Ricerc@Sapienza

Dr. Di Benedetto’s research interests include speech and wireless communications. Her research interest in speech started since 1981 when she developed, during a master’s internship at IBM scientific center in Paris, France, a method for detecting voiced vs. voiceless sounds within a project dedicated to the development of computer-based tools for deaf children, and continued later with a Ph.D. topic focused on the acoustic and perceptual properties of vowels, that she mostly developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Speech Communication Group, under the supervision of Prof. Kenneth N. Stevens. In the following years, upon return in Italy, she directed for Sapienza, two European projects on the development of an Interactive system for Spoken European Language Training, and, from 1990 to 2000, her research focused on the analysis of the Italian language and in particular Italian consonants and gemination, within a project that was funded by Sapienza for a duration of over 10 years. Results of investigations on the Italian language were applied to the development of a speech synthesizer for Italian within the INFOVOX multi-lingual synthesis project. Thanks to the collaboration with the French laboratory LIMSI-CNRS her research on vowels expanded further to tackle the problem of the effect of vocal effort on spectral properties of vowels in French. In the 1990’s she was called for her expertise in speech to participate in the working group dedicated to the development of the speech coder for the first cellular communication system (2G), later known as GSM, under definition in Europe. This experience triggered her interest in wireless communications and as a consequence her research focused on the conception and designing of the next cellular generation. From 1995 to 2000, she directed for Sapienza four European projects on the design of UMTS (3G). Since 2000, she has been active in fostering the development of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio communications in Europe and directed for Sapienza several pioneering EU projects on UWB communications. As a result of her UWB research, Dr. Di Benedetto published in 2004 with Prentice Hall, the first published book on UWB communications, which included her key contributions to the design of UWB systems, and that was also later translated in Chinese.