Yuki Saito, Ph.D.

Language: EN/JP

My CVs are available [here (full)] and [here (short)].

Publications:

Tutorials

1. Yuki Saito, Shinnosuke Takamichi, and Wataru Nakata, "Emerging topics for speech synthesis: versatility and efficiency," APSIPA ASC 2024, Macau, China, Dec. 2024. (Slide)

Invited Articles

1. Yuki Saito, "Empathetic dialogue speech synthesis: Speech synthesis towards more expressive spoken dialogue systems," Journal of Acoustical Society of Japan, Vol. 80, No. 12, pp. 667--674, Dec. 2024. (in Japanese)

Journal Papers

International Conferences (Peer-Reviewed)

Technical Reports

Domestic Conferences

Dissertations

1. Yuki Saito (adviser: Professor Hiroshi Saruwatari), "Statistical speech synthesis based on human's speech information processing abilities," Ph.D. Thesis, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, 2021. (Dean's Award) (PDF, Slide)
2. Yuki Saito (supervisor: Professor Hiroshi Saruwatari), "High-quality statistical parametric speech synthesis using generative adversarial networks," M.S. Thesis, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, 2018. (PDF, Slide)

Competitive Funds:

1. Google-initiated Research Grant, 30,000 USD, Nov. 2023--Oct. 2024. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
2. Japan Science and Technology Agency, ACT-X. 4,500,000 JPY, Oct. 2023--Mar. 2026. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
3. Travel Grant Award for INTERSPEECH2023, 750 EUR, Aug. 2023.
4. Research Grant (S) from Tateisi Science and Technology Foundation, 30,000,000 JPY, Apr. 2023--Mar. 2026. (Representative: Hiroshi Saruwatari)
5. Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists, Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (JSPS), 3,600,000 JPY, Apr. 2022--Mar. 2025. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
6. Research Grant (A) from Tateisi Science and Technology Foundation, 2,200,000 JPY, Apr. 2022--Mar. 2023. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
7. Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up, Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (JSPS), 2,400,000 JPY, Sep. 2021--Mar. 2023. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
8. KIOXIA Incentive Research, 1,000,000 JPY, Jun. 2021--Mar. 2022. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
9. Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows, the Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (JSPS), 2,500,000 JPY, May 2018--Mar. 2021. (Representative: Yuki Saito)
10. Grants for Researchers Attending International Conferences from NEC C&C, 250,000 JPY, Apr. 2018.

Awards:

1. Winners of The INTERSPEECH2024 Discrete Speech Challenge (TTS Track), Sep. 2024.
2. 2024 IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Award, Jul. 2024.
3. The 40th Inoue Research Award for Young Scientists, Feb. 2024.
4. Travel Grant Award for INTERSPEECH2023, Aug. 2023.
5. 2023 Otogaku Symposium Best Presentation Award, Jun. 2023.
6. The 22nd Funai Information Technology Award for Young Researchers, May 2023.
7. 2021 IEICE Journal Paper Award, Jun. 2022.
8. 2021 IPSJ SIG-SLP Best Student Paper Award (Yahoo! JAPAN Award), Mar. 2022.
9. 2020 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award, Jun. 2021.
10. Dean's Award, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Mar. 2021.
11. The 49th Awaya Prize Young Researcher Award of ASJ, Mar. 2021.
12. Outstanding Paper Award for Young C&C Researchers, Jan. 2019.
13. The 12th IEEE Signal Processing Society Japan Student Journal Paper Award, Nov. 2018.
14. 2017 IEICE ISS Young Researcher's Award in Speech Field, Aug. 2018.
15. Partial Exemption from Repayment of Scholarship Loan for Students with Outstanding Results, Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), May 2018.
16. The 34th TELECOM System Technology Award for Students from TAF, Mar. 2018.
17. The 1st IEEE Signal Processing Society Tokyo Joint Chapter Student Award, Nov. 2017.
18. Spoken Language Processing Student Grant of ICASSP, Mar. 2017.
19. 2017 IEICE ISS Student Poster Award, Jan. 2017.
20. The 14th Best Student Presentation Award of ASJ, Mar. 2017.
21. Graduation Research Award, Advanced Course of Electronic and Information Systems Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kushiro College, Feb. 2016.
22. Dean's Award, Department of Information Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kushiro College, Mar. 2014.

