Fred Cummins

Biography

Research Interests:

• Cognitive Science
• coordination
• dynamics
• motor control
• phonetics
• prosody
• speech
• timing

General

Name and Title: 

Dr Fred Cummins BA MA PhD

Position: 

Lecturer

Phone: 

+353 1 716 2902

Email: 

Office: 

CSI / A1.11

Address:
School of Computer Science & Informatics
Room: A1.11
Computer Science Building
Belfield
Dublin 4

• Biography
• Professional
• Publications
• Research
• Teaching
• Collaborators

Biography

PhD (Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Joint Major) Indiana University, 1997. Lecturer, UCD, since 1999. Group leader, Media Lab Europe, 2000-2004.

My principal professional interests lie in helping to develop a cognitive science that does justice to the reality of subjective experience.  I have particular interests in rhythm, speech, language, enaction, ecological psychology, and the metaphysical basis of experience. My empirical work is concerned with understanding coordination in skilled action, with special emphasis on speech. I am an unreformed anti-representationalist and I think in terms of dynamic systems theory.

Professional

Honours & Awards:

• Year: 1998.
  Title: Cognitive Science Outstanding Dissertation Award , Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
• Year: 1997.
  Title: Awarded Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University
• Year: 1996.
  Title: Research Incentive Dissertation Year Fellowship Award, University Graduate School, Indiana University
• Year: 1996.
  Title: Cognitive Science Summer Research Award, Indiana University
• Year: 1996.
  Title: Runner up for Marr prize, 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, San Diego, CA
• Year: 1995.
  Title: Awarded Best Student Paper in Speech Communication, 130th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, St Louis, MO
• Year: 1995.
  Title: Cognitive Science Summer Research Award, Indiana University
• Year: 1993.
  Title: Connectionist Models Summer School Fellowship, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
• Year: 1993.
  Title: Cognitive Science Summer Research Award, Indiana University
• Year: 1991.
  Title: Cognitive Science Fellowship, Indiana University
• Year: 1991.
  Title: Gold Medal Award on graduation, Trinity College Dublin
• Year: 1989.
  Title: Foundation Scholarship, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Professional Associations:

• Association: Acoustical Society of America, Function/Role: *
• Association: Cognitive Science Society, Function/Role: *
• Association: Cognitive Science Society of Ireland, Function/Role: *
• Association: Irish Research Scientists Association, Function/Role: *
• Association: Irish Speech Group, Function/Role: *

Patents:

• Patent PCT/EP03/03596 : Speaker Identification of Verification Using Temporal Measurements

Publications

Please see my personal website at http://pworldrworld.com/fred for a more reliable list of publications, with pdfs.

Book Chapters:

• Juraj Simko and Fred Cummins (2010) 'Sequencing Embodied Gestures in Speech' In: John Gray and Samia Nefti-Meziani (eds). Advances in Cognitive System. Somewhere: IET. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2006) 'Probing the dynamics of speech production' In: Methods in Empirical Prosody Research. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1999) 'Synergetic organization in speech rhythm' In: Tschacher, W. and Dauwalder, J.-P (eds). Dynamics, Synergetics, Autonomous Agents. Singapore: World Scientific. [Details]
• Port, R., Tajima, K., and Cummins, F. (1999) 'Speech and rhythmic behavior' In: Savelsburgh, G. J. P., van der Maas, H., and van Geert, P. C. L (eds). The Non-linear Analysis of Developmental Processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier. [Details]
• Port, R. F., Cummins, F., and McAuley, J. D. (1995) 'Naive time, temporal patterns and human audition' In: Port, R. F. and van Gelder, T (eds). Mind as Motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Details]

Books Edited:

• Vatakis, A., Esposito, A., Giagkou, M., Cummins, F., and Papadelis, G (Ed.). (2011) Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception: Proceedings of the COST TD0904 International Workshop. Berlin: Springer. [Details]

Peer Reviewed Journals:

