Catherine Lai

Course Organizer and Lecturer

Catherine Lai is a lecturer in Speech and Language Technology, based in the Centre for Speech Technology Research. Catherine will be teaching in all of the lectures, and will be in labs for the first half of the course. She’s also the course organizer for Speech Processing this year.  You can contact her about all matters related to this course.

She works on several aspects of speech processing (e.g. spoken language understanding, affective computing, and multimodal speech processing) as well as theoretical and experimental linguistics (e.g. prosody and discourse structure). She lived in various computer science/informatics and linguistics departments before settling in a place that truly allows her to work on both. She’s happy to talk to you about anything from maths, to phonetics, to spoken dialogue structure!

You can find more info on her webpage.

How to contact Catherine

You can contact Catherine by email (c.lai@ed.ac.uk) or on the Speech Zone forums. If you have a question about course content, you will probably get the quickest reply on the Forum as multiple staff members monitor it.

Office hours

Drop-in office hours (2024-25, Semester 1): Friday’s 15:00-16:00, Dugald Stewart Building, Room 2.11
By appointment: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/clai/meetings

Questions?

You can also use the forums here is to ask questions about course content (Simon also monitors this so you’ll probably get a quicker answer!).  You can use the Speech Processing – course delivery › Using speech.zone forum to report any problems with the website, ask for tips on how to use it, etc.