About George Close

Me IRL

Email: glclose1@sheffield.ac.uk

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, as part of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies.
My supervisors are Dr. Stefan Goetze and Prof. Thomas Hain.
My project is sponsored in part by TOSHIBA Cambridge Research Laboratory.
I am due to graduate in January 2025.
📧 Click here to contact me 📧

Interests

  • Neural Speech Enhancement / Noise Reduction
  • Psychoacoustically motivated approaches
  • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
  • Speech Quality / Intelligibility assessment metrics and prediction
  • Human perception of audio
  • Neural systems for hearing aids and other low power devices
  • Self Supervised Speech Representations / Foundational models
  • Deep Fake Detection / Adversial attacks on neural networks.

Technical Skills

  • Python - PyTorch, Tensorflow, SciPy, SpeechBrain
  • HuggingFace / OpenAI API
  • Git / GitHub
  • High performance computing / GPU clusters
  • CuDA
  • MATLAB
  • Linux / BASH scripting
  • C++, Java, Haskell

Qualifications / Work Experience

  • Yamaha Research and Development (Internship)
    Hammamatsu, Japan
    May 2024 - August 2024

  • PhD Computer Science
    University of Sheffield, UK
    2020-2024

  • BSc Computer Science (First Class Honours)
    Cardiff University, UK
    2017-2020

Papers and Publications

I am an author on 12 papers, of which 9 I am first author.

  • Hallucination in Perceptual Metric-Driven Speech Enhancement Networks
    arXiv | Accepted @ EUSIPCO 2024| Listening Test Examples
    George Close, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • SSSR In Loss Functions For Hearing Aid Speech Enhancement
    Accepted @ EUSIPCO 2024
    Robert Sutherland, George Close, Thomas Hain, Stefan Goetze and Jon Barker

  • Transcription-Free Fine-Tuning of Speech Separation Models for Noisy and Reverberant Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition
    Accepted @ Interspeech 2024
    William Ravenscroft, George Close, Stefan Goetze, Thomas Hain, Mohammad Soleymanpour, Anurag Chowdhury and Mark C. Fuhs

  • Non-Intrusive Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing-Impaired Users using Intermediate ASR Features and Human Memory Models
    Techincal Report | arXiv | ICASSP 2024
    🏆 2nd Place in Clarity Prediction Challenge 2
    Rhiannon Mogridge, George Close, Robert Sutherland, Thomas Hain, Jon Barker, Stefan Goetze and Anton Ragni

  • Multi-CMGAN+/+: Leveraging Multi-Objective Speech Quality Metric Prediction for Speech Enhancement
    arXiv | ICASSP 2024 | GitHub
    George Close, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • CMGAN+/+: The University of Sheffield CHiME-7 UDASE Challenge Speech Enhancement System
    Technical Report
    🏆 Entry to CHiME 2024 UDASE Task

    George Close, William Ravenscroft, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • Non Intrusive Intelligibility Predictor for Hearing Impaired Individuals using Self Supervised Speech Representations
    arXiv | SPARKS Workshop 2023
    George Close, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • The Effect of Spoken Language on Speech Enhancement using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Loss Functions
    arXiv | WASPAA 2023 | GitHub
    George Close, Thomas Hain, Stefan Goetze

  • Perceive and predict: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Based Loss Functions for Speech Enhancement
    arXiv | ICASSP 2023 | Audio Examples
    George Close, William Ravenscroft, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • PAMGAN+/-: Improving Phase Aware Speech Enhancement Performance via Expanded Discriminator Training
    154th AES Convention Europe 2023
    🏆 WINNER: STUDENT TECHNICAL PAPER AWARD
    George Close, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • Non-intrusive Speech Intelligibility Metric Prediction for Hearing Impaired Individuals - Clarity Prediction Challege 1
    INTERSPEECH 2022
    George Close, Samuel Hollands, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

  • MetricGAN+/- Increasing Robustness of Noise Reduction on Unseen Data
    arXiv | EUSIPCO 2022 | Audio Examples
    George Close, Thomas Hain and Stefan Goetze

Talks and Presentations

My github My twitter My LinkIn My Google Scholar 📧