Dr Francis Li

Senior Lecturer

Francis portrait

Contact details

Email: F.F.Li@salford.ac.uk

Telephone: 0161 295 5462

Location: Newton Building

Profile

After 5 years at MMU as a Senior Lecturer in Computing, Francis moved back to Salford, where he used to be a research assistant and did his PhD. Francis will undertake teaching, research and programme administration duties in general areas of acoustics, electro acoustics, acoustic and audio signal processing and acoustic informatics. He wiil be the programme leader of the Institute of Acoustics Diploma in Acoustics and Noise Control from 2006-2007 academic year. At the moment, he is busy preparing research proposals and teaching materials.

Over 20 years, Francis has a accumulated a broad spectrum of expertise and research interests including architectural acoustics; digital processing of speech, music and multimedia signals; artificial intelligence and soft-computing (neural networks, evolutionary computing and fuzzy logics) applied to various natural science and engineering problems involving uncertainly, complexity and fuzziness; computational electromagnetism; data and voice communications; digital electronics; hardware and software co-design; software engineering; instrumentation; adaptive filter and control systems, but his major and long-standing research interest centres around the use of intelligent computation and modern signal processing techniques to solve acoustics and sound related problems, in particular, the computation, processing, extraction, organisation, recognision, storage and re-use of information contained in acoustic and/or audio signals for various applications - he refers to this area as Acoustic Informatics.

Currently active research areas

Soft-computing and signal processing methods to extract concert hall acoustic parameters from naturalist stimuli such as speech or music signals.
Computer modelling and separation of incident and reflected shallow sea waves.
Machine assessment of QoS (Quality of Service) of VoIP and wireless networks in terms of perceived sound quality or intelligibility.
Audio information hiding and high performance codecs.
AV fusion -the work looks at the use of audio and acoustic information to assist video information extraction.
Sound based handwriting analysis - handwriting analysis based on the vibrations and sounds caused by friction between pen-nibs and paper surfaces.
Shaping the Articulation and phrasing of synthesized music.

Francis at piano

Francis has always been busy teaching and doing research. See what he does in his rare spare time: he plays the piano, which is the greatest inspiration of doing research in acoustics to him. If you happen to hear a few wrong notes when he plays, forgive him: he must be thinking of acoustics simultaneously.

Recent Publications (from 2001)

1. Y. Zhang, J. A. Chambers, F. F. Li, P. Kendrick and T. J. Cox, "Blind estimation of reverberation time in occupied rooms" to appear in the EUSIPCO 2006 proceedings.

2. P. Kendrick, T. J. Cox, Y. Zhang, J. A. Chambers and F. F. Li, "Room acoustic Parameter Extraction from music signals" Proceedings of IEEE ICASSP 2006.

3. N. Subramaniam, F. Li, D. Ingram and C. Mingham, "Generation of reflection-free numerical wave flume with PID active control", to appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Coastal Engineering, 2006.

4. T. D. Jackson, K. Yates and F. F. Li, "Perceptually masked audio sub-channels and applications" in the CD Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 27, Nov. 2005.

5. F. F. Li, "Estimation of intelligibility from received arbitrary speech signals with support vector machine", Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, (ICMCL 2005), Vol. 6, pp. 3755-3760, ISBN: 0-7803-9091-1, Guangzhou, 18-21, August, 2005.

6. T. D. Jackson, F. F. Li and K. Yates, "Hidden auxiliary media channels in audio signals by perceptually insignificant component replacement", Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Multimedia and Expo, pp. 17-20, ISBN: 0-7803-9331-7, July 6-8, 2005, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

7. F. F. Li and T. J. Cox, "A neural network model for speech intelligibility quantification", in the International Journal of Applied Soft Computing (invited), 2005.

8. N. Subramaniam, F. Li, D. Ingram and C. Mingham, "A comparative study of major random wave separation methods applied to Boussinesq-type numerical wave flumes", in the CD ROM proceedings of the Wave 2005.

9. F. F. Li, "The Discrete Cosine Transform and its Significance in Audio Technology and Room Acoustics", Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 26, Pt. 8, pp. 42-49, 2004.

10. F. F. Li, "A new approach to sound-based handwriting authentication", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Signals and Electronic System (ICSES04) joint with International workshop on systems, signals and image processing (IWSSIP04) conferences, pp. September 13-15, 2004 Poznan, Poland.

11. F. F. Li, "A unified framework for machine assessment of speech intelligibility", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Signals and Electronic System (ICSES04) joint with International workshop on systems, signals and image processing (IWSSIP04) conferences, pp. September 13-15, 2004 Poznan, Poland.

12. F. F. Li, "Handwriting Authentication by Envelopes of Sound Signatures", the Proceedings of 17th IEEE international conference on pattern recognition ICPR2004, Vol. 1, pp. 401-404, Cambridge, UK, 23-26, Aug. 2004.

13. T. D. Jackson, K. Yates and F. F. Li, "Watermarking and Copyright Protection by Information Hiding in Soundtracks", The Proceedings of the 15th AES International Conference 2004, pp. 265-274, ISBN 0-937803-52-9, June 17-19, 2004, London, UK.

14. F. F. Li, "Speech Intelligibility of VoIP to PSTN interworking - A key index for QoS", IEE Conference Proceedings: Telecommunications Quality of Service (QoS04), ISBN 086341 3935, Savoy Place, London, pp. 104-108, March, 2004.

15. F. F. Li, "The complexity of speech intelligibility measurements in packetised transmission channels", Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 25, Pt. 8, pp. 303-308, 2003

16. F. F. Li, "A stochastic model for sound effects in multimedia virtual rooms", Proceedings of the IEEE/EURASIP IWSSIP' 03 Conference, Prague, Sept. 2003.

17. F. F. Li and T. J. Cox, "Speech transmission index from running speech: A neural network approach," Journal of Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 113, Issue 4, pp.1999-2008, 2003

18. F. F. Li and T. J. Cox, "A neural network for blind identification of speech transmission index", in the Proceedings of IEEE ICASSP2003', V. II, pp. 757-760, 2003.

19. F. Li and T. J. Cox, "A neural network model for speech intelligibility quantification", Proc. 4th International Conference on Recent Advances in Soft Computing, pp. 91-92., also available on RASC 2002 CD ROM, Nottingham Dec., 2002. ISBN: 1-84233-0764. (Received invitation to submit a further extended version for publication in the Journal of Applied Soft Computing.)

20. F. F. Li and T. J. Cox, "A hybrid neural network for blind identification of speech transmission channels", in P. Liatsis Edits Recent Trends in Multimedia Information Processing, World Scientific Publishing, pp. 353- 308, ISBN 981-238-242-7, 2002.

21. T. J. Cox, F. Li, and P. Darlington, "Extraction of room reverberation time from speech using artificial neural networks," Journal of Audio Engineering Society, Vol. 49, No. 4, pp. 219-230, 2001.

22. F. F. Li, "EMC of power suppliers for telecommunications by design - a computational approach", Proc. IEE/IEEE 23rd International Telecommunications Energy Conference, pp. 636-639, Edinburgh, 2001.

23. T. Cox and F. Li, "Extracting STI from arbitrary running speech" Proc. of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 23(8), pp. 61-68, 2001.

24. T. Cox and F Li, " Extraction of speech transmission index from speech signals using artificial neural networks", AES 110th Convention, Amsterdam, Netherlands, preprint No. 5354, 2001

25. T. J. Cox and F. F. Li, "Using Artificial Intelligence to Enable Occupied Measurements of Concert Hall Parameters," Proc. 17th ICA, 3A.08.05., Italy, 2001.