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! 👏

UK Speech 2023 (June 14-15, 2023)

I had a fabulous time attending UK Speech 2023 from June 14-15, 2023, at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and presenting some ongoing work exploring prosody in referential communication with human and computer partners.

Particularly happy that the conference will be renamed UK and Ireland Speech starting next year to reflect the contributions of Irish researchers to the speech technology community in the British Isles. 💚 🇮🇪

Joining ADAPT GEDI Committee

This month, I joined the ADAPT Gender, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) Committee as a postdoctoral representative.

In parallel with ADAPT’s research mission, the GEDI Committee advises the centre on issues relating to inclusiveness, diversity and equal opportunities for all members. It works with the ADAPT management to create an open, sustainable, and community-focused culture that fosters next generation research.

IJHCS article published! 🎉

We are happy to announce that our article Audience Design and Egocentrism in Reference Production during Human-Computer Dialogue was published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies and is available online. 📖

The article compares the level of allocentric and egocentric speech production in human-human dialogue (HHD) and human-computer dialogue (HCD). We find that the role the computer partner occupies in the dialogue (i.e., whether it is seen more as a tool or as a dialogue partner) can affect how allocentric and egocentric users behave during the interaction. A more tool-like perception of the computer partner leads to increased egocentric behaviour on the part of the user, while perceiving the computer partner as dialogue partner leads to similar levels of allocentric and egocentric behaviour in HCD as in HHD.