Imperial News

TSM students reach Hackathon Final

by Miranda Toora

TSM Students create an application for analysing emotions conveyed in speech which allows them to advance to the Oxford Hack finals.

On the weekend of 25th - 26th November, a group of three TSM students (Eduardo Ramos Fernandez, Jonas Verschueren and Jacek Golebiowski) attended a Hackathon organised at the University of Oxford (Oxford Hack). After 24 hours of continuous programming the team, TSM Hackers, presented an application for analysing emotions conveyed in speech. The app, called Speemo (SPEech to EMOtions), was warmly received and allowed the team to advance to the finals, beating 85% of participants.

The program uses signal processing techniques and a deep recurrent neural network to perform a live analysis on speech and determine which emotion - out of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise or lack of thereof - the speaker is most likely trying to convey. Going forward, the team would like the app to find some use assisting people with communication issues.

The code can be found on: https://github.com/TSM-Hackers/speemo