF. He has supervised 25 PhD students on the following topics: Clustering (9), Image and audio compression (5), Speech technology (4), Image processing, de-noising and HDR (3), Location-aware systems (3), and web mining (1). Six of the students originate from Russian including St. Petersburg (3), Uljanovsk (2) and Novosibirsk (1). All graduates work in research, teaching (postdoc, lecturer, associate professor), or in research & development in academia or in IT companies located in Finland, Shanghai, Singapore, Germany, Romania and Iran.
Sami Andberg ([email protected])
I’m doing PhD research on early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease using AI based on non-invasive biomarkers like eye tracking data and audio analysis of speech recordings.
Tomi Kinnunen ([email protected])
Tomi H. Kinnunen is a Professor at the University of Eastern Finland. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Joensuu in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was an associate scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore. Since 2007, he has been with UEF. In 2010-2012, he was funded by a post-doctoral grant from Academy of Finland focusing on speaker recognition. He has been a PI or co-PI in three other large Academy of Finland funded projects on speaker recognition and voice anti-spoofing, and a partner in H2020-funded OCTAVE project focusing on voice biometrics for physical and logical access control. He chaired Odyssey 2014 workshop and served as an associate editor in Digital Signal Processing. From 2015 to 2018, he served as an associate editor in IEEE/ACM Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing and from 2016 to 2018 as a Subject Editor in Speech Communication. Between 2015 and 2016 he visited 6 months at National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan, under a mobility grant from Academy of Finland, with focus on voice conversion and spoofing. Since 2017, he has been Associate Professor at UEF, where he leads Computational Speech Group (https://www.uef.fi/web/speech). He is known as one of the co-founders of ASVspoof challenge (www.asvspoof.org), a non-profit initiate that seeks to evaluate and improve security of voice biometric solutions under spoofing attacks.
Research interests:
– Speaker and language recognition (in wide sense; includes automatic and perceptual methods)
– Spoofing and countermeasures for speaker recognition
– Voice transformation
– Application of my research to other bioacoustic signals
Viliina Silvonen ([email protected])
Viliina Silvonen is an ethnomusicologically oriented folklorist specializing in Karelian lament tradition and its sprouts in Finland. Her research includes themes like performance and poetics, emotions and affective power of lamenting, as well as historical and cultural meanings. She is interested in tradition in changing sociocultural contexts, and the postcolonial discourse and minority perspectives linked to the lament tradition in contemporary Finland. Affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher at the UEF Karelian Institute, she works at the multidisciplinary research community of Finnish Literature Society (SKS).
In her article-based doctoral dissertation, she combined views from linguistic anthropological and folklore studies’ performance and practice theories with interdisciplinary affect and emotion theories and applied text, music and sound/voice analyses and sensory ethnography to reach the emotions and the affective power of laments through the archival audio material. In her postdoctoral research, she concentrates on the continuum of varying lament tradition from Karelian ritual practice to the practices and performances in contemporary Finnish society. During last couple of years, she has collaborated with a lamenter-musician Emmi Kuittinen.
Silvonen defended her doctoral dissertation in Folklore Studies at the University of Helsinki in January 2022. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Folklore Studies from the University of Turku in 2014. Silvonen is a member of the editorial board for the Elore Journal. She has founded a popular science blog Päivystävä folkloristi (‘a folklorist on-call’) with her colleagues.