Speech Pitch

In this episode, we have a conversation with Roger K. Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing at the University of Sheffield. Prof. Moore has more than 50 years' experience in research and development of speech technology, having been President of the European/International Speech Communication Association from 1997 to 2001, and the Head of the UK Government's Speech Research Unit from 1985 to 1999.

During this conversation, Prof. Moore spoke to us about the development of the field of speech technology in the last 40 years, and shared his views on the past and future of the field, as well as on the possible impacts of Large Language Models in speech technology . We further discussed his own work on speech recognition and animal vocalisations, and got to learn about his experience as a professor and his love for photography.

In this episode, we have Professor Pascale Fung with us. Pascale is the Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE). Apart from her highly-achieved academic roles, she is also very active in the industry.

In our conversation, Pascale generously shared her experiences and knowledge regarding the relationship between AI and art, why and how we need to work on empathetic machines, the uncanny valley effect in conversational agents, global collaboration on ethical AI, as well as her personal role models and interesting stories and enlightening insights about science communication.

In this episode, we are chatting with John Hansen, a Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also the founder of the Center for Robust Speech Systems at the same university, and was the president of ISCA – the International Speech Communication Association, until last year. John has worked in many different fields, so we had the opportunity to discuss many interesting topics, including robust and speech recognition, health applications of speech technologies, and even got to hear really interesting stories about NASA, within the context of the fearless steps project. This is a long episode, but full on incredible stories and interesting perspectives on science, and the speech community.

In this episode, we are chatting with Shri Narayanan, a Professor at the University of Southern California. Among many other things, Shri is a Fellow of many institutions including the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), IEEE, and ISCA; an editor of several journals, including the Computer, Speech and Language Journal; and (Spoiler Alert!!) a musician of South Indian Classical Variety. We talk about multidisciplinary research, the importance of being heard, and the big challenges that motivate Shri in speech research. We also discuss ways of making an impact, through publication and entrepreneurial aspects.

In this episode, we are chatting with Nicholas Cummins, a Lecturer in AI for speech analysis at King's College London. We talk about speech technologies for health-related applications with a special focus on mental health. We also discuss several of Nick's recent projects as well as his views and advices on living abroad.

In this episode we are chatting with Odette Scharenborg, an Associate Professor and Delft Technology Fellow. She is also a member of the ISCA board, where she acts as the chair of the diversity committee, co-chair of the Interspeech Conferences committee and of the Technical Committee. We talk about diversity concerns not only in speech technology but also within the community. Odette also told us about her career, its highlights as well as its least successful aspects.

This is the first episode of Speech Pitch, ISCA-SAC's (Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association) new podcast. We are interviewing Iona Gessinger, last year’s ISCA-SAC General Coordinator and winner of the best student-paper award in Interspeech 2020.