Keynote lecturer: Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi

Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi is founder and director of the Signals and Interactive Systems Lab at University of Trento, Italy. He received his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and Master in Information Technology, in 1991, from the University of Padua and CEFRIEL/Politechnic of Milan (Italy), respectively. From 1990 to 1993 he collaborated with Alcatel-Telettra Research Laboratories (Italy). In 1995 he received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Padua, Italy. From 1993 to 2005, he was at AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA) and then AT&T Labs-Research (USA) where he worked in the Speech and Language Processing Lab. In 2005 joined the faculty of University of Trento (Italy). He is affiliated with the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science and Center for Mind/Brain Sciences.
Prof. Riccardi’s research on stochastic finite state machines for speech and language processing has been applied to a wide range of domains for task automation. He and his colleagues designed the AT&T spoken language system ranked first in the 1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He and his colleagues pioneered the speech and language research in spontaneous speech for the well-known “How May I Help You?” research program which led to breakthrough speech services. His research on learning finite state automata and transducers has lead to the creation of the first large scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation ( Anuvaad ). He lead University of Trento’s team that contributed to the IBM WATSON machine that won the Jeopardy! challenge.
Prof. Riccardi has co-authored more than 190 scientific papers. He holds more than 70 patents in the field of automatic speech recognition, understanding, machine translation, natural language processing and machine learning. His current research interests are language modeling, language understanding, spoken/multimodal dialog, affective computing, machine learning and social computing.
Prof. Riccardi has been on the scientific and organizing committee of EUROSPEECH, INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, NAACL, EMNLP, ACL an EACL. He has co-organized the IEEE ASRU Workshop in 1993, 1999, 2001 and General Chair in 2009.  He has been the Guest Editor of the IEEE Special Issue on Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation. He has been a founder and Editorial Board member of the ACM Transactions of Speech and Language Processing. He has been elected member of the IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee (2005-2008). He is member of ACL, ISCA, ACM and Fellow of IEEE.
Prof. Riccardi has received many national and international awards including the Marie Curie Excellence Grant (predecessor of the ERC Starting Grant ) by the European Commission, IEEE SPS Best Paper Award and IBM Faculty Award.

Rest of lecturers (in alphabetical order):

 

Dr. Jesús Andrés-Ferrer

Jesús Andrés-Ferrer received his Computer Science Degree (2004), his M.Sc. degree (2008) in Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition and Digital Imaging and his European Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (2010) from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV). He is co-author of several articles in international journals and many more articles in international conferences. He was awarded with the IEEE Spoken Language Processing Student Travel Grant and was involved in several national and international projects. He was an active member of the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology research group and the Spanish AERFAI Society. In 2014 he joined Nuance Communications where he has been working since then as a Principal Language Modelling Research. His research interests include machine learning, neural networks (deep learning) and statistical methods applied to natural language processing.

Dr. Antonio Bonafonte

Antonio Bonafonte received his PhD from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC, 1996). Member of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications since 1993, currently as Associated Professor. During 1999 he was visitor of the Bell Labs, in the Dialogue Department headed by C.H. Lee. He was co-founder (1999) of the company VERBIO specialized in spoken language technology. He has being working on Speech synthesis since more than 20 years, releasing proprietary and open-source applications with different technologies. His main interest is on deep learning for speech synthesis, including topics as expressive speech, semantic representation and waveform generation

He was the chairman of the 8th ISCA Speech Synthesis WS (2013) and local organizer of the 9th ISCA Speech Synthesis WS (2016). He was the chair of the last RTTH Summer School and member of the organizing committee of the next IberSpeech, to be hold in Barcelona in 2018.

Dr. Arantza del Pozo

Dr. Arantza Del Pozo is the head of the Speech and Natural Language Technologies department at Vicomtech-IK4. She graduated from the Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering Department at the University of Deusto, Bilbao (2003). After graduation, she went to Cambridge University to course an MPhil in Computer, Speech, Text and Internet Technologies (2004) and then continued onto a PhD (2008) within the Speech Research Group of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, under the supervision of Prof. Steve Young. Since May 2008, she has been working as a principal researcher at Vicomtech-IK4, where she leads the Speech and Natural Language Technologies team and manages speech and language related R&D projects. She has coordinated several EU projects and technically led various integrated industrial and collaborative research projects of strategic nature in the fields of automatic multilingual subtitling and
smart customer service. She is author of several peer reviewed international publications in relevant conferences and journals, also being expert reviewer in conferences and of project proposals in the field.

