Another successful conference is over. This time professor Andrew Kun, Tim Paek of Microsoft Research, and I had a paper at Interspeech 2007 which took place in Antwerp, Belgium from 27^th to 31^st of August.
The conference was very well organized, and a lot of people from all over the world attended it. We saw many interesting lectures and papers. This picture will show how crowded it was during one of the receptions. Almost every day after the lectures and poster presentations were over, the hosts organized receptions with famous Belgian beer (and less-famous wine) tasting, which I think many people enjoyed very much.

Our paper was scheduled for a poster presentation on the third day of the conference. In our paper we investigated the influence of speech recognizer accuracy, dialog repair, and press-to-talk (PTT) button usage on driving performance. Our results showed two important effects. First, there is a statistically significant influence of low speech recognizer accuracy on steering wheel angle variance. Second, the interaction between low speech recognizer accuracy and PTT button usage has a significant influence on lane position variance. We had a chance to talk to many people who were interested in our poster and gave us some good ideas and suggestions.
We also had enough time to explore Antwerp and the surroundings. Antwerp is a nice city with plenty of museums and sightseeing areas. One of the museums that we visited is the house of the famous Belgian painter Paul Rubens, which is shown in the next picture. Paul Rubens himself designed the house and inside we could see many of his paintings.

One day we also went to Brussels, which is only 45 minutes from Antwerp by train. Although we saw many interesting things over there as well, one of the most exciting was the Atomium, shown below. It was built for the World’s Fair in 1958 and represents a crystal molecule of metal. It looks very big from the outside but it is even bigger from the inside. We went to the highest ball where we had a beautiful view of Brussels.

This was the biggest conference I have attended so far. We had a chance to meet a lot of people in our research area and exchange ideas with them which was a valuable experience. Last, but not the least, we enjoyed a lot of famous Belgian beer and chocolate! So, I hope everybody will get a chance to go and visit Belgium and enjoy it as I did.

Zeljko Medenica

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