Interspeech and AVSP 2007
Posted on October 12, 2007
I recently attended two speech related conference over in Europe. It seems I like my international conferences in twos. The first conference was the Interspeech 2007 conference in Antwerp, Belgium, and the second was the International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP) 2007 near Hilvarenbeek in the Netherlands. Both were good experiences and will be helpful to my research.
After a lovely 20 hour flight from Brisbane, with stop-overs at every corner of the globe (it seemed), I arrived in Antwerp for the eight annual Interspeech conference. The Interspeech conferences replace the Eurospeech and ICSLP conferences, which used to alternate year-by-year. It is now considered taboo to mention these earlier names, as it is just Interspeech - at least this is what we were told at the welcome lecture.
Although speech is a fairly focussed area of signal processing, there is still a lot of topics that can be covered under Interspeech’s umbrella, and some of them weren’t of much interest to me. However, I did manage to attend a number of sessions on most of the 5 days of the conference. I was a little dissapointed that my area of research, multi-modal speech processing, had it’s only oral and poster session on at the same time!. That was quite annoying, but I did manage to see most of both sessions, even though I was presenting an oral in one of them. In particular I found some of the research into recognising speech with infrared sensors by Bo Zhu at MIT interesting.
The social program of Interspeech was quite nice, with lots of free food and Belgium beer available at various social events on most of the nights of the conference. Entrance to the Antwerp Zoo, next door to the conference venue, was also included in the conference registration, although all those animals in such a small area seemed a little sad to me.
On the final day of the Interspeech conference, I had to pack my bags and catch a hour or so train to Tilberg, Netherlands where I could catch an expensive taxi to Kasteel Groenendael in Hilvarenbeek for AVSP 2007. It probably would have been nice if AVSP had arranged a shuttle bus, as the taxi to Hilvarenbeek cost more than the train trip from Belgium, although I did get to share the cost with some other attendees on the way back.
The AVSP 2007 conference was a small workshop style conference specifically devoted to my area of research, although it does focus on human perception as well as automatic, which is more my style. I got to see a lot of interesting research at the AVSP workshop, although did seem to be a little perception heavy. However, I found the studies of how humans do what I am trying to perform with computers provided a good perspective on my research that I don’t normally encounter. Although even further away from my area of research, I found invited speaker Asif Ghazanfar’s talk on speech perception in monkeys (that is monkey-speech perception) to be very well presented and quite interesting.
Kasteel Groenendael is Philip Electronic’s executive training centre just outside the small village on Hilvarenbeek. Seeing what their executive training centre is like, I don’t think I’d mind working for Philips. Everything was provided for us at the workshop, and I’d probably even say it was worth loosing my weekend. I also got to meet and discuss research with a lot of interesting people over breakfast, lunch and dinner over the two days, and I hope to keep in touch with many of them.
Finally, I’d like to thank QUT and ASSTA for supplying the funding to travel to Europe and attend these conferences.
» Filed Under biometrics, conference, research, speech
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