Internships MOASIS: Transcription of EAR Speech Data

Dear students - We look for motivated research interns!

Focus of internship(s):

The URPP "Dynamics of Healthy Aging" is offering internships within the "Mobiity, Activity, and Social Interactions Study" (MOASIS), in which we track a wide range of activities and experiences in older adults' daily lives using mobile sensing.

Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) is an audio recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds and speech in real life. in the MOASIS project, we used the EAR and collected a random sample of over 100'000 sound files (50 s long) from 148 healthy older adults across 1 month. In order to analyze the content of these sound files with respect to older adults' daily activities and interactions, we detect and transcribe human speech.

Start and duraction of internships:

The internships can begin in July 2022 or onwards. A typical internship is 6 months long (20%).

Tasks for the student(s):

• Speech segments of each participant (in each 50-second audio file) will be manually transcribed to text
• During the speech-to-text process, speech segments will also be translated from Swiss German to Standard German
• Speech segments will be coded for some psychological variables (e.g., Is the participant taling about the past or not?) 

The goal of the analysis is to better understand the real-life social and cognitive activities and well-being of older adults.

The internship(s) will be supervised by Dr. Burcu Demiray and can be pursued working from home (if needed).

If interested: Please contact Dr. Burcu Demiray

Application materials: Motivation letter, CV and a copy of your Bachelor's transcript.