PhD, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1996)

MPhil, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1990)

BSc, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1988)

Tan Lee received his PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He has been working on speech and language related research since early 1990s. Tan Lee led the effort on developing Cantonese-focused spoken language technologies that have been widely licensed for industrial applications. His recent works are featured by in-depth and substantive collaboration across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including linguistics, education, psychology, and medicine. He is committed to apply signal processing and machine learning methods to atypical speech and language across various challenging human communication scenarios. Tan Lee co-invented ACEHearingTM, the winner of the Bronze Award in Asian Innovation Awards 2011. In 2023, he founded the Vocofy AI, a social enterprise providing technology solutions to enable speech communication of vocally disabled people.

Tan Lee was an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. He was the Vice Chair of ISCA Special Interest Group of Chinese Spoken Language Processing, and an Area Chair in the Technical Programme Committees of INTERSPEECH 2014, 2016 and 2018.

Tan Lee was the Associate Dean for Education of CUHK Faculty of Engineering during 2021-2024 and the Associate Dean for Student Affairs during 2011-2014. He received the CUHK Exemplary Teaching Award and the Faculty of Engineering’s Exemplary Teaching Awards for multiple times. Tan Lee was invited to teach advanced courses for elite computer science students at Tsinghua University, and at the Globex Summer Programme of Peking University. Since 2019, Tan Lee has been teaching and supervising talented secondary-school students from the Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education (HKAGE). Tan Lee is the Dean of Students of the SHHO College of CUHK during 2022 – 2025.

1.    Si Ioi Ng, Cymie Wing-Yee Ng, Jiarui Wang, and Tan Lee, “Automatic detection of speech sound disorder in Cantonese-speaking pre-school children,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 32, pp. 4355-4368, 2024.

2.    Yusheng Tian, Jingyu Li, and Tan Lee, “Creating personalized synthetic voices from articulation impaired speech using augmented reconstruction loss”, Proceedings of ICASSP 2024, pp.11501-11505.

3.    Dehua Tao, Tan Lee, Harold Chui, and Sarah Luk, “Modelling intrapersonal and interpersonal influences for automatic estimation of therapist empathy in counselling conversation,” Proceedings of ICASSP 2024, pp.12692-12696.

4.    Guangyan Zhang, Ying Qin, Wenjie Zhang, Jialun Wu, Mei Li, Yutao Gai, Feijun Jiang, and Tan Lee, “iEmoTTS: Toward robust cross-speaker emotion transfer and control for speech synthesis based on disentanglement between prosody and timbre,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol.31, pp.1693-1705, 2023.

5.    Jonathan Him Nok Lee, Eddie S. K. Chong, Harold Chui, Tan Lee, Sarah Luk, Dehua Tao, and Nicolette Wing Tung Lee, “A curvilinear association between therapists’ use of discourse particles and therapist empathy in psychotherapy,” Journal of Counselling Psychology, 70(5), 562-570, July 2023.

6.    Si-Ioi Ng, Rui-Si Ma, Tan Lee and Raymond Kim-Wai Sum, “Acoustical analysis of speech under physical stress in relation to physical activities and physical literacy,” Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022, pp.200-204, Lisbon, Portugal, May 23-26, 2022.

7.    Shuiyang Mao, P. C. Ching and Tan Lee, “Enhancing segment-based speech emotion recognition by iterative self-learning,” IEEE/ACM Trans. on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 30, pp.123-134, 2022.

8.    Matthew King-Hang Ma, Manson Cheuk-Man Fong, Chenwei Xie, Tan Lee, Guanrong Chen and William Shiyuan Wang, “Regularity and randomness in ageing: Differences in resting-state EEG complexity measured by largest Lyapunov exponent,” Neuroimage: Reports, December 2021.

9.    Xurong Xie, Xunying Liu, Tan Lee and Lan Wang, “Bayesian learning for deep neural network adaptation,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 29, pp. 2096-2110, 2021.

10.  Daxin Tan and Tan Lee, “Fine-grained style modeling, transfer and prediction in text-to-speech synthesis via phone-level content-style disentanglement,” Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2021, pp.4683-4687.

11.  Y. Qin, Tan Lee and Anthony P. H. Kong, “Automatic assessment of speech impairment in Cantonese-speaking people with aphasia,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topic in Signal Processing, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 331-345, February 2020.

12.  Si-Ioi Ng, Cymie Wing-Yee Ng, Jiarui Wang, Tan Lee, Kathy Yuet-Sheung Lee, and Michael Chi-Fai Tong, “CUCHILD: A large-scale Cantonese corpus of child speech for phonology and articulation assessment,” Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2020, pp.424-428, Shanghai, October 2020.

13.  Yuzhong Wu and Tan Lee, “Enhancing sound texture in CNN-based acoustic scene classification,” Proceedings of ICASSP 2019, pp.815-819, Brighton, May 2019.

14.  Xurong Xie, Xunying Liu, Tan Lee, Shoukang Hu, and Lan Wang, “BLHUC: Bayesian learning of hidden unit contributions for deep neural network speaker adaptation,” Proceedings of ICASSP 2019, pp.5711-5715, Brighton, May 2019. [Best Student Paper]