Location and schedule

Schedule:

• 09:00-09:30 opening: welcome, introductions

• 09:30-09:45 lightning poster overviews I

• 09:45-10:45 morning poster session

  • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Poster 1: Iakovi Alexiou "The Effect of Intonational Contour on Perceived Intent in TTS Task-Oriented Dialogues"

                      • Poster 2: Kayleigh Jones "Discovering Bias in Dutch Automatic Speech Recognition by Clustering Interpretable Acoustic and Prosodic Features"

                      • Poster 3: Kira Tulchynska "Prosodic marking of syntactic boundaries in Khoekhoe"

                      • Poster 4: Marjan Golmaryami "Robust Audio-based Environmental Hazard Surveillance System"

                      • Poster 5: YH Victoria Chua "Visualizing conversational micro-structures in turn-taking"

                      • Poster 6: Maryam Naderi "Towards interfacing large language models with ASR systems using confidence measures and prompting"

                      • Poster 7: Hilla Goren Barnea "Emotional arousal of female politicians: Distinguishing enthusiasm and anger using data augmentation and machine learning"

                      • Poster 8: Yara El-Tawil "Ethical Development of Speech-Centered Affective Computing for Health"

                      • Poster 9: Varvara Petrova "Acoustic Properties of Vowels in Northern Mansi"

• 10:45-11:15 coffee break

• 11:15-12:15 doctoral student panel

  • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Marianne de Heer Kloots (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

                      • Leonie Schade (Bielefeld University, Germany)

                      • Adaeze Adigwe (University of Edinburgh, UK)

                      • Tina Raissi (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)

• 12:15-13:15 lunch break

• 13:15-14:15 mentoring

  • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Table 1: Jennifer Williams (University of Southampton, UK)
                        Group 1: Kayleigh Jones, Marta Grasa, Iakovi Alexiou

 Group 2: Xi Xuan, Ida Krarup, Varvara Petrova

• • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Table 2: Helena Moniz (INESC-ID, Portugal)
                        Group 1: Chenyi Lin, Marjan Golmaryami, Hilla Goren Barnea

 Group 2: Srija Anand, Yeeun Kang, Kira Tulchynska

• • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Table 3: Éva Székely (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
                        Group 1: Myeongju Lee, Kira Tulchynska, Srija Anand, Xi Xuan

 Group 2: Marjan Golmaryami, Belu Ticona, YH Victoria Chua, Iakovi Alexiou

• • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Table 4: Carolina Brum (Apple, USA)
                        Group 1: Emma Leschly, Maryam Naderi, Yeeun Kang, Ida Krarup

 Group 2: Yara El-Tawil, Marta Grasa, Kayleigh Jones, Hilla Goren Barnea

• • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Table 5: Karen Livescu (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, USA)
                        Group 1: Yara El-Tawil, YH Victoria Chua, Belu Ticona, Varvara Petrova

 Group 2: Chenyi Lin, Myeongju Lee, Emma Leschly, Maryam Naderi

• 14:15-14:30 coffee break

• 14:30-14:45 lightning poster overviews II

• 14:45-15:45 afternoon poster session

  • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Poster 10: Ida Krarup "Examining the Modalities of Speech Perception: Vibration and the Perception of Voicing Contrasts"

                      • Poster 11: Myeongju Lee "Acoustic-Prosodic Cues to Deceptive Speech in Korean (L1) and English (L2)"

                      • Poster 12: Marta Grasa "How do ASR models deal with foreign-accented speech?"