Co-author's Awards:

1. The 29th Best Student Presentation Award of ASJ, Mar. 2025. (Awardee: Ryo Ogawa)
2. Candidates for the APSIPA ASC 2024 Best Student Paper Award, Dec. 2024. (Awardee: Wataru Nakata)
3. YANS2024 IVRy Award, Sep. 2024. (Awardee: Taisei Takano)
4. The 28th Best Student Presentation Award of ASJ, Sep. 2024. (Awardee: Kazuki Yamauchi)
5. Shortlisted for the ISCA Best Student Paper Award 2024, Aug. 2024. (Awardee: Dong Yang)
6. 2024 Otogaku Symposium Best Presentation Award, Jun. 2024. (Awardee: Kazuki Yamauchi)
7. 2024 IEICE ISS Student Poster Award, Mar. 2024. (Awardee: Kazuki Yamauchi)
8. 2023 IPSJ SIG-SLP Best Student Paper Award (Fairy Devices Award), Mar. 2024 (Awardee: Ryunosuke Hirai)
9. The 27th Best Student Presentation Award of ASJ, Mar. 2014. (Awardee: Aya Watanabe)
10. Google Travel Grants for Students in East Asia, Jul. 2022. (Awardee: Yuto Nishimura)
11. National Institute of Technology Student Award, Mar. 2021. (Awardee: Kazuki Fujii)
12. IPSJ SIG-MUS/SLP Student Poster Award, June 2020. (Awardee: Kazuki Fujii)
13. FujiSankei Business i Awards, June 2020. (Awardee: Kazuki Fujii)
14. IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Award, Mar. 2020. (Awardee: Shinnosuke Takamichi)
15. The 3rd IEEE Signal Processing Society Tokyo Joint Chapter Student Award, Dec. 2019. (Awardee: Hiroki Tamaru)
16. The 18th Best Student Presentation Award of ASJ, Mar. 2019. (Awardee: Satoshi Mizoguchi)
17. 2018 Otogaku Symposium Best Presentation Award, June 2018. (Awardee: Shinnosuke Takamichi)

Reviews:

1. Journals: Neural Networks (from 2024), Information Fusion (from 2024), Acoustical Science and Technology (from 2024), IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (from 2023), Computer Speech and Language (from 2023), Journal of Audio Engineering Society (from 2022), IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (from 2022), Journal of Information Processing (from 2022), APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing (from 2021), EURASIP Journal on Audio Speech and Music Processing (from 2021), IEEE Access (from 2021), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (from 2020), IEEE Signal Processing Letter (from 2018)
2. Conferences: SLT (from 2024), ISCSLP (from 2024), NeurIPS (from 2024), INTERSPEECH (from 2021), MLSP (from 2019), ICASSP (from 2018)

Research and Work Experiences:

1. Lecturer of The University of Tokyo, Japan. Apr. 1, 2024--XX. (Lab. page)
2. Assistant Professor of The University of Tokyo, Japan. Apr. 1, 2023--Mar. 31, 2024. (Lab. page)
3. Project Research Associate of The University of Tokyo, Japan. Apr. 1, 2021--Mar. 31, 2023. ("Research and Development on Acoustic Information Processing and Voice Conversion," Moonshot Research & Development Program of Japan Science and Technology Agency, Representative: Hiroshi Saruwatari) (Project)
4. Research assistant of The University of Tokyo, Japan. Apr. 1, 2019--Mar. 31, 2021. ("Stress-free, real-time, and full-band voice conversion based on perceptual models," executed under the Commissioned Research of MIC SCOPE 182103104, Representative: Shinnosuke Takamichi) (Project)
5. Short-time researcher in DeNA Co., Ltd., Japan, Oct. 1, 2018--Mar. 31, 2019 & June 1, 2019--Mar. 31, 2020. (Mentor: Kentaro Tachibana)
6. Research fellow (DC1) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan, Apr. 1, 2018--Mar. 31, 2021. ("Active speech synthesis based on listener perceptual modeling," JSPS KAKENHI 18J22090, Representative: Yuki Saito) (KAKEN) (Project)
7. Short-time researcher in NTT Media Intelligence Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Japan, Aug. 30, 2017--Oct. 31, 2017. (Mentor: Yusuke Ijima)
8. Short-time researcher in NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Japan, Aug. 8, 2016--Sep. 9, 2016. (Mentor: Hirokazu Kameoka)

Academic Activities:

1. Session Chair for INTERSPEECH (from 2024)
2. Session Vice-Chair for ASJ Meeting (from 2023)
3. Board member of IEICE Technical Committee on Speech (SP) (from Apr. 2024 to Mar. 2026)
4. Board member of IPSJ SIG-SLP Committee (from Apr. 2024 to Mar. 2026)
5. Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ) Students and Young Researchers Forum, Organizing member (from Mar. 2017) and Vice President (from Apr. 2019 to Mar. 2022)

Speech Corpora:

