Hi all,

Last week I attended Interspeech 2007, along with Zeljko Medenica and Alex Shyrokov. Zeljko and I had a paper at Interspeech, along with Tim Paek of Microsoft Research.

This was a pretty large conference, with around 1,200 attendees from all over the world. The conference was somewhat selective, with an acceptance rate of just under 60%. While this is not a very low acceptance rate, the papers we saw at the conference (as posters or as presentations) were of high quality. We presented our paper in poster format. Zeljko did a great job of creating the poster, and he and I talked to a large number of people about it. Here is a picture of us and our poster (thanks Alex!):

Tim Paek was busy with another poster, displayed right next to ours. His poster was about People Watcher, a computer game which elicited transcribed speech data from users, while at the same time entertaining these same users. The data was used to train a system for automated (spoken) directory assistance. The paper received the ELRA best paper award for Interspeech 2007. Congratulations Tim et al! Here’s a picture of Tim (facing us on the right) and co-author Yun-Cheng Ju (facing, left) discussing their poster with attendees:

In this post I also wanted to mention another collaborator, Peter Heeman. Peter presented a poster on a simulation study in which he and a student explored initiative in human-human dialogues. Understanding how initiative is treated in these dialogues is important if one wants to build a system for mixed-initiative human-computer dialogues. Here’s a picture of Peter discussing his poster:

Peter, Alex and I also had a paper at the Sigdial 2007 workshop, which was held immediately after Interspeech. I’ll talk more about Sigdial in another post.

Andrew Kun

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