Simone Ashby Email & Phone Number

Denver, Colorado, United States

• Working 1:1 with corporate partners in the design and integration of effective, human centered voice user interface (VUI) solutions• Working with a consortium of ICT researchers, speech technologists and journalists to develop prototyping tools and platforms for community information powered by voice and audio interfaces• Developing a mobile place-based crowdsourcing platform that uses sentiment analysis and information visualization strategies to empower citizens to become better engaged in their communities• Designing an interactive installation that uses TTS-generated 'big data' fragments, interactive floor projections and metaphors from James Joyce’s Ulysses to create a space in which the participant is both the observer and the observed, highlighting themes of voyeurism and state surveillance• Developing a long-term, multidisciplinary R&D project aimed at leveraging mobile-based services in sub-Saharan Africa, as part of the Speech and Language Technologies for Development (SLT4D) initiative• Teaching undergraduate courses: Human Computer Interaction, User Centered Research, Requirements Engineering, Hypermedia Design

Freelance Work Performed In Portugal

Editing British and US phonetic transcriptions for the Oxford English Dictionary Online

• Leading the graduate level Capstone course and mentoring corporate sponsored R&D projects for the Carnegie Mellon | University of Madeira dual Master's program in Human Computer Interaction• Supervising graduate level independent study projects

Funchal, Portugal

• Co-directing the Carnegie Mellon University | Portugal professional Master's of Human Computer Interaction (MHCI) degree program• Acting as a liaison with the School of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University• Serving on the HCII Admissions Committee• Advising and mentoring MSc students• Communicating with the public and ensuring the quality and reputation of the program• Managing relations with alumni, recruiting new students and working with faculty to innovateand expand the MHCI curriculum

Lisbon, Portugal

• Coordinating the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) project for maintaining and improving the Portal da Língua Portuguesa online lexical knowledge base• Authoring and coordinating the FCT R&D project 'The Portuguese Unisyn Lexicon (LUPo): An accent-independent pronunciation lexicon for Portuguese' for developing an accent-independent lexicon and rule system for generating accent-specific phonetic transcriptions for regional variants of Portuguese• Field work and development of a 200+hour Luso-African speech corpus (the first of its kind)• Supervising two graduate research assistants• Collaboration with LUPo's international research team partners and consultants• Member of ILTEC's Direction Board• PhD Thesis Director to Portugal's Science and Technology Foundation (FCT)

Lisbon, Portugal

Co-authoring requirements specifications, authoring phonetic transcription specifications, providing feedback on in-house tools, text normalization, evaluating golden test set materials for pause and intonation alignments, and conducting tests for the enhancement of Microsoft’s American English ASR and TTS technologies

Lisbon, Portugal

Teaching Language Engineering to Master's degree students in Clinical Linguistics

Vancouver, Canada

Leading a team of documentation specialists to create and maintain user manuals and online help content for a gaming software company

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

• Work towards the development of multimedia conferencing, meeting browsing, and speech recognition technologies for the AMI–Augmented Multi-party Interaction project• Management of a 100-hour multimodal corpus• Translation of user requirements into written schemes for annotating audio and video data• Supervision of eight transcribers and annotators• Management of a subproject for the video annotation of head and hand gestures

Santa Monica, California, Usa

Building, editing and maintaining the concept lexicon and ontological database for a natural language search engine, text/domain analysis, product testing, and HTML design of project demonstrations

Phd, Computer Science

Visiting Phd Research, Linguistics

Ma, Linguistics

Ba, Journalism