The INSPIRE training network contains 13 individual ESR projects organized into four themes:
- accommodation (A)
- individual differences (ID)
- microscopic intelligibility prediction (MIP)
- engineering robustness (ENR)
These themes provide differing perspectives on the realistic conditions faced by listeners, and within each theme, projects address several combinations of these conditions.
The first three themes were chosen to reflect important emerging trends in current speech and hearing research, which have in common that they rely on advanced methods to process and model large amounts of detailed behavioural observations. The fourth theme employs knowledge from human speech processing to improve automatic speech recognition, and provides feedback about constraints of models of human processing.
In addition to the 13 projects for ESRs, INSPIRE will include three experienced researcher (ER) projects dedicated to provisioning the data and tools to support the ESR research and to create long-term anchors for the results of the network.