Here is another last-minute announcement for our Friday tea talk tomorrow:
First we will have Mirco Ravanelli, who recently joined MILA, talk about "Some insights into distant speech recognition" (abstract below).
Subsequent to the talk Harm de Vries, Sarath Chandar and Aaron Courville will present and betatest "GuessWhat?!" - their new data collection game. Don't forget to bring your laptop!
PS we will bring some beers! PS2 the best player will be awarded a special prize!
Where: AA3195 When: Friday, Apr. 22nd, 14:30
Abstract for Mircos talk:
Some insights into distant speech recognition
Building computers that understand speech represents a crucial step towards easy-to-use human-machine interfaces. Despite the significant progress made in the last decade, state-of-the-art speech recognition technologies provide a satisfactory performance only in close-talking scenarios, forcing the users to speak close to a microphone-equipped device. However, it is easy to predict that in the future people will prefer to relax the constraint of handling or wearing any device to access speech recognition services, requiring techniques able to better cope with distant-talking interactions even in adverse acoustic conditions. This talk will briefly discuss some important applications of this emerging technology and will highlight prominent issues of current systems. In the final part of the talk a new architecture solely based on machine-learning techniques, which is potentially able to better counteract the harmful effects of noise and reverberation, is proposed to overcome the major limitations of state-of-the-art technology.