• Cummins, Fred (2011) 'Periodic and aperiodic synchronization in skilled action'. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5 (170). [DOI] [Details]
• Cummins, Fred (2011) 'Gaze and Blinking in Dyadic Conversation: A Study in Coordinated Behavior Among Individuals'. Language and Cognitive Processes, . [Details]
• Simko, Juraj and Cummins, Fred (2011) 'Sequencing and optimization within an embodied task dynamic model'. Cognitive Science, 35 (3):527-562. [Details]
• Simko, J. and Cummins, F. (2010) 'Embodied Task Dynamics'. Psychological Review, 117 (4):1229-1246. [Details]
• Leonard, Thomas and Cummins, Fred (2010) 'The temporal relation between beat gestures and speech'. Language and Cognitive Processes, . [DOI] [Details]
• Cummins, F. and Simko, J. (2009) 'Notes on phase and coordination, and their application to rhythm and timing in speech'. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 13 (3):7-18. [Details]
• Fred Cummins (2009) 'Rhythm as an affordance for the entrainment of movement'. Phonetica, 66 (1-2):15-28. [Details]
• Fred Cummins (2009) 'Rhythm as entrainment: The case of synchronous speech'. Journal of Phonetics, 37 (1):16-28. [Details]
• Jackson S, Cummins F, Brady, N. (2008) 'Rapid perceptual switching of a reversible biological figure'. PLoS ONE, 3 (12). [DOI] [Details]
• Grimaldi, M., Cummins, F., (2008) 'Speaker identification using instantaneous frequencies'. IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, 16 (6):1097-1111. [Details]
• Jackson, S., Cummins, F., Brady, N., (2007) 'Rotating walker: Multistable perception of an ambiguous biological figure'. Perception, 36 :74-74. [Details]
• Horgan, P., Cummins, F., (2006) 'Modeling dopamine activity by Reinforcement Learning methods: implications from two recent models'. Artificial Intelligence Review, 26 (1-2):49-62. [Details]
• Jackson, Stuart and Brady, Nuala and Cummins, Fred and Monaghan, Kenneth (2006) 'Interaction effects in simultaneous motor control and movement perception tasks'. Artificial Intelligence Review, 26 (1):141-154. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2005) 'Interval timing in spoken lists of words'. MUSIC PERCEPTION, 22 (3):497-508. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2003) 'Practice and performance in speech produced synchronously'. Journal of Phonetics, 31 (2):139-148. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2002) 'On synchronous speech'. Acoustic Research Letters Online, 3 (1):7-11. [Details]
• Gers, F. A., Schmidhuber, J., and Cummins, F. (2000) 'Learning to forget: Continual prediction with LSTM'. Neural Computation, 12 (10):2451-2471. [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1999) 'Some lengthening factors in English speech combine additively at most rates'. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105 (1):476-480. [Details]
• Cummins, F. and Port, R. F. (1998) 'Rhythmic constraints on stress timing in English'. Journal of Phonetics, 26 (2):145-171. [Details]

Other Journals:

• Cummins, F. (2003) 'Entraining speech with speech and metronomes' Cadernos de Estudos Linguisticos 43 :55-70. [Details]

Conference Publications:

