MUET Faculty Members Secure Top Rank in Interspeech Challenge

A team of researchers from Mehran University of Engineering & Technology (MUET), Pakistan, and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia, participated in the Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition from Spontaneous Speech (ADReSSo) challenge at Interspeech 2021. Interspeech is one of the prestigious conferences in speech communication and technology, in particular computational processing of speech. The challenge consisted of three subtasks, i.e. Alzheimer's Dementia Classification, Mini-Mental State Examination Score Prediction, and Prediction of Cognitive Decline. The ADReSSo challenge received 26 system submissions from 15 different countries.

Members of Team MUET-RMIT include Dr. Zafi Sherhan Syed who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication Engineering (MUET), Muhammad Shehram Shah Syed, an Assistant Professor from the Department of Software Engineering (MUET) and currently a doctoral researcher at RMIT, and Prof. Margaret Lech and Prof. Irena Pirogova, both of whom are Professors at the School of Engineering at RMIT.

The team secured top rank for the subtask on Prediction of Cognitive Decline with a mean-f1-score of 73.80%, with researchers from the University of Massachusetts Boston standing second with a score of 70.91%. Team MUET-RMIT’s proposed method stood second for the subtask on Alzheimer's Dementia Classification with a mean-f1-score of 84.46% that is closely behind the score of 84.49% achieved by the team from University of Sheffield, who secured the first place.

Team MUET-RMIT stood third for the subtask on MMSE score prediction in which their proposed method achieved a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 4.35 compared to second placed team from Universidad de Buenos Aires who achieved an RMSE of 4.26, and the first placed team from the University of Massachusetts Boston whose method achieved an RMSE of 3.85.

In addition to this, Mr. Shehram was the recipient of a very generous travel grant from the International Speech Communication Association.

Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro and Department of Telecommunication and Software Engineering congratulates Team MUET-RMIT on this achievement.

Figure 1: Screenshot from the announcement of winners for the ADReSSo challenge.