Blogs

The 37th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, (ICASSP) was held in the city of Kyoto, Japan, from the 25-30 March 2012. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference for signal processing and its applications. Over 1 350 papers were presented at ICASSP, taken from more than 2 700 submissions. The papers were divided into 15 categories ranging from audio/acoustic signal processing to information forensics and security to signal processing education (just to name a few!).

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual workshop designed for graduate students, PhD students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans.

One week before the Saint Patrick weekend more than 50 researchers gathered in Dublin to discuss innovations and (or 'on' as one of the keynote speakers would say) applications in speech technology. The event was thoughtfully organized by the team of UCD and TCD researchers and led by Dr. Joao Cabral and John Kane, with websupport by Amalia Zahra.

The Students Meet Seniors lunch provided an opportunity for students
to meet and talk with some industry/research experts over a casual
lunch. Specifically, my table had Prof. Abeer Alwan from the Speech
Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory at UCLA in the USA, as
well as Dr. Maurizio Omologo from the Speech-acoustic Scene Analysis
and Interpretation Group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. This
proved to be a great chance for us students to informally talk about
our research and future career paths.

At 12 o'clock a great number of students and seniors streamed
towards a huge meeting room. The atmosphere was buzzing with
chat and excitement. A huge buffet of delicious Italian food
arranged at the side of the room served to further elevate moods at
the event.
After everyone had eventually found the right table, the session
kicked off with an introduction of everybody at the table and their
research interests. The group was very international, with students
from Sweden, Russia, Ireland and Italy present. All students shared

At the beginning of the discussion, Dr. Hermann Ney firstly introduced
himself and then asked others to introduce themselves in return. The
introduction included where one's home country is, what research one's
been doing on, and what one is interested to learn from this
discussion. Dr. Hermann Ney is very nice and patient to try to
understand everyone's work. At the same time he also gave lots of
comment and helpful guidance.
After the self-introduction part, we enjoyed the delicious food

On this day, a small group of students met at the lunch room of the Interspeech
Conference to an event which had not existed before in this form: We had the
opportunity
to have lunch together with several experienced researchers from different
fields.

On our table, Peter Birkholz was the main host, and I believe him to have been
an inspiration
to all of us, showing what you can achieve. Our group consisted of students from
many different
fields, which yielded a very broad discussion on all kinds of topic related

It is really an amazing experience to attend Interspeech2011 in
Florence. Also the student lunch event was so productive and
interesting. We met the famous researchers in similar or same fields.
   The experts of our table are Prof. Helen Meng and Prof. Andrea
Paoloni. The students of this table include Arindam Ghosh from
University of Trento, Janto Skowronek from Technical University Berlin
- Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Senaka Amarakeerthi from University
of Aizu, Sourish Chaudhuri from CMU whom I met in the Uffizi Gallery

 We had students from different institutes, and a senior whose works strongly reflected the demand of the industry. In general, we discussed our concerns and interest in related to speech processing and robotics. This provided a valuable opportunity for us to exchange ideas, get to know each other's work, and find potential opportunities for collaboration. Given a large scale conference like InterSpeech, such a conversation is indeed necessary for students to form a direct benefit from the research community.