Speech Pitch

There is no such thing as a banquet that lasts forever, and farewells can be bittersweet as we part ways with old and newfound friends from the conference. Yet, the real magic often happens behind the scenes.

In this episode, we were joined by two dedicated members of the UK Speech 2023 local committee: Hend TM Elghazaly and Olga Iakovenko. As the conference venue quieted down after attendees departed, they offered us a glimpse into the world of conference organisation as a team. From the joys they found in the process to the challenges they encountered, they shared their insights and experiences, leaving us with valuable advice for future student volunteers.

In this episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing three senior students from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies, University of Sheffield: George Close, Mary Hewitt and Tom Pickard. Drawing from their personal experience, they shared valuable insights on how to navigate conferences without getting exhausted, along with recounting their most memorable and unexpected moments.

In this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Robbie Sutherland and Mattias Cross, two first-year PhD students from the University of Sheffield, working on speech and language technologies. With limited conference experience, they discussed their expectations for such events and posed insightful questions for seasoned senior students to shed light on.

UK Speech annually extends its invitation to local businesses, offering them a platform to showcase their advancements in speech technologies. In this exclusive interview, we had the pleasure of hosting representatives from Oxford Wave Research, a company specialising in audio and speech processing, voice biometrics, and deep learning-driven product development.

During our conversation with Dr Anil Alexander and Dr Finnian Kelly, we delved into the vast potential of speech technologies and their significance for everyday individuals. The discussion also touched upon the unique research dynamics within a smaller company and strategies for fostering collaboration with academic researchers. Last but not least, Anil and Finnian revealed the qualities they seek in potential new team members -- yes, they are hiring! Tune in to seize this opportunity!

Apart from big speech research groups, there are also many other research groups of various sizes. In this episode, we interviewed Dr. Jennifer Williams, an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, who has worked a lot on privacy and security in the speech field. Joining us was Beatrice Pakenham-Walsh, a final-year undergraduate student. UK Speech 2023 marked Beatrice's conference debut, where she presented a poster on using audio analysis to detect pain.

In this episode, Dr. Williams and Beatrice shared their experiences and perspectives on doing speech research at the University of Southampton. We discussed the challenge of interdisciplinary work, the role of a research community and how individual researchers can use a community to identify potential collaborative opportunities. 

Apart from big speech research groups, there are also many other research groups of various sizes. In this episode, we interviewed Dr Zoe Handley, an Associate Professor at the Department of Education at the University of York. Dr Handley has more than 20 years of experience in applying speech technologies in language education. 

In the discussion, Dr Handley shared her views about the evolution of speech technologies from the perspective of language learning and teaching. She also talked about how to find collaborations outside the researcher’s institute, and how to leverage conferences such as UKSpeech to find such collaborations. At the end, we also discussed the connection between STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and social sciences, as well as applications in general.

The University of Cambridge has one of the biggest speech research groups in the UK. In this episode, we have Dr Kate Knill and her colleague Dr Mengjie Qian from the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Dr Knill is a Principal Research Associate in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory. She is also one of the keynote speakers at UK Speech 2023. Her speech is titled ‘Foundation Models in Spoken Language Processing: Time to go home or make hay?

In this episode, Dr Knill recapped her keynote speech with the key line for the audience to take away. Together with Dr Qian, she also shared her opinions about the big changes in automated language teaching and assessment over the past few years, as well as what it will be like in the next 5 to 10 years. We also discussed the potential to apply such automotive assessment techniques in the music field. In the end, they shared their vision about the UK and Ireland Speech 2024, which will be held at the University of Cambridge.

This episode is the first in a special series of mini-episodes covering the UK Speech 2023 Conference. In preparation for the conference, we have ISCA-SAC’s volunteer Guanyu Huang talk to Dr Anton Ragni, the Local Committee Chair of the conference, about its organisation, history, and impact of the conference on the speech research community in the UK.

In this episode, we have a conversation with Roger K. Moore, Professor of Spoken Language Processing at the University of Sheffield. Prof. Moore has more than 50 years' experience in research and development of speech technology, having been President of the European/International Speech Communication Association from 1997 to 2001, and the Head of the UK Government's Speech Research Unit from 1985 to 1999.

During this conversation, Prof. Moore spoke to us about the development of the field of speech technology in the last 40 years, and shared his views on the past and future of the field, as well as on the possible impacts of Large Language Models in speech technology . We further discussed his own work on speech recognition and animal vocalisations, and got to learn about his experience as a professor and his love for photography.

In this episode, we have Professor Pascale Fung with us. Pascale is the Chair Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE). Apart from her highly-achieved academic roles, she is also very active in the industry.

In our conversation, Pascale generously shared her experiences and knowledge regarding the relationship between AI and art, why and how we need to work on empathetic machines, the uncanny valley effect in conversational agents, global collaboration on ethical AI, as well as her personal role models and interesting stories and enlightening insights about science communication.

This is the first episode of Speech Pitch, ISCA-SAC's (Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association) new podcast. We are interviewing Iona Gessinger, last year’s ISCA-SAC General Coordinator and winner of the best student-paper award in Interspeech 2020.