Dr. Laura Docío

Laura Docío-Fernández (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at University of Vigo (UVIGO), and a member of the Multimedia Technologies Group (GTM). Her research interests lie in the broad field of speech, audio and multimedia signal processing using pattern recognition and machine learning techniques, with special emphasis on speaker diarization, speaker recognition, content search on multimedia documents and audio-visual-based information extraction. She has participated in more than 15 research projects funded by national or international public institutions and companies. She is the author of more than 40 papers published in journals and international conference proceedings and advised 1 PhD thesis.

Dr. Ángel Gómez

Ángel M. Gómez received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computing science from the University of Granada, Spain, in 2001 and 2006, respectively. In 2002 he joined the Signal Theory, Networking, and Communications Department, University of Granada, where he is a member of the research group on Signal Processing, Multimedia Transmission and Speech/Audio Technologies (SigMAT). Currently he is an associate professor at the University of Granada. His main interests are on robust speech recognition, speech and audio coding, and multimedia transmission.

Dr. José A. González

Jose A. Gonzalez received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science both from the University of Granada, Spain, in 2006 and 2013, respectively. Since 2013, he is a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, U.K., working in clinical applications of speech technology. His research interests include include human speech processing, robust automatic speech recognition and machine learning.

Dr. Paula López

Paula López Otero received the degree in Telecommunication Engineering and the PhD degree in 2008 and 2015, respectively, both from the University of Vigo. During her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at University of Surrey (United Kingdom) and Technical University of Munich (Germany). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center on Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC). Her research interests focus on audio and speaker segmentation and clustering, spoken term detection and emotional state detection, fields in which she has published several research papers in journals and international conference proceedings. Part of her research efforts have been devoted to participating in evaluations related to these research topics, being part of the winning team of Albayzin 2014 and 2016 Search on Speech Evaluations.

Prof. Antonio Peinado

Antonio M. Peinado received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Granada, Granada, Spain, in 1987 and 1994, respectively. Since 1988, he has been with the University of Granada, Granada, Spain, where he has led several research projects related to signal processing and transmission.

In 1989, he was a Consultant with the Speech Research Department, AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. He has held the positions of Associate Professor from 1996 to 2010 and has been Full Professor since 2010 with the Department of Signal Theory, Networking and Communications, University of Granada, where he is currently the Head of the research group on Signal Processing, Multimedia Transmission and Speech/Audio Technologies (SigMAT).

He is the author of numerous publications and coauthor of the book Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels (New York, NY, USA: Wiley, 2006). His current research interests are focused on robust speech recognition and transmission, robust image/video transmission, and ultrasound and proteomic signal processing.

Dr. Carlos Turró

Carlos Turro is M.D. and PhD from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. He is working there since 1992 and since 2000 is Head of its Media Services unit. From that place he has developed the Polimedia service as a system to create Video Learning Objects. Currently, the Polimedia system is used by more than fifteen universities and has produced more than 18000 learning objects. The Polimedia system was granted with the Spanish national award FICOD 2009 for digital services.

He has and is working in different EU- funded projects. He has worked at the Translectures project, for automatic and interactive transcription and translation of video lectures, the the EMMA project for automated transcription and translation of MOOCs and the Rec:All project researching how video cab be used in learning environments.

Currently is involved in the edX project for MOOC production, and is member of the Board n the Opencast community of Lecture Recordings where UPV develops of a media player for lectures called Paella Player.

Roundtable participants

• Alberto Alegre (Fermax)
• Jesús Andrés (Nuance)
• Arantza del Pozo (ViComTech)
• Germán Sanchis (Sciling)
• Carlos Turró (ASIC-UPV)