2009 Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems

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Overview
Thanks for making this year's YRRSDS a smashing success! We'll see you next year. Please fill out YRRSDS 2009 Survey. Proceedings of YRRSDS 2009 [PDF] Download all presentations from YRRSDS 2009 [ZIP, 123MB] Photos from YRRSDS 2009 [ZIP, 20MB] The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop is meant to provide an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research, and help create a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field. Please note that by 'young researchers' the workshop's organizers mean to target students and researchers in the field who are at a relatively early stage of their careers, and in no way mean to imply that participants must meet certain age restrictions. This year, the workshop was held on September 13th-14th, 2009, in London, England, as a satellite workshop to Interspeech 2009, the day after SIGDIAL 2009. It was held at Queen Mary University of London, not far from the Interspeech location. Previous workshops were held in Columbus (ACL 2008), Antwerp (Interspeech 2007), Pittsburgh (Interspeech 2006) and Lisbon (Interspeech 2005). Here is the poster [PDF] [JPEG] and call for papers [PDF] advertising the workshop. Please post them in your department! [Facebook Group] ISCA will consider applications for a limited number of travel grants for the roundtable. Applications should be sent to grants@isca-speech.org, details of the application process and forms are available from http://www.isca-speech.org/grants.html. Closing date for applications will by the end of July.
Workshop Format
The 2009 workshop will be a 2-day event. The first day will comprise an introductory session, a senior researcher panel with both academic and industry panellists, and two group discussion sessions. During the one-hour introductory session, participants will briefly introduce themselves and their research. After the opening session, all the participants will stay together for the senior researcher panel. We intend to invite similar numbers (probably 2-3) of senior researchers from both academia and industry to answer participants questions on career path building and long term career planning. Afterwards, participants will be split into discussion groups (three groups for the target size of 30-50 participants; the precise number of groups is subject to change depending on the number of attendees). Each group will be assigned a dialogue research issue to discuss; these topics will be chosen based on interests expressed during the submission process. Potential Roundtable discussion topics could include: the effects of the speech channel in human-computer communication, the prosody of conversation, best practices for conducting and evaluating user studies of spoken dialogue systems, statistical methods in dialogue systems, design of gestures for conversational avatars, or cultural adaptation of dialogue strategies. The discussion groups will have two hours to discuss the topic, after which the entire group will reconvene and each group will make a short summary presentation. On the second day there will be a demo and poster session, providing a space for students to present their current work and results. We will also continue and expand last year's discussion on evaluation, exploring various aspects of SDS evaluation frameworks: "Frameworks and Grand Challenges for Dialogue System Evaluation".
Workshop Committees
Organizing Committee David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Signal Processing Applications Group (GAPS), Politechnic University of Madrid Milica Gasic, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK François Mairesse, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK Matthew Marge, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Joana Paulo Pardal, L2F iNESC-ID and IST, Technical University of Lisbon Ricardo Ribeiro, L2F iNESC-ID and ISCTE, Lisbon Local Organizers Arash Eshghi, Interaction, Media and Communication Group, Queen Mary University of London, UK Christine Howes, Interaction, Media and Communication Group, Queen Mary University of London, UK Gregory Mills, Interaction, Media and Communication Group, Queen Mary University of London, UK Advisory Committee (as of 5/9/09) Hua Ai, University of Pittsburgh, USA James Allen, University of Rochester, USA Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Dan Bohus, Microsoft Research, USA Philippe Bretier, Orange, France Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Sadaoki Furui, ISCA and Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Luis Hernández Gómez, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain Carlos Gómez Gallo, University of Rochester, USA Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland Nuno Mamede, L2F iNESC-ID, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal David Martins de Matos, L2F iNESC-ID, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Joao Paulo Neto, Technical University of Lisbon & Voice Interaction, Portugal Tim Paek, SIGdial and Microsoft Research, USA Antoine Raux, Honda Research Institute, USA Robert Ross, University of Bremen, Germany Alexander Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Mary Swift, University of Rochester, USA Isabel Trancoso, L2F iNESC-ID, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal Tim Weale, The Ohio State University, USA Jason Williams, AT&T Labs, USA Sabrina Wilske, Saarland University, Germany Andi Winterboer, University van Amsterdam, Netherlands Craig Wooton, University of Ulster, UK Steve Young, University of Cambridge, UK
Email
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