First La Salle Campus Barcelona Symposium on Research and Teaching

On January 26^th took place the 1^st Symposium on Research and Teaching at La Salle – Universitat Ramon Llull (URL), which aimed at bringing together researchers from the campus to share their practices in taking their research to the classrooms for undergraduate and master's students.

A total of 12 researchers from the different research groups at La Salle Campus Barcelona presented their contributions. Among the participants, two researchers from the Research Group on Media Technologies (GTM): Dr Joan Claudi Socoró and Dr Xavier Sevillano.

Dr. Joan Claudi Socoró presented two activities undertaken during first semester within the subject named “Audio and speech processing”, which is included in the study plan of undergraduate degrees in Multimedia Engineering and Audiovisual Systems Engineering. The aim of these two activities were focused on engaging students throughout the promotion of some research methods developed within the Signal processing research line of the GTM. The first activity was a practical exercise in groups of 3 people, in which students used an available labelled audio dataset (“TUT Acoustic scenes 2017”, composed of indoor and outdoor audio scenes of 10s length each), and they were challenged to design two Matlab scripts to organize the dataset, to perform its audio feature-based parameterization and to train and test four type of classifiers. The second activity was devoted to ask students to participate in a subjective listening test to assess the contribution of glottal source and vocal tract in two expressive speech styles (aggressive and happy) in Spanish.

Dr Xavier Sevillano presented his experience in communicating his research to his students in the classroom and engaging them in collaborations. He shared his thoughts on the fact that students in the Engineering School at La Salle – URL are mostly unaware of the research conducted by the academic staff. To fight against this situation, Dr Sevillano presented a threefold methodology based on i) introducing research in lectures with a context, ii) presenting a research slideshow highlighting students’ collaborations, and iii) boosting BSc and MSc theses with scientific potential. As a result of these efforts, a total of fifteen students have collaborated in different research projects since 2014, totalizing 10 BSc theses and 7 MSc theses. From these collaborations, nine publications in preprint servers, international journals and indexed journals have been produced, and three more publications are on their way.

This Symposium, jointly organized by the Research Policies Direction and the Academic Policies Direction of La Salle Campus Barcelona, is envisioned as an instrument to achieve the goal that 80% of the students in the campus interact with research activities during their studies.