SpoHuMa21 (November 15-17, 2021)

I had the pleasure of organizing the FRIAS Junior Researcher Conference - Human Perspectives on Spoken Human-Machine Interaction (SpoHuMa21) together with Sarah Warchhold (University of Freiburg), Daniel Duran (ZAS Berlin), and Eran Raveh (Hyro AI). The conference was supported by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) – special thanks to Kyra Vogt and Attilio Ferrarese!

SpoHuMa21 featured submitted talks by young researchers, invited talks by Michelle Cohn (University of California, Davis, USA), Friederike Eyssel (Bielefeld University, Germany), Roger K. Moore (University of Sheffield, UK), Catharine Oertel (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands), and Karola Pitsch (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany), as well as various interactive discussion sessions.

We had a great time discussing spoken human-machine interaction from many different angles! 🗣 🤖

The organizers of SpoHuMa 2021 in the FRIAS Gather space

YFRSW (August 29, 2021)

Yesterday, the Workshop for Young Female Researchers in Speech Science & Technology (YFRSW) took place as a satellite event of Interspeech 2021. A total of 21 undergraduate and master’s students presented their projects in the field of speech science and technology. Thank you for your participation and the great poster presentations!

I would also like to highlight our doctoral student panel, consisting of Carol Figueroa (Furhat Robotics), Omnia Ibrahim (Saarland University), Mariana Julião (INESC-ID/IST/Lisbon University), and Joana Correia (Spotify), who answered our attendees’ questions with much dedication. Thank you so much for sharing your experience! 🙏

Doctoral Student Panel @ YFRSW 2021

Dissertation submitted! 😄

GAM Workshop (May 10-14, 2021)

In the context of STEP 2021 (Spring Training in Experimental Psycholinguistics) organized by the Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton/Canada, I had the pleasure to participate in the workshop on data analysis with the generalized additive model (GAM) held by Harald Baayen, Yu-Ying Chuang (both University of Tübingen), and Peter Hendrix (Tilburg University).

This was an excellent introduction to the topic, which fortunately even used examples from Phonetics. Terrific! 💯 Thank you very much!

Selfie during STEP 2021: in the lobby @ gatherTown

Announcing Speech Pitch 🗣

Speech Pitch is ISCA-SAC's [1] new podcast. Throughout the episodes, we will interview different guests, mostly from the speech community, in an informal setting. We want to get to know their work, their stories and their ideas for the future. This podcast is hosted by PhD students in speech, with no experience in podcasts, but with the hope that it can bring the students and the entire speech community closer together, especially in pandemic times where we lack presencial conferences and other social interactions. We will try to have a new episode every 2 or 3 months. We hope you enjoy listening to it, and stay tuned!

[1] Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association

…and I had the honor to be the featured guest on the first episode of Speech Pitch. Many thanks to the hosts Catarina Botelho and Francisco Teixeira for making this such a pleasant experience! 👏