Henk van den Heuvel

Henk van den Heuvel is an expert on production and curation of language and speech databases, transcription of speech (orthographical and phonetic); and automatic speech recognition and language learning. Research group Language and Speech Technology

He is director of the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) and Head of the Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Arts.
He is also Research Data Manager (data steward) for the Faculty of Arts.

• 2015 - 2023 CLARIAH: Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and HumanitiesMore information
• 2019 - 2022 SSHOC will create the social sciences and humanities area of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) thereby facilitating access to flexible, scalable research data and related services streamlined to the precise needs of the SSH community.More information
• 2020 - 2023 The HoMed project (Homo Medicinalis) will implement a SSH research infrastructure with an enormous potential for automatic transcription of sensitive audio-visual (AV) recordings. Its use case will focus on AV-recordings of medical consultations on the use of pharmaceuticals (henceforth ‘MedPharm’). MedPharm in practice shows situations where patients often appear not to be able to understand proper medicine use. To overcome unintentional medicine use we need to better understand the attribution of meaning to medicines. Therefore, recordings and transcriptions of patient consultations are needed. In HoMed a standard automatic speech recogniser (ASR) for Dutch will be adapted to MedPharm discourses, since essential jargon is not part of the vocabulary of the current generic ASR. The ASR will be retrained on existing radio and tv data and on highly sensitive AV-recordings of patient consultations at Nivel. More information
• 2021 - 2023 ST.CART develops speech technology applications and two Artificial Intelligence products: a care assistant ( the Care Assistant), and a Reading Tutor (the Digi Juf). The Digi Juf motivates children to learn to read in a fun way and adapts adaptively to the level of the student. The Care Assistant is a new module based on an existing Virtual Assistant (Anne) - which, for example, helps elderly people with dementia to remain independent for longer - which can diagnose specific diseases (Parkinson's, Alzheimer's) based on speech characteristics.More information