The human-computer dialogue, in debate at UPT, at SpeD-2019
The human-computer dialogue, in debate at UPT, at SpeD-2019
The most interesting and newest research in current technologies in speech recognition and human-computer dialogue that governs digital assistants (such as Siri, Alexa, Home), was presented at the 10th International Speech Technology and Human-Computer Dialogue Conference - SpeD 2019, an event organized between October 10 and 12, 2019 by Politehnica University Timisoara, through the Multimedia Research Center, next to the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, the Institute for Computer Science of the Romanian Academy, the Iași Branch, and the Research Institute Artificial Intelligence "Mihai Drăgănescu" of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest branch, whose opening ceremony was held Thursday, October 10, 2019, in Auditorium within the Conference Center of UPT.
At the opening of the event, the words of welcome from the hosts, Politehnica University Timișoara, were addressed by assoc. prof. Liviu Cadariu-Brăiloiu, PhD, rector, and prof. eng. Radu Vasiu, PhD, both as president of the UPT Senate and as co-organizer of the event, followed by the academician Horia Nicolae Teodorescu, from the Romanian Academy, prof. eng. Corneliu Burileanu, PhD, from UPB, and Prof. Laurent Besacier, from the University of Avignon, France.
The SPED 2019 conference is an event in the Politehnica 100 calendar - the first century of university education in Timișoara. At the conference that brings together 60 participants, from several countries, parallel sessions and dedicated workshops were organized, on topical topics in speech recognition and human-computer dialogue, digital assistive technologies through voice commands, automatic translation technologies, of assistive technologies for people with disabilities.
Conference SPED 2019 took part branded speakers, keynote speakers as follows:
Prof. Laurent Besacier (Univ. Avignon, France) defended his doctoral thesis in computer science in 1998 on the theme "A parallel model for the automatic recognition of speakers". Since 1999 he has been an associate professor (full professor since 2009) in computer science at the University of Grenoble Alpes. From September 2005 to October 2006, he was a guest researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center (NY, USA), working on Speech to Speech translation. His research interests are mainly related to multilingual speech recognition and machine translation. Laurent Besacier has published over 150 papers in conferences and magazines related to speech and language processing. He has been involved in several national and international projects, as well as in several evaluation campaigns. Since October 2012, Laurent Besacier has been a junior member of the "Institut Universitaire de France" with a project entitled "From underacoustic language processing to machine translation: an ecological approach".
Academician Prof. Dan Tufiș is a professor of computational linguistics and director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Bucharest (since 2002). His contributions to NLP (paradigmatic morphology, POS labeling, WSD, QA, MT, word alignment, wordnet, etc.), are widely recognized and have been published in over 300 scientific papers. Dan Tufiș coordinated several national and international projects related to resources and technology for the Romanian language. He is a member of 9 editorial boards of international journals and has been or has been on the program committees for more than 100 international conferences.
Prof. eng. Radu Vasiu, PhD, is a professor at the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technologies of Politehnica University Timisoara. He received his doctoral degree in Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications from Politehnica University Timisoara in 1997. His most recent research interests are in the fields of e-Learning, multimedia, web technologies, open data and smart cities. He is the President of the Senate of Politehnica University and director of the Multimedia Research Center. He has published 12 books and over 100 papers in journals or presented at different international conferences. He has been involved in 28 international research or cooperation projects. Currently, Prof. Vasiu is acting as President of the International Association for e-Sciences ( IAFeS ), which promotes the use of ICT in science and technology internationally.
Dr. Géza Németh is an associate professor and head of the Intelligent Speech and Interaction Technology Laboratory in the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics of the University of Technology and Economics in Budapest (BME TMIT SmartLab ). He has led several research and development projects as a pioneer of speech technology and smart platforms (telephone, TV, robot, clock, etc.) in Hungary. His exceptional work has been honored by several awards, including the Officers' Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2004. He has over 170 scientific publications and four patents. Currently, it is a Hungarian national contact point for the European platform on request AI (project AI4EU) and serves as the leader of the working group for international relations of the Hungarian coalition in Hungary.
