SPEECH

SCUBA

SAVOIR VIVRE

    Seems like a lot of cool things start with S.   Howdee, my name's Holger Quast, I am affiliated with the Machine Perception Lab and the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego as a former visiting scholar.  My home at the University of Göttingen's Physics of Oscillations Institute is the Speech and Neural Networks group.   Currently Gent, Belgium, is my main abode. I have just finished my thesis work on natural language speech interfaces for the University of Göttingen and Bosch r&d (so you'll be able to ask your car in the not-so-far future 'My dear automobile, what is that marvellous beach to my right where beautiful women abound?' and after doing some nifty speech/natural language processing, looking on its GPS, maps, possibly the internet, it shall tell you 'That's La Jolla Shores, Sir. Prepare the surfboard!' ). 

    My main interests are nonverbal vocal communication and pattern recognition machines that can perceive speakers as happy, angry, confident, or whatever the speaker may sound like.  My goal is to build more natural human-computer interfaces, training aids for orators who want to be perceived in a certain manner (e.g. teachers as interesting!), speech therapy tools for the deaf or hard of hearing, accent and pronunciation trainers for language students, stress level monitoring for pilots, etc.  Check out a brief description of how I do this on my SPEECH link.

    One of the truly cool things you can do here in San Diego is scuba diving.   Think about diving in shallow warm, calm water, no wetsuit or weights... well, let me tell you it ain't nothing like that out here.   This is adventure-diving.  Nothing beats diving underneath the radiant orange kelp canopy, beams of sunlight illuminating the underwater forest, home to the playful sea lion, the bright-orange colored garibaldi, the elegant leopardshark and the almost-as-elegant Holkfish.   It's awesome.   If you want to see what's going on in La Jolla waters or take one of my scuba courses here at UCSD, click SCUBA.

    Needless to say, life is pretty smooth in Southern California.   I put up some pictures here for friends and family.   If you want to see where I hang out in my spare time when I am in San Diego, here are some pics I've taken in the hood.

 
Currently, you can find me here: (remove the _no_spam_ from email addresses) 

Meet my dive partner  Honey Ryder.

Dr. Holger Quast Drittes Physikalisches Institut, Universität Göttingen Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1 37077 Göttingen Germany  holcus@_no_spam_physik3.gwdg.de

last updated June 12, 2006    HQ