1. Yuki Saito, Takuto Igarashi, Kentaro Seki, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Ryuichi Yamamoto, Kentaro Tachibana, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "SRC4VC: Smartphone-Recorded Corpus for Voice Conversion," Jun. 2024. (URL)
2. Aya Watanabe, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Yuki Saito, Detai Xin, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "Coco-Nut: Corpus of Japanese utterance and voice characteristics description for prompt-based control," Nov. 2023. (URL)
3. Detai Xin, Junfeng Jiang, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Yuki Saito, Akiko Aizawa, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "JVNV: a Japanese emotional speech corpus with both verbal content and nonverbal vocalizations," Oct. 2023. (URL)
4. Yuki Saito, Eiji Iimori, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Kentaro Tachibana, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "STUDIES 2 (CALLS) Corpus: Complaint handling and Attentive Listening Lines Speech," Mar. 2023. (URL)
5. Yuki Saito, Shinnosuke Takamichi, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "SMASH Corpus: A spontaneous speech corpus recording third-person audio commentaries on gameplay," Jul. 2022. (URL)
6. Yuki Saito, Yuto Nishimura, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Kentaro Tachibana, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "STUDIES Corpus: Japanese empathetic dialogue speech corpus," Mar. 2022. (URL, arXiv preprint)
7. Shinnosuke Takamichi, Kentaro Mitsui, Yuki Saito, Tomoki Koriyama, Naoko Tanji, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "JVS corpus: free Japanese multi-speaker voice corpus," Aug. 2019. (URL, arXiv preprint)

Invited / Visiting Talks:

1. Yuki Saito, "Towards human-in-the-loop DNN-based speech synthesis technologies," Seminar by IEEE NZ Signal Processing / Information Theory Joint Chapter and Acoustics Research Center, the University of Auckland, Dec. 2022.
2. Yuki Saito, "Towards human-in-the-loop speech synthesis technologies," Seminar by IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Singapore Chapter, Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society Teochew Doctorate Society, Singapore, and Human Language Technology Lab., National University of Singapore, Aug. 2022.

Patents:

1. Kentaro Tachibana, Yuki Saito, Kei Akuzawa, "SPEECH PROCESSING APPARATUS AND SPEECH PROCESSING PROGRAM," JP2020190605, Filled in May 21.
2. Shinnosuke Takamichi, Yuki Saito, Takaaki Saeki, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "VOICE CONVERSION DEVICE, VOICE CONVERSION METHOD, AND VOICE CONVERSION PROGRAM," JP2021032940, Filled in Aug. 19, 2019.
3. Shinnosuke Takamichi, Yuki Saito, Takaaki Saeki, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "VOICE CONVERSION DEVICE, VOICE CONVERSION METHOD, AND VOICE CONVERSION PROGRAM," PCT/JP2020/031122, Filled in Aug. 18, 2020.
4. Shinnosuke Takamichi, Yuki Saito, Takaaki Saeki, and Hiroshi Saruwatari, "VOICE CONVERSION DEVICE, VOICE CONVERSION METHOD, AND VOICE CONVERSION PROGRAM," PCT/JP2021/004367, Filled in Feb. 5, 2021.

Lectures:

• "Applied Acoustics," Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2024 Instructor)
  • 07."Speech Production" Slide
  • 08."Speech Perception" Slide
  • 09."Automatic Speech Recognition System" Slide
  • 10."Text-To-Speech Synthesis System" Slide
  • 11."Voice Conversion System" Slide
  • 12."Speaker Recognition/Verification System" Slide
• "Academics Frontier Lecture (Introduction to Cybernetics --Advanced Information Science Connecting Physics, People, and Society--): Signal Processing Technologies for sound analysis and synthesis," College of Arts and Sciences (Junior Division), The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2024 Instructor) Slide
• "Information System Laboratory III: Signal Processing and Machine Learning," Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2024 Instructor)
• "Information System Laboratory: Project Practice," Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2016--2017 TA, FY2023 Instructor)
• "Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics: Digital Signal Processing and Acoustic Systems," Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2023 Instructor)
• "Advanced Signal Processing," Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (Guest Presenter)
  • FY2022 (Slide)
  • FY2024 (Slide)
• "Applied Gaussian Process and Machine Learning," Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan. (FY2021 Guest Presenter) (Slide)

Education:

• Ph.D. degree in Information Science and Technology.
  Mar. 2021, Dept. of Information Physics and Computing, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan.
  (Adviser: Professor Hiroshi Saruwatari)
• M.S. degree in Information Science and Technology.
  Mar. 2018, Dept. of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan.
  (Adviser: Professor Hiroshi Saruwatari)
• B.S. degree in Engineering.
  Mar. 2016, Advanced Course of Electronic and Information Systems Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kushiro College, Japan.
  (Adviser: Assistant Professor Hiroshi Tenmoto)
• A.S. degree in Engineering.
  Mar. 2014, Dept. of Information Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kushiro College, Japan.
  (Adviser: Assistant Professor Hiroshi Tenmoto)

Misc.:

• I was invited to Google Research Talk, Google Tokyo, Japan. (Nov. 2018)
• I was invited to Google Speech Technology Summit 2018, Google London, UK.
  I talked about two research papers that were accepted to ICASSP 2018 at the poster session.
• A figure taken from our paper was used on the cover of the IEEE/ACM TASLP (January/February issue).