• Simko, J. and Cummins, F. and Benus, S. (2011) Investigating the stability of intergestural timing relations INTERSPEECH 2011 Firenze, IT, [Details]
• Simko, J. and Cummins, F. and Benus, S. (2011) An analysis of the relative timing of coarticulated gestures within VCV sequences ICPhS XVII Hong Kong, [Details]
• Cummins, Fred (2010) Coordination, not control, is central to movement Proceedings of COST 2102 Caserta, IT, [Details]
• Cummins, Fred (2010) Blinking in face to face communication 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Galway, IE, , pp.74-83 [Details]
• Cummins, Fred (2009) Phase and coordination in speech production . In: Coyle, L. and Dunnion, J. and Freyne, J eds. 20th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science , pp.13-22 [Details]
• Phelan, C., Bleakley, C., and Cummins, F. (2009) Adapting and parameterising auditory icons for use in a synthetic musical instrument IET Irish Signals and Systems Conference (ISSC), Dublin, Ireland [Details]
• Oertel, C. et al. (2010) D64: A corpus of richly recorded conversational interaction . In: Kipp, M., Martin, J.-C., Paggio, P., and Heylen, D. (eds) eds. LREC 2010 Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality Valetta, Malta, , pp.27-30 [Details]
• Marco Grimaldi and Fred Cummins (2009) Speech style and speaker recognition: a case study Proceedings of INTERSPEECH [Details]
• Jackson,S., Brady, N., & Cummins, F. (2008) Rotating Walker: An Ambigious bilogical stimulus reveals biases in human vision . In: Journal of Vision eds. Vision Sciences Meeting Naples, Florida, USA, , 09-MAY-08 - 14-MAY-08 , pp.252-252a [Details]
• Jackson,S., Brady, N., & Cummins, F. (2007) Perceptual Consequences of the percept's action: The Role of Human Form in Perceiving an Ambigious Rotating Walker Three Dimensional Sensory and Motor Space: Perceptual Consequences of Motor Action Sant Feliu de Guixois, Spain, , 06-OCT-07 - 11-NOV-07 [Details]
• Jackson, S., Cummins, F., Brady, N., (2007) Perception Rotating walker: Multistable perception of an ambiguous biological figure , pp.74-74 [Details]
• Cummins, F., Grimaldi, M., Leonard, T., Simko, J. (2006) The CHAINS corpus: CHAracterizing INdividual Speakers In Proc of SPECOM'06 St Petersburg, RU, , pp.431-435 [Details]
• Jackson, S., Brady, N., Cummins, F. & Monaghan, K. (2006) Interaction effects in simultaneous motor control and movement perception tasks 17th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Queens' University, Belfast, , 11-SEP-06 - 13-SEP-06 [Details]
• Jackson, S., Brady, N., Cummins, F. & Monaghan, K. (2006) Action understanding: an investigation into the simultaneous perception and performance of human movement 7th International Multisensory Research Forum Trinity College, Dublin, , 18-JUN-06 - 21-MAY-06 [Details]
• Jackson, S., Brady, N., Cummins, F., Monaghan, K., (2006) Artificial Intelligence Review Interaction effects in simultaneous motor control and movement perception tasks , pp.141-154 [Details]
• Fred Cummins (2009) Phenomenal worlds and nervous system activity Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Amsterdam, [Details]
• Prys, D, Williams, B, Hicks, B, Jones, D, Ní Chasaide, A, Gobl, C, Carson-Berndsen, J, Cummins, F, Ní Chiosáin, M, McKenna, J, Scaife, R & Uí Dhonnachadha, E (2004) WISPR: Speech processing resources in Welsh and Irish Proceedings of the SALTMIL Workshop: First steps in language documentation for minority languages Lisbon, [Details]
• Juraj Simko and Fred Cummins (2009) Sequencing of articulatory gestures using cost optimization Proceedings of INTERSPEECH Brighton, U.K, [Details]
• Fred Cummins (2009) Deep affordance: seeing the self in the world 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology Bloominton, IN, [Details]
• Fred Cummins (2008) Auditory event structure and speech 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody Campinas, Brazil, [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2007) Speech synchronization: Investigating the links between perception and action in speech production International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) Saarbruecken, DE, [Details]
• Reitter, D. and Panttaja, E. M. and Cummins, F. (2004) UI on the fly: Generating a multimodal user interface HLT/NAACL [Details]
• Brucker-Cohen, J. and Bennett, M. and Agamanolis, S. and Cummins, F. and Doyle, L. (2004) Bumplist: developing beneficial email list structures CHI [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2003) Rhythmic grouping in word lists: competing roles of syllables, words and stress feet 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) Barcelona, , pp.325-328 [Details]
• Gers, F. A. and Schmidhuber, J. and Cummins, F. (1999) Continual prediction using LSTM with forget gates Neural Nets, WIRN , pp.133-138 [Details]
• Gers, F. A. and Schmidhuber, J. and Cummins, F. (1999) Learning to forget: Continual prediction with LSTM International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) Edinburgh, , pp.850-855 [Details]
• Cummins, F. and Port, R. F. (1996) Rhythmic constraints on English stress timing . In: Bunell, H. T. and Idsardi, W eds. 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) Wilmington, DE, , pp.2036-2039 [Details]
