UKIS 2024 (July 1-2, 2024)

Once again, UK 🇬🇧 and Ireland 🇮🇪 Speech (UKIS) has proven to be a fantastic venue to discuss all aspects of speech research. With international conferences ever increasing in size, these local events are so important for proper exchange and thorough networking. Many thanks to Kate Knill and her team for hosting us at the University of Cambridge this year! We presented our work on querying speech embeddings for phonetic information with the aim of making deep-learned speech recognition models accessible to linguistic research. Please also find presentations from our group in the special session on Leveraging Large Language Models and Contextual Features for Phonetic Analysis at Interspeech 2024! 🇬🇷

The full programme of UKIS 2024 can be accessed via the Book of Abstracts. 📓

Best Paper Award at CHI 24 🏆

Delighted that our paper Cooking With Agents: Designing Context-aware Voice Interaction for Complex Tasks received a Best Paper Award at the 2024 CHI conference in Hawai’i, USA.

This work was led by Razan Jaber, who recently received her PhD from Stockholm University! 🎉

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! 🍀 📝

Visit at Microsoft Research Lab – India

Today I had the pleasure of visiting Microsoft Research in Bengaluru, India. Thank you for having me Sunayana Sitaram and Kalika Bali! 😊 👋

Starting new position 🚀

Happy to share that I am starting a new postdoc position at the School of Computer Science of University College Dublin. I will work on querying speech embeddings for phonetic information with Prof. Julie Carson-Berndsen and her group. The position is affiliated with ADAPT, SFI’s Research Centre for AI-driven Digital Content Technology, which has the following partner institutions: Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University, University College Dublin, Munster Technological University, Technological University Dublin, Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest, Maynooth University, and National University of Ireland, Galway.