Hynek Hermansky Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering Baltimore, USA hynek@jhu.edu

Keynote topic - Why should we ask why?

Abstract: We often present advances in automatic recognition of speech (ASR) by describing the most successful configuration of available open software processing modules, sometimes adding new elements, and reporting the accuracy of the obtained results. So, what is being reported to the community is HOW the work was done and WHAT has been the output. That is understandable since reviewers are evaluating our papers by checking if the work is replicable (the HOW element) and if the progress is demonstrated (the WHAT element). However, one can argue that more scientific progress could be made when the report also contains an explanation of WHY the processing was effective. Some attempts to follow this advice in our own work are discussed in the talk.

Hynek Hermansky's Biography

Hermansky serves in leadership roles for the field’s key workshops and conferences presents invited lectures and keynote presentations around the globe and were lecturing worldwide as the Distinguished Lecturer for ISCA and for IEEE. Hermansky was the General Chair of INTERSPEECH 2021 in Brno, Czech Republic, was a General Chair of the 2015 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), and chair of the technical committee for the ICASSP 2000. In addition to leading several Hopkins’ CLSP workshops, he was also on the organizational committee for ASRU 2017, ASRU2013 and ASRU 2005, for ten years was the executive chair of the annual ISCA-sponsored workshops on Text, Speech, and Dialogue in the Czech Republic, and was a tutorial speaker at Interspeech 2015. He received a M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1972) from Technical University Brno, Czech Republic and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1983) from University of Tokyo, Japan.

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Preslav Nakov Natural Language Processing Department Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence Masdar City Abu Dhabi preslav.nakov@mbzuai.ac.ae

Keynote topic - TBA

Abstract:

Preslav Nakov's Biography

Preslav Nakov's research interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing, disinformation, propaganda, fake news and media bias detection, fact checking, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, and biomedical text processing. Prior to joining MBZUAI, Nakov worked at the Qatar Computing Research, HBKU where he was a principal scientist. Previously, he was a research fellow at the National University of Singapore (2008–2011) and a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2008). He has been an honorary lecturer at Sofia University, Bulgaria since 2014. Nakov is one of the leading experts on “fake news”, disinformation, fact checking, propaganda, and media bias detection and has published tens of research papers on solutions and stop-gaps for the ever-growing online social media infodemic. He’s served on the program committees of the major conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Most recently, he was a program committee chair of the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022).