Mireia Farrús

I was born in Barcelona in 1975. I graduated in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB, 1998) and in Linguistics (2003) from the same university (2003). This background was optimal to combine two interdisciplinar research areas in the field of Signal Processing and Linguistics, and I received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, 2008), in Barcelona, in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications.

My thesis, entitled "Fusing acoustic and linguistic information in speaker recognition”, focused on the use of speaker recognition technologies within the area of Biometrics and Security. The main contribution to it was the use of linguistic models –-especially the prosodic information contained in the human speech–- in order to improve the state-of-the-art systems based solely on acoustic and spectral features of the speech signal.

After receiving her PhD, I got a postdoctoral position for two years at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) to work on the Machine Translation field. My main contribution was to use the linguistic knowledge to improve the state-of-the-art machine translation systems, which were mainly based on statistical models. From 2009 to 2011 I held a research position in the Office of Learning Technologies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where I worked on the UOC's Machine Translation System and on the development of e-Learning applications related to the Natural Language Processing.

I have also held researcher positions at DFKI (Germany), Umeå Universitet (Sweden) and the National Centre for Biometric Studies at the University of Canberra (Australia). From January 2012  I am a Visiting Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, doing reserach in the Natural Language Processing group (TALN) and teaching at the Polytechnic School (ESUP).