• Horgan, P. Cummins, F. (2006) Modeling dopamine activity by reinforcement learning methods: implications from two recent models In Proc. of the 17th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science [Details]
• Jackson, S., Brady, N., Cummins, F., Monaghan, K. (2006) Interaction effects in simultaneous motor control and movement perception tasks In Proceedings of the 17th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2006) Measuring synchronization among speakers reading together In Proc. ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics Athens, GR, , pp.105-108 [Details]
• Bennett, M. and Cummins, F. (2004) ORRIL: A Simple Building Blocks Approach to Zoomable User Interfaces IV 2004 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Visualization *, [Details]
• Cummins, F., Doherty, C., and Dilly, L. (2004) Discrimination of pitch change in speech- and non-speech stimuli Proceedings of the 15th Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference Castlebar, Ireland, , pp.29-38 [Details]
• Panttaja, E., Reitter, D., and Cummins, F. (2004) The evaluation of adaptable multimodal system outputs Proceedings of the Workshop on Robust and Adaptive Information Processing for Mobile Speech Interfaces, COLING 2004 *, [Details]
• Cummins, Fred and Bravo, M. E. (2004) Melody and serial recall Proceedings of the 15th Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference (2004) Castlebar, Ireland, , pp.209-215 [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2002) Speech Rhythm and Rhythmic Taxonomy Proceedings of Prosody 2002 Aix en Provence, , pp.121-126 [Details]
• Cummins, Fred and Roy, Deb. (2001) Using Synchronous Speech to minimize variability in pause placement Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics (2001) *, , pp.201-206 [Details]
• Bohan, A.; E. Creedon, J. Carson-Berndsen & F. Cummins (2001) Application of a Computational Model of Phonology to Speech Synthesis AICS 2001 Maynooth, [Details]
• Cummins, F., Gers, F., and Schmidhuber, J. (1999) Language identification from prosody without explicit features EUROSPEECH Budapest, , pp.371-374 [Details]
• Cummins, F. and Port, R. F. (1996) Rhythmic commonalities between hand gestures and speech 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society *, , pp.415-419 [Details]
• Port, R., Cummins, F., and Gasser, M. (1996) A dynamic approach to rhythm in language: Toward a temporal phonology Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago. (1996) *, , pp.375-397 [Details]
• Port, R.F., Tajima, K., and Cummins, F. (1996) Self-Entrainment in Animal Behavior and Human Speech Online Proceedings of the 1996 Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference. (1996) *, [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1993) Representation of temporal patterns in recurrent neural networks 15th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, (1993) *, , pp.377-382 [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2005) The conductor model of online speech modulation Proceedings of the 16th Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference Portstuart, Northern Ireland, , pp.51-60 [Details]
• Cummins, F. and Port, R. (1993) On the treatment of time in recurrent neural networks Proceedings of the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. 1993 *, , pp.211-218 [Details]
• Port, R. and Cummins, F. (1992) The English voicing contrast as velocity perturbation International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) Alberta, , pp.1311-1314 [Details]
• Cummins, F., Doherty, C., Dilley, L. (2006) Phrase-final pitch discrimination in English 3rd Intl. Conf. on Speech Prosody [Details]
• Cummins, F., Grimaldi, M., Leonard, T., Simko, J. (2006) The CHAINS corpus: CHAracterizing INdividual Speakers In Proc of SPECOM'06 St Petersburg, RU, , pp.431-435 [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1998) Limit cycle dynamics in prosody In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress on Acoustics (ICA) and the 135th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). 1998 *, [Details]
• Cummins, Fred (2000) Prosodic characteristics of synchronous speech Proceedings of the Prosody 2000: speech recognition and synthesis Krakow, Poland, , pp.45-49 [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2004), (2004) Synchronization among speakers reduces macroscopic temporal variability 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society *, , pp.304-309 [Details]
• Zvonik, E. and Cummins, F. (2003) The effect of surrounding phrase lengths on pause duration EUROSPEECH Geneva, , 01-SEP-03 - 04-SEP-03 , pp.777-780 [Details]
• Zvonik, E. and Cummins, F. (2002) Pause duration and variability in read texts ICSLP Denver, CO, , 16-SEP-02 - 20-SEP-02 , pp.1109-1112 [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2002) Classifying languages based on speech rhythm AICS 2002 Limerick, , 12-SEP-02 - 12-SEP-02 [Details]
• Olinsky, C. and Cummins, F. (2002) Iterative English accent adaptation in a speech synthesis system IEEE workshop on speech synthesis Santa Monica, CA, , 11-SEP-02 - 13-SEP-02 [Details]

