Academic experience 

  • Assistant Professor: January 2012 -- present
    Senior Research Associate: September 2011 -- December 2011
    • Development of statistical methods for dialogue systems. 
  • Research Associate: September 2008 -- August 2011
    • Research into semantic parsing and parameter learning for spoken dialogue systems.
    • The article on "Natural Belief-Critic: a reinforcement algorithm for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems" (F. Jurčíček et al.) received the best paper award at the Interspeech 2010 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
  • Research Assistant: August 2002 -- August 2008
    • Designed and implemented the LVCSR decoder for Czech Language.
    • Designed and organized semantic annotation of the human-human train timetable dialogue (HHTT) corpus (3000 dialogues).
    • Implemented a semantic parser for the HHTT corpus. 
  • Visiting Scholar: February -- December 2004
    • Built a new baseline ASR system for the Czech MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large spoken ArCHives) project. 
    • Evaluated performance of MFCC and PLP front-ends for broadband data (44kHz).
    • Evaluated performance of colloquial and formal language models for Czech language.
  • Center of Computational Linguistics - University of West Bohemia 
  • Research Assistant: May 2001 -- August 2002
    • Implemented a software layer between a telephone dialogue system and telephone cards based using TAPI and CAPI communication protocols.
    • Designed and implemented a finite state grammar compiler for automatic speech recognition.

Industry experience

  • Department of business and system analysis - Cleverlance Enterprise Solution a.s. 
    Business system analyst: January 2008 -- August 2008 
    • Responsible for software requirement specification, analysis and early project cost estimation and planning.
    • Projects: Revenue Assurance Tool - DHL Information Services (Europe) s.r.o, Contact center - Vodafone Czech Republic a.s.
  • Department of software development - ANECT a.s. 
    Business system analyst: September 2006 -- December 2007
    • Responsible for software requirement specification, analysis and early project cost estimation and planning.
    • Projects: Electronic operational documentation – Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí, Call center statistics – Allianz pojišťovna a. s., Call center statistics – Pražská plynárenská a.s.
  • Speechtech s.r.o - www.speechtech.cz 
    Researcher/Developer: 2001 -- 2004
    • Contributed to core design of the internally developed speech recognition engine. 
    • Ported the engine to Linux and IRIX (SGI O2) platforms.
    • Contributed to speech synthesis integration.

Education

  • Master of Computer Science - University of West Bohemia , June 2003 
    Pilsen, Czech Republic
    • Thesis: Design of LVCSR Decoder for Czech Language
    • Graduated with honors.

Teaching

Research interests 

  • Spoken dialogue management
  • Reinforcement learning
  • Spoken language processing and understanding
  • Computational linguistics

Professional service

Achievements

  • Awarded for supervising Ondrej Klejch - Ondrej got the CZ.NIC aword for his master thesis in the ACM-SPY Czech republic competition.
  • Received the best paper award for the article on "Natural Belief-Critic: a reinforcement algorithm for parameter estimation in statistical spoken dialogue systems" ( F. Jurčíček et al.) at the Interspeech 2010 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
  • Received the dean's award for scientific achievements, 18.10.2007, Pilsen, Czech Republic.
  • Awarded for supervising Jan Švec, the finalist of the IT master thesis of the year 2007 , 20.9.2007, Prague, Czech Republic.

Grants 

  • Modern Bayesian methods in machine learning (PI, 2013, FRVŠ 182/2013 B6 c)
  • Development of statistical methods for spoken dialogue systems (PI, 2012-2016, Program NAVRAT, Grant No. LK112210)
  • Data preparation for dialog draft using spoken language recognition (co-investigator, MŠMT ČR FR VŠ G1/F966, 2002)
  • Noise compensation in automatic speech recognition systems of spoken Czech (co-investigator, MŠMT ČR FR VŠ G1/F920, 2001)

Invited Talks

Extra activities

Open source projects

Other projects