Interspeech (September 15-19, 2019)

This year’s Interspeech was jointly organized by the speech communities of Graz/Austria and Maribor/Slovenia under the motto Crossroads of Speech and Language. We presented our work in the sessions on Sociophonetics and Adaptation and Accommodation in Conversation. Thanks to the organizers for a great week at Messecongress Graz!

Proceedings

For videos of keynote and survey talks, please visit the YouTube channel of Interspeech 2019.

I would like to highlight the following presentation of the piece Voices and Piano – Hanna Schygulla by Peter Ablinger which which was interpreted during the opening session by Alexandra Radoulova (piano) and Winfried Ritsch (live electronics):

ISCA-SAC: 5th Doctoral Consortium (September 14, 2019)

The 5th ISCA-SAC Doctoral Consortium was held at Graz Technical University on September 14, 2019. A group of 14 highly motivated PhD students from research institutes in India, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, France, South Korea and the USA presented their work in two parallel tracks to a panel of researchers from academia and industry:

• Kate Knill (University of Cambridge)
• Anouschka Foltz (University of Graz)
• João Freitas (DefinedCrowd)
• Ngoc Thang Vu (University of Stuttgart)
• Hema Murthy (Indian Institute of Technology Madras)
• Simon King (University of Edinburgh)
• Sebastian Möller (TU Berlin and DFKI Berlin)
• Dayana Ribas (University of Zaragoza)
• Kyu Han (ASAPP Inc.)

The panel provided their expertise with respect to consolidating the findings presented to them into one final product: the PhD thesis. We thank the experts on the panel very much for taking the time and sharing their insight!

We further would like to express our gratitude to Jamilla Balint and Katharina Pollack from Graz Technical University for their tremendous help in the local organization of the event!

PhD Panel at YFRSW (September 14, 2019)

Today, I had the pleasure to be part of the PhD panel of this year’s Workshop for Young Female Researchers in Speech Science & Technology (YFRSW) which was held at Graz Technical University. YFRSW aims to foster interest in research in female undergraduate and masters students, who have not yet committed to getting a PhD. The panel answered questions by the audience on how to get a PhD position (in different countries), how to get through a PhD while keeping a sane mind, and why to pursue a PhD in the first place.

Thank you for the invitation and for organizing this great workshop, Catharine Oertel (Delft University of Technology), Esther Klabbers (ReadSpeaker), Odette Scharenborg (Delft University of Technology), and team!

ICPhS (August 4-10, 2019)

Four years after the last International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow, it was about time for the 19th edition! This year about 900 Phoneticians gathered at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Australia. The main areas covered by ICPhS are speech production, speech acoustics, speech perception, speech prosody, sound change, phonology, sociophonetics, language typology, first and second language acquisition, forensic phonetics, speaking styles, voice quality, clinical phonetics, and speech technology. We had the pleasure to present our paper A Wizard-of-Oz Experiment to Study Phonetic Accommodation in Human-Computer Interaction. We had a great time Down Under and we are looking forward to ICPhS 2023 at Charles University in Prague!

Proceedings

ISCA-SAC Events @ Interspeech (September 14-19, 2019)

Will you be at Interspeech 2019 in Graz? Please consider joining the events hosted by ISCA’s student advisory committee (ISCA-SAC). This year we are organizing the 5th Doctoral Consortium (abstract submission deadline: July 17th), another edition of our successful Students Meet Experts event, and the new Mentoring format.

For more information, check out the Interspeech homepage.