Deok-Hyeon Cho (조덕현)

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University

Research in Affective Computing:
Emotional Speech Synthesis • Conversational Speech Synthesis • Full Duplex Speech-to-Speech • Emotion Recognition
• Emotional Voice Conversion • Multimodal Affective Modeling

Download CV

🎓 Education

• [Sep. 2022 - Present] Korea University, Seoul, South Korea.

  • Integrated M.S.&Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence in Pattern Recognition & Machine Learning Lab, under the supervision of Seong-Whan Lee.
  • GPA: 4.19 / 4.50

• [Mar. 2016 – Jul. 2022] Hanyang University, Ansan, South Korea.

  • B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics.
  • GPA: 4.40 / 4.50

💻 Research Projects

1. Development of interjection utterances for natural speech synthesis

• Institution: Samsung Research, Korea
• Duration: May. 2024 ~ Dec. 2024

2. Cross-speaker controllable emotion transfer TTS (Voltron)

• Institution: Thomas Crown, USA
• Duration: Sep. 2025 - Oct. 2025

3. Full Duplex Speech-to-Speech Conversational AI

• Institution: Murf AI, USA
• Duration: Oct. 2025 ~ Oct. 2026

💼 Employment History

• [Jan. 2022 - Feb.2022] RexSoft (Intern) | Development Department

  • Debugged and enhanced the REX program

• [Jun. 2021 – Jul.2021] Visang Education (Intern) | E-Learning Content Planning Department (2021)

  • Managed data entry, validation, analysis, and report creation

📑 Research Publications

[2026]

• D.-H. Cho, H.-S. Oh, S.-B. Kim, and S.-W. Lee, “Affectron: Emotional Speech Synthesis with Affective and Contextually Aligned Nonverbal Vocalizations,” (Under Review), 2026.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

• H.-S. Oh, D.-H. Cho, S.-B. Kim, and S.-W. Lee, “Toward Complex-Valued Neural Networks for Waveform Generation,” in Proc. Conference of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

[2025]

• D.-H. Cho, H.-S. Oh, S.-B. Kim, and S.-W. Lee, “DiEmo-TTS: Disentangled Emotion Representations via Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Speaker Emotion Transfer in Text-to-Speech,” in Proc. Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2025.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

• N.-G. Kim, D.-H. Cho, S.-B. Kim, and S.-W. Lee, “Spotlight-TTS: Spotlighting the Style via Voiced-Aware Style Extraction and Style Direction Adjustment for Expressive Text-to-Speech,” in Proc. Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2025.

  • [📄 Paper] [🎤 Demo]

• D.-H. Cho*, H.-S. Oh*, S.-B. Kim*, and S.-W. Lee, “EmoSphere-SER: Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition through Spherical Representation with Auxiliary Classification,” in Proc. Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2025.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code]

• D.-H. Cho, H.-S. Oh, S.-B. Kim, and S.-W. Lee, “EmoSphere++: Emotion-Controllable Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech via Emotion-Adaptive Spherical Vector,” in Proc. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC), 2025.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

• H.-S. Oh, S.-H. Lee, D.-H. Cho, and S.-W. Lee, “DurFlex-EVC: Duration-Flexible Emotional Voice Conversion Leveraging Discrete Representations Without Text Alignment,” in Proc. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC), 2025.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

[2024]

• J.-E. Lee, S.-B. Kim, D.-H. Cho, and S.-W. Lee, “PromotiCon: Prompt-Based Emotion Controllable Text-to-Speech via Prompt Generation and Matching,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2024.

  • [📄 paper] [🎤 Demo]

• D.-H. Cho, H.-S. Oh, S.-B. Kim, S.-H. Lee, and S.-W. Lee, “EmoSphere-TTS: Emotional Style and Intensity Modeling via Spherical Emotion Vector for Controllable Emotional Text-to-Speech,” in Proc. Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2024.

  • [📄 Paper] [💻 Code] [🎤 Demo]

🏆 Awards & Achievements

• Awards

  • [2025] Excellence Award
    Extreme-Noise Speech Recognition & Restoration AI Model Development Competition (AI Frontier Challenge) — Korea Artificial Intelligence Association (KAIA)

  • [2021] Excellence Award
    Credit Card User Delinquency Prediction AI Competition — Hanyang University & Dacon

• Reviewer

  • Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC)
  • IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
  • IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL)
  • IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)
  • International Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH)

📑 Patents (KR)

• Method for Cross-Speaker Emotion Transfer in Text-to-Speech Using Disentangled Emotion Representations via Self-Supervised Distillation, 10-2025-0130127.

• Method and System for Expressive Text-to-Speech via Voiced-Aware Style Extraction and Style Direction Adjustment, 10-2025-0116457.

• Apparatus and Method for Speech Synthesis, 10-2025-0088028.

• Method, Device, and Program for synthesizing voices Expressing emotions Based on Prompts, 10-2024-0099370.

• Emotional Expression Voice Generation Apparatus and Method Capable of Controlling Emotional Style and Intensity Using Continuous Emotional Dimensions, 10-2024-0029066.