Abstract

• Cummins, F. (1995) Dynamic information for vowel identity is formant based, while steady-state information is based on spectral shape. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96(5):3257: Abstract [Details]

Published abstracts

• Jackson, S. and Cummins, F. and Brady, N. (2007) Rotating walker: Multistable perception of an ambiguous biological figure. Perception, 36 (ECVP Abstract Supplement): Published abstracts [Details]
• Wang, B. and Cummins, F. (2003) Intonation Contour in Synchronous Speech. Published abstracts [Details]
• Ashby, S. and Cummins, F. (2003). (2003) Acoustic characteristics of listener-constrained speech. Published abstracts [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2002) Rhythmic organization of read word lists. Published abstracts [Details]
• Ashby, S., Cummins, F., and Roy, D. (2002) The ads-to-ids continuum: Developing an index for the study of infant directed speech prosody. Published abstracts [Details]
• Cummins, F. (2001) Reducing expressive variation in speech with synchronous speech. Published abstracts [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1998) Limit cycle dynamics in prosody. Published abstracts [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1995) Identification of rhythmic forms of speech production. Published abstracts [Details]
• Cummins, F. (1994) A novel architecture for the recognition of periodic signals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96(5):3257: Published abstracts [Details]

Reports

• Cummins, F., Gers, F., and Schmidhuber, J. (1999) Comparing prosody across many languages. Reports [Details]
• Gers, F. A., Schmidhuber, J., and Cummins, F. (1999) Learning to forget: Continual prediction with LSTM. Reports [Details]
• Cummins, F., Gers, F., and Schmidhuber, J. (1999) Automatic discrimination among languages based on prosody alone. Reports [Details]
• Cummins, F., Anderson, S., Port, R. F., and McAuley, J. D (1993) A dynamic systems model for temporal pattern recognition. Reports [Details]

Technical Publication

• Cummins, F. (2007) The quantitative estimation of asynchrony among concurrent speakers. University College Dublin: Technical Publication [Details]

Dissertations/Theses

• Cummins, F. (1997) Rhythmic coordination in English speech: An experimental study. Technical report 198, Indiana University Cognitive Science Program: Dissertations/Theses [Details]

Research

Research Interests:

Speech, Cognitive Science Foundations

Post-cognitive approaches to the foundations of cognition; Temporal patterning in speech production and perception; Speech rhythm; Motor control and the coordination of skilled action; Dynamic modeling within cognitive science; Gesture, Gaze and Blinking; Speech rate; Conversational interaction; Individual and social cognition; Subjective experience.  Relation between latter-day approaches to Cognitive Science and recurrent themes in Eastern Religious Philosophy.

Research Projects:

• Sponsor : Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology (IRCSET)
  Title : The behavioural and neural correlates of action representation
  Start Date / End Date : 01-OCT-06 / 30-SEP-09
  
• Sponsor : Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
  Title : CHAINS: CHAracterizing Individual Speakers: Basic and Applied Research on Speaker Identity
  Start Date / End Date : 01-APR-05 / 30-SEP-09
  
• Sponsor : Higher Education Authority (HEA)
  Title : Speech where needed: enabling the development of speech technology for very many languages
  Start Date / End Date : 01-JAN-02 / 30-APR-08
  
• Sponsor : Enterprise Ireland (EI)
  Title : Text to speech quickly: facilitating rapid development of TTS systems for communities with low literary rates.
  Start Date / End Date : 01-OCT-01 / 30-SEP-03
  
• Sponsor : Higher Education Authority (HEA)
  Title : Understanding wholesale changes to speech timing and intonation
  Start Date / End Date : 01-JAN-01 / 31-DEC-01
  
• Sponsor : European Commission FP6
  Title : European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems (euCognition)
  Start Date / End Date : 01-JAN-06 / 31-DEC-08
  
• Sponsor : University College Dublin (UCD)
  Title : Rhythm perception and production workshop
  Start Date / End Date : 28-AUG-06 / 31-AUG-06
  

Teaching

Modules Co-ordinated:

• 2007   COMP40630     Computer Science: Human Computer Interface
• 2007   COMP40260     Computer Science: Connectionism
• 2007   COMP40290     Computer Science: Research Project in Cognitive Science
• 2007   COMP40280     Computer Science: Topics in Cognitive Science
• 2007   COMP20090     Computer Science: Introduction to Cognitive Science

Current Postgraduate Students:

Collaborators

External Collaborators:

• Wang Bei, Minzu University, Beijing, PRC;
  Simko, Juraj, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, DE;
  Benus, Stefan, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia;