Positions

Thank you for considering working with us!

Our lab has open and collaborative minds and often has various opportunities, including postdocs, visitors, and Ph.D. students. We want applicants to have solid fundamentals and interests in one or more of the following topics:

• Automatic speech recognition
• Speech enhancement and separation
• Spoken language understanding
• Machine learning for speech and language processing

Solid programming skills and open-source experiences are also preferred.

However, we also consider the research diversity. We’re interested in expertise outside the above topics or other unique experiences, which can be applied to speech and audio problems.

Please see the following for details of each application category.

Postdoc

• Currently, we don’t have an opening position, but if you really want to work with us, please contact us.
• If you’re interested in the position, we suggest you to have the following actions. Note that we would not respond to all applications.
•   Please email your CV to shinjiw@ieee.org with the subject “WAVLab postdoc applications”.
•   If you do not put it in the subject, we regard that you do not thoroughly investigate our lab’s activities in this webpage, and unfortunately, we may not respond to this email.
•   Note that your CV will be shared with other lab members (but we do not distribute it outside).
•   Please check our publications and find matches in advance. We really care about it.
•   Please clarify your available term. This is very important for the postdoc application.

PhD

•   Please submit your application through LTI. Unfortunately, we may not respond to a direct email about the Ph.D. application.

CMU undergraduate/master students

•   Please email your CV to shinjiw@ieee.org with the subject “WAVLab undergraduate/master applications”
•   If you do not put it in the subject, we regard that you do not thoroughly investigate our lab’s activities in this webpage, and unfortunately, we may not respond to this email.
•   Note that your CV will be shared with other lab members (but we do not distribute it outside).
•   We care about the educational perspectives for the undergraduate/master students to be familiar with the speech research background, required programming skills, knowledge of the cluster, and use of speech and audio toolkit. This period would be at least the first couple of months or longer. We believe that this is an essential process for you to start a solid research activity. If you want to publish a paper as soon as possible, our lab is not the best option for you, unfortunately. I recommend you to contact the other faculties.
•   Please refer to the FAQ to learn more about the interview and admission process.

Visting positions

•   Please email your CV to shinjiw@ieee.org with the subject “WAVLab visitor applications”.
•   If you do not put it in the subject, we regard that you do not thoroughly investigate our lab’s activities in this webpage, and unfortunately, we may not respond to this email.
•   Note that your CV will be shared with other lab members (but we do not distribute it outside).
•   We will not have funding support for the visitor position, basically. So, therefore, we will only accept self-funded researchers.
•   Please refer to the FAQ to learn more about the interview and admission process.

FAQ

• Do you have a Ph.D. opening?
  • Yes, we’ll always have at least one Ph.D. position per year.
• Who will I meet with during my interview?
  • The interview is of 2 stages
    • A preliminary interview with Ph.D. students
    • Interview with Prof. Shinji
• What is the structure of the preliminary interview?
  • The structure of the interview is as follows-
    • Basic Introduction of yourself as well as the interviewee (5 minutes)
    • Discussion of research experience of the interviewee (20 minutes)
    • General Questions (10 minutes)
    • Quiz (10 minutes) -> Either about Neural networks or Language Model fundamentals
    • Interviewee asks questions about lab (5 minutes)
• What are interviews with Shinji like?
  • The structure of the interview is as follows-
    • Introduction (5 minutes)
    • General Questions (20 minutes)
    • Interviewee asks questions about lab (5 minutes)
• What can I expect following my interview? What are my chances for being accepted?
  • After we finish the interviews, The committee combines the information from the interviews to form a complete picture of the applicants. We consider the overall quality, as well as fit with our lab and the research diversity of the lab. We also consider applications from students who have previously not worked in speech processing. This process takes a few weeks, after which we notify students if they have been accepted, waitlisted, or rejected. Additionally, not all offers are sent at the same time. If someone else receives an offer and you haven’t heard yet, don’t be discouraged!
• What should I do following my interviews?
  • Keep us informed of your status. If you are considering offers from other labs or have any deadlines specific to your program, please let us know. We try to move quickly, but we don’t want to lose a candidate who thinks that they won’t get in because they haven’t heard back yet.
• What are potential projects?
  • We work on almost every aspect of speech processing, from frontends like speech enhancement to speech recognition and text to speech, as well as downstream tasks like speech translation and spoken language understanding. The research projects assigned to you depend on your interest and are decided after you are accepted into our lab.