Carlos Daniel Hernandez Mena

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Biography

He earned his degree in Communications and Electronics Engineering from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City. He later pursued a Master of Engineering in Computer Engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he also completed his Ph.D. in Digital Signal Processing, specializing in Automatic Speech Recognition. In 2019, he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Linguistics & Language Technology (ILLT) at the University of Malta. In 2021, he joined the University of Reykjavík as a postdoctoral researcher at the Language and Voice Lab (LVL). In 2023, he moved to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as a research engineer. His primary research interests include Automatic Speech Recognition for minority languages, corpus curation and creation, and applied phonetics.

Educación

- 2021 - 2023. Postdoc.

Research Scientist at Reykjavík University.

- 2019 - 2021. Postdoc.

Research Support Officer III at The University of Malta.

- 2011 - 2018. PhD Degree.

Digital Signal Processing at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

- 2007 - 2010. Master's Degree.

Computer Engineering at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

- 2001 - 2005. Engineer Degree.

Communications and Electronics Engineering at Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), México.

Research

My main research interests include, but are not limited to, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Datasets Creation, Datasets Curation and Applied Linguistics.

Publications in Conferences and Journals

- IberSPEECH 2024

 * Open-Source Multispeaker Text-to-Speech Model and Synthetic Speech Corpus with a Mexican Accent through a Web Spanish Dictionary
 * 3CatParla: A New Open-Source Corpus of Broadcast TV in Catalan for Automatic Speech Recognition.
 
- LREC 2024
 * Samrómur Milljón: An ASR Corpus of One Million Verified Read Prompts in Icelandic.
 
- NoDaLiDa 2023
 * ASR Language Resources for Faroese
 * Standardising pronunciation for a Grapheme to Phoneme converter for Faroese
 
- SEPLN (2023)
* The state of end-to-end systems for Mexican Spanish speech recognition.
 
- Applied Acoustics (2023)
 * Assessing the benefits of virtual speaker lateralization for binaural speech intelligibility over the Internet.
 
-  LREC 2022
* Creating Mexican Spanish Language Resources through the \emph{Social Service} Program.
* Samrómur Children: An Icelandic Speech Corpus
 
- Neural Computing and Applications (2021)
 * Triplet loss based embeddings for forensic speaker identification in Spanish
 
- Arxiv (2021)
 * Data Augmentation for Speech Recognition in Maltese: A Low-Resource Perspective.
 
- Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics (2020)
 * Phonetic algorithms for detection of phonetically similar words in Central-Mexico Spanish.
 
- LREC 2020
 * MASRI-HEADSET: A Maltese Corpus for Speech Recognition
 
- Journal of Applied Research and Technology (2017)
 * Automatic speech recognizers for Mexican Spanish and its open resources
 
- International Journal of Signal Processing Systems (2016)
 * Novel Online Tools for Automatic Generation of Pronouncing Dictionaries in Mexican Spanish for Speech Processing.
 
- International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (2015)
 * Creating a Grammar-Based Speech Recognition Parser for Mexican Spanish Using HTK, Compatible with CMU Sphinx-III System.
 
- Research in Computing Science (2014)
 * A Set of Phonetic and Phonological Rules for Mexican Spanish Revisited, Updated, Enhanced and Implemented
 
- LREC 2014
 * CIEMPIESS: A new open-sourced Mexican Spanish radio corpus
 
- IEEE ROC\&C' 2013
 * Creación de un diccionario de pronunciación de nombres propios para uso en tecnologías del habla
 
- IEEE ROC\&C' 2012
 * Diseño y creación de un pequeño corpus oral de habla espontánea en español del centro de México para el desarrollo de sistemas de reconocimiento automático de voz

Memberships

- Member of the Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla.

http://lorien.die.upm.es/~lapiz/rtth/introduccion.php
 

- Member of the Speech Team of the Languges Technologies Unit (LTU) of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

- Member of the Laboratory L52+ of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

https://l52mas.gitlab.io/members/carlos-mena/
 
- Founder of the CIEMPIESS-UNAM Project
https://ciempiess.org/about
https://huggingface.co/ciempiess
 

Qualifications

Throughout my career, I have worked with various ASR systems such as: CMU-Spinx, HTK, Kaldi, Nvidia-NeMo, Wav2Vec, Whisper. I am also proficient in programming microcontrollers and digital signal processors (DSPs) in both assembly language and C/C++.

Teaching

- 2008 - 2019. Microcontrollers Course.

I taught PIC Microcontrollers in C and assembly language for 10 years at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) as a Interim Professor.