                      • Poster 13: Srija Anand "Enhancing Out-of-Vocabulary Performance of Indian TTS Systems for Practical Applications through Low-Effort Data Strategies"

                      • Poster 14: Yeeun Kang "Generating Code-Switching Speech Based on Intonation Units for Non-English Language Pairs"

                      • Poster 15: Chenyi Lin "Manipulating Acoustic Correlates for Vocal Persona Transition: From Neutral to Friendly"

                      • Poster 16: Belu Ticona "Towards Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation for Quechua-Spanish"

                      • Poster 17: Emma Cathrine Liisborg Leschly "Toward Interpretable Multimodal Deep Learning for Neurological Assessment"

                      • Poster 18: Xi Xuan "Efficient Real-Time Multi-Scenario Speaker Recognition with Mel-Spectrogram-Based Hybrid TDNN for Edge System"

• 15:45-16:45 senior panel

  • 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. • Jennifer Williams (University of Southampton, UK)

                      • Helena Moniz (INESC-ID, Portugal)

                      • Georgia Maniati (Samsung Electronics (Innoetics), Greece)

                      • Esther Klabbers (phAIstos, USA)

  • 16:45-17:00 closing: best poster, final comments, group photo

Biographies of Mentors and Senior Panelists

• Dr. Jennifer Williams is an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Computer Science, working on audio AI. Her research explores creation of trustworthy, private, and secure speech/audio solutions. Dr Williams leads several large interdisciplinary projects through the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (TAS Hub) including voice anonymisation, trustworthy audio, speech paralinguistics for medical applications, and AI regulation. She also leads an RAI UK International Partnership with the UK, US, and Australia on "AI Regulation Assurance for Safety-Critical Systems" across sectors. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh on representation learning for speech signal disentanglement.

• Dr. Helena Moniz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lisbon, President of the European Association for Machine Translation and of the International Association for Machine Translation. Worked with a Translation industry for 9 years and is always eager to learn from her own mistakes. Working in two national projects on Responsible AI.

• Dr. Éva Székely is an Assistant Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Her primary research interest lies in modelling spontaneous speech phenomena in conversational TTS. She is PI of three research projects, two of which introduce a novel research methodology that uses spontaneous speech synthesis to study speech perception, and aim to uncover biases in how listeners perceive and evaluate speakers based on their voice and speaking style. Her latest project aims to develop self-supervised approaches for modeling conversational dynamics. Eva holds a Master’s degree in Speech and Language Technology from the University of Utrecht. She completed her PhD at University College Dublin, on the topic of expressive speech synthesis in human interaction.

• Dr. Carolina Brum is a Research Scientist at the Biosensing Intelligence Group at Apple, currently working on Safety for Apple Intelligence. Her work has been published at top journals, such as IEEE Sensors and Open Sensors. Carolina was instrumental in developing robust real-time tracking and prediction algorithms for the Soli radar sensor at Google and Assistive Touch gesture recognition at Apple. Carolina currently leads the Human Red Teaming effort at Apple. Her research interests include sensing, algorithms, gestures, neuroscience and human computer interaction. When not working, Carolina enjoys biking, reading and learning with friends. 

• Dr. Karen Livescu is a Professor at TTI-Chicago.  This year she is on sabbatical, splitting her time between the Stanford NLP group and the CMU Language Technologies Institute.  She completed her PhD at MIT in 2005. She is an ISCA Fellow and a recent IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.  She has served as a program chair/co-chair for ICLR, Interspeech, and ASRU, and is an Associate Editor for TACL and IEEE T-PAMI.  Her group's work spans a variety of topics in spoken, written, and signed language processing, with a particular interest in representation learning, cross-modality learning, and low-resource settings.

• Georgia Maniati is a Speech Research Scientist at Samsung Electronics, AI Group, spreadheading the development of synthetic voices for global products and Bixby. With over eight years of experience in the text-to-speech industry from Nuance Communications and Innoetics, Samsung, she holds an M.Sc. in Speech & Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Athens. Her research leverages linguistic theories, structures and resources to enhance synthetic speech, including cross-lingual and expressive TTS, as well as automatic assessment. For more, see her publications.

• Dr. Esther Klabbers is a Research Scientist with decades of experience in text-to-speech synthesis. She used to work in academia as an Assistant Professor at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU) and after that she worked for almost 10 years in industry at ReadSpeaker where they made TTS software. She was a co-organizer of this workshop in 2018 and has mentored several Masters and PhD students over the years. Now Esther consults on TTS through her company phAIstos Speech & Language Technology Services.