This year’s Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems was a great place to share ideas with fellow speech research enthusiasts. Lots of attention was devoted to the design of spoken dialog systems in general (as the name of the event might suggest), but also to more specific areas, as automotive speech user interfaces. Besides the main program, the pleasant meal breaks provided a great environment for people to discuss research ideas in an informal manner.
I had some very interesting conversations concerning automotive topics during these breaks with Ben Reaves from Toyota ITC, Stefan Hamerich from Harman/Becker and Zeljko Medenica from Project54/UNH. We discussed the state-of-the-art of automotive speech user interfaces and where the field is headed. Most of us heard about Microsoft’s Sync Technology for Ford vehicles, thanks to their advertising campaign in the USA, but other big auto makers are also selling their cars equipped with speech recognition systems (e.g. Toyota, Honda, etc). Ben proposed, that now is the time to set standards for automotive speech user interfaces, which could be accepted by all relevant parties in business and research. We all agreed that the accepted standard might not be the best one (see VHS vs. Betamax), but still it could be very beneficial to the field, by focusing its development.
The poster session was cleverly piggy-backed onto the afternoon coffee break. This way people didn’t even notice that their minds were “on-duty” even during “recess”. I presented a poster on my ongoing research concerning push-to-talk button solutions for in-car speech user interfaces. It drew a bigger crowd than I imagined. Professor Alex Rudnicky from CMU was inquiring about the premises and methods of my research. Then, the automotive specialists, Stefan and Ben were joined by several other participants in discussing details about the poster with me.
Stefan Hamerich, Ben Reaves, Antoine Raux, Oskar Palinko, Milica Gasic
We had a very good conversation on the advantages/disadvantages of high fidelity driving simulators in automotive research. They can provide lots of measured variables (lane position, steering wheel angle, distances, speeds, etc.), but in the same time researchers must cope with their possible undesired effects (e.g. motion sickness).
I found out, that informal discussions are a very effective way of sharing ideas within small groups of people. I enjoyed a lot to talk to fellow researchers about common interests at YRRSDS’08.
Oskar Palinko
Project54, UNH