AILO Workshop in Longford

At the end of the year, I had the pleasure to lead a workshop at Scoil Mhuire Longford in preparation for the All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO). Students from Longford and Roscommon came together to solve linguistic puzzles. Among others, we had a look at Pali, a literary language related to Sanskrit, ancestor of North Indian languages such as Hindi, and Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, ancestor of North Germanic languages such as Swedish.

The national final of AILO will take place in March 2024 at Dublin City University, the international final in July 2024 in Brazil’s capital Brasília. More information about AILO can be found here.

Best of luck to all students who try out for the finals – hope to see you in Dublin this March! 🍀 📝

ADAPT ExploreAI @ European Researchers' Night

I was happy to support the ADAPT ExploreAI exhibition in the Douglas Hyde Gallery at Trinity College Dublin tonight. In the context of the European Researchers’ Night, ADAPT researchers showcased cutting edge research on artificial intelligence (AI). I represented the ADAPT Gender, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) committee helping to make sure that the event was accessible to all.

Interspeech 2023 (August 20-24, 2023)

Another whirlwind week of Interspeech is behind us! 🌪️ For the first time, the conference took place right on my doorstep, at the Convention Centre in Dublin!

I presented our recent work on Cross-linguistic Emotion Perception in Human and TTS Voices in collaboration with Michelle Cohn (UC Davis, USA), Benjamin R. Cowan (University College Dublin, Ireland), Georgia Zellou (UC Davis, USA), and Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Germany). I also co-chaired a session on Health-Related Speech Analysis with Corinne Fredouille (University of Avignon, France). An absolute pleasure to learn more about this area!

Very happy as well to have been recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer by the TPC chairs of the conference! 😍

YFRSW 2023

It was such a pleasure to welcome 16 highly motivated female Bachelor’s and Master’s students from nine countries (USA, India, China, Portugal, Finland, Germany, UK, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) to this year’s edition of the Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop (YFRSW) at Trinity College Dublin!

A big thank you to my co-chairs Leda Sari (Meta AI, USA) and Jennifer Williams (University of Southampton, UK), as well as all members of the organizing committee: Ayushi Pandey (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), Johannah O’Mahony (University of Edinburgh, UK), Pamir Gogoi (Living Tongues Institute of Endangered Languages, USA), and Sarenne Wallbridge (University of Edinburgh, UK)! 💚 🤍 🧡

YFRSW 2023 received overwhelming positive feedback by its attendees and we are looking forward to organizing the event again next year, as a satellite to Interspeech 2024 in Jerusalem! 🇮🇱

CUI 2023 (July 19-21, 2023)

The ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2023 took place from July 19–21, 2023, at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands.

I was delighted to witness our former UCD Master’s student Sam Davern (now PhD student at Trinity College Dublin) presenting his thesis Investigating the Usability of a Speech Agent-based Role-Playing Game. Very well done, Sam! 👏