After weeks of much anticipation (brought by the fear of the proposal deadline, mind you), my thesis topic has already been decided.

Development of Emotion Classification for Call Center Speech Analysis

Basically, my thesis partner and I will have to analyze a number of recordings to determine the factors indicating certain moods of customers. Of course, this could be done by the call center agent but the goal of this project is to actually replace a call center agent with a machine so that he/she could go on doing more tasks.

Truth to be told, I have never been this excited to take on an academic project ever since the license plate recognition project for a number of reasons:

1. I am officially assigned to the speech group of DSP — my preference ever since my application
2. I get to be tutored under Sir Franz and Dean Gev (yup, THE College Dean). Both a blessing and a challenge, if you ask me.
3. I have the chance to learn a new subject aside from hardcore signals processing.
4. The project is part of a big undertaking of DSP, in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Speech Comm and Theater Arts. Plus, it has already been approved by the OVCRD (Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Development).
5. A corollary of number 3: My thesis partner and I will be granted honorarium! Woot!

Of course, there are times when I ask myself what in the world did I put myself into. Then again, it’s only a few moments where you could actually seize an undertaking that will be worth all the hard work. Yes, Risha the geek is alive once again.

And since it will take a huge amount of my time, expect more thesis entries from this point onward.