Dragos Balan

Profile

I am working in collaboration with Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid (National Institute for Sound & Vision) on the Oral History - Stories at the Museum around Artworks (OH-SMArt) project. OH-SMArt is a long term initiative to significantly improve the digital research chain around using Oral History and spoken narratives, with research into artworks and museums as a use case. My role within this project is to evaluate state-of-the-art speech recognition models such as Whisper and XLS-R and propose and implement one of the models as an automatic transcriber within the infrastructure of the project which can be used as a tool by researchers working with digital media archives to automatically transcribe Oral History interviews.

As about my background, I studied the Bachelor of Computer Science & Engineering at TU Delft and the Voice Technology Master at University of Groningen - Campus Fryslân. My master's thesis topic is using state-of-the-art models (mainly XLS-R) for Frisian Automatic Speech Recognition.

My general interests are speech technology-related, focusing on speech recognition for low-resource contexts (languages, groups of speakers, etc.).

publications