Workshop sponsor

Organizers

Prof. Cosmin Munteanu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at University of Toronto Mississauga. His research includes speech and natural language interaction for mobile devices, mixed reality systems, learning technologies for marginalized users, usable privacy and cyber-safety, assistive technologies for older adults, and ethics in human-computer interaction research. http://cosmin.taglab.ca

Prof. Pourang Irani is a Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Manitoba and Canada Research Chair in Ubiquitous Analytics. His research sits at the crossroads of mobile/wearable computing and data visualization. http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~irani

Dr. Sharon Oviatt is internationally known for her multidisciplinary research on human-centered interfaces, multimodal and mobile interfaces, spoken language and digital pen interfaces, educational interfaces, technology design and evaluation, and the impact of interface design on human cognition. Her latest textbook, The Paradigm Shift to Multimodality in Contemporary Computer Interfaces (co-authored with Phil Cohen) was published by Morgan Claypool in 2015. http://www.incaadesigns.org/

CereProc Chief Science Officer Dr. Matthew Aylett has over 15 years’ experience in commercial speech synthesis and speech synthesis research. He is a founder of CereProc, which offers unique emotional and characterful synthesis solutions and has been awarded a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship to explore the role of speech synthesis in the perception of character in artificial agents. http://www.cereproc.com

Prof. Gerald Penn is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is one of the leading scholars in Computational Linguistics, with significant contributions to both the mathematical and the computational study of natural languages. Gerald's publications cover many areas, from Theoretical Linguistics, to Mathematics, and to ASR, as well as HCI. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gpenn

Dr. Shimei Pan is an assistant professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Before joining UMBC, Dr. Pan was a research scientist at IBM T. J Watson research center in New York. Her primary research interests include Natural Language Processing, Multimedia Multimodal Conversation Systems, User Modeling and Human-Computer Interaction. http://nlp-lab.umbc.edu/home/shimei/

Dr. Nikhil Sharma is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. He leads the user experience research for Voice Search. He's worked on both multimodal and voice only experiences on a range of devices including smartphones, smartwatches and cars. https://research.google.com/pubs/NikhilSharma.html

Dr. Frank Rudzicz is a Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research focus is on machine learning and signal processing in atypical speech. He is the President of the ACL/ISCA SIG on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies and Young Investigator of the Alzheimer’s Society. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~frank

Dr. Randy Gomez is a senior scientist at the Honda Research Institute Japan (HRI-JP). His interests include speech recognition, speech enhancement, multi-modal interaction and intelligent systems. Currently he oversees the research work in robust multimodal interaction with context awareness at HRI-JP. http://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81327488828

Dr Benjamin R. Cowan is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin's School of Information and Communication Studies. His primary research focuses on the psychological aspects of speech interface interaction. In particular he studies how the design of speech interfaces affect user's perceptions, their mental models as well as their language production. http://www.benjamincowan.com 

Dr. Keisuke Nakamura is a senior scientist at the Honda Research Institute Japan. His research interests are in the field of robotics, control engineering, signal processing, computational auditory scene analysis, multi-modal integration, and robot audition. http://dl.acm.org/author_page.cfm?id=81100584698