It is a great pleasure to announce that Fuxiang Tao, PhD student under my supervision, graduated with a thesis entitled “Speech-based Automatic Depression Detection via Biomarkers Identification and Artificial Intelligence Approaches”.

Fuxiang published three papers during his PhD, all in the upper quartile of the CORE conference ranking:

• F.Tao, X.Ge, W.Ma, A.Esposito and A.Vinciarelli, “Multi-Local Attention for Speech-Based Depression Detection“, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Audio, Speech and Signal Processing, 2023.
• F.Tao, A.Esposito, A.Vinciarelli, “The Androids Corpus: A New Publicly Available Benchmark for Speech Based Depression Detection“, Proceedings of Interspeech, 4149–4153, 2023.
• F.Tao, A.Esposito and A.Vinciarelli, “Spotting the Traces of Depression in Read Speech: An Approach Based on Computational Paralinguistics and Social Signal Processing“, Proceedings of Interspeech, 2020.

Special thanks to the examiners Dr Simone Stumpf (University of Glasgow) and Prof Ian McLaughlin (Singapore Institute of Technology) for their feedback about the Thesis.

Dr Tao will now move to Sheffield where he will join the group of Prof Heidi Christensen. It will be a great opportunity for Fuxiang to join a department hosting some of the best experts in speech processing, including Prof Thomas Hair and prof Roger Moore.