We are proud to celebrate Kalle Lahtinen, doctoral researcher at Tampere University’s Signal Processing Research Centre, who has been selected as Researcher of the Month by Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland.
Kalle’s work focuses on Human and Machine Perception of Affect in Speech, exploring how emotions and linguistic affect emerge in spontaneous, unacted Finnish speech. His research bridges spoken and written language, combining signal processing, machine learning, and large-scale corpus analysis to better understand how meaning and emotion interact in everyday communication.
A key achievement from Kalle’s doctoral research is the creation of FinnAffect, the first large-scale Finnish corpus of spontaneous emotional speech. Compiled from trusted datasets such as Donate Speech, Helpuhe, and Tampuhe, FinnAffect includes over 1.4 million transcribed utterances and thousands of expert emotion annotations. The corpus will be published through the Language Bank of Finland and represents a major contribution to both linguistic research and speech technology development in Finland.
Warm congratulations to Kalle on this well‑deserved recognition, and thank you for advancing Finland’s leadership in speech, language, and affective computing research!
