Laurent Besacier
Short CV:
Prof. Laurent Besacier defended his PhD thesis (Univ. Avignon, France) in Computer Science in 1998 on “A parallel model for automatic speaker recognition”. Since 1999 he is an associate professor (full professor since 2009) in Computer Science at Univ. Grenoble Alpes (he was formerly at U. Joseph Fourier). From September 2005 to October 2006, he was an invited scientist at 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 >150 papers in conferences and journals related to speech and language processing. He supervised or co-supervised 20 PhDs and 30 Masters. He has been involved in several national and international projects as well as several evaluation campaigns. Since October 2012, Laurent Besacier is a junior member of the “Institut Universitaire de France” with a project entitled “From under-resourced languages processing to machine translation: an ecological approach”.
Title: Automatic Speech Recognition: Introduction, Current, Trends and Open Problems
Dan Tufis
Short CV:
Dan Tufis is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Bucharest (since 2002). His contributions in NLP (paradigmatic morphology, POS tagging, WSD, QA, MT, word alignment, large mono- and multi-lingual corpora and dictionaries, wordnet, etc.), are largely acknowledged and have been published in more than 300 peered reviewed scientific papers. Dan Tufis coordinated several national and international projects related to resources and technology for Romanian language. He is a member of 9 editorial boards of international journals and is and has been on the program committees for more than 100 international conferences.
Title: Resources and Technologies for Speech and Language Processing of Romanian
Abstract: The talk will make an overview of what is available for open access resources and technologies for processing (including translation of) Romanian. The presentation will mention some more goodies under development and some relevant European actions (ELG, ELRC, NexusLinguarum) towards access facilitation of researchers and developers of a multilingual Europe virtual environment.
Radu Vasiu
Short CV:
Radu Vasiu received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania in 1982 and 1997, respectively. He is currently a professor at the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technologies of the Politehnica University of Timisoara. His research interests in the last years are in the area of open data , smart cities, mobile applications, e-learning, multimedia and web technologies. Since 1993 he was involved in more than 30 international projects (Tempus, Phare, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Life Long Learning, FP6, etc), especially in the field of multimedia and e-learning, both as coordinator or as contractor.
He is now the President of the Politehnica University Senate and the Director of the Multimedia Research Centre.
He acted as invited professor in different universities from UK, Finland, France, Austria, Greece and Netherlands.
The publication list includes 12 books and more than 150 papers presented at different international conferences. He was involved in 32 research or international cooperation projects.
Currently, prof. Vasiu acts as President of the International Association for e-Science (IAFeS), that promotes at international level the use of ICT in science and technology.
He is also a member of IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Communications Society, European Association for Telematics Applications (EATA), European Distance and E-learning Network (EDEN), International Association of Science and Technology Engineers for Development (IASTED) and of the Commission for European Integration of the Romanian Academy, Timisoara branch.
Title: Open Data for Smart Cities
Abstract: The presentation will start from the framework and concepts of Smart Cities, making the connection between creative industries and cities development, with an emphasize on online tools for testing digital competences and skills enabling those industries according to the European Framework for Digital Competences DigiComp 2.1. The importance of open data and open access in this context will also be introduced. Examples of online and mobile applications development in smart cities will be given, most of them coming from the own experience with the Politehnica University of Timisoara in the context of the preparations for Timisoara – European Capital of Culture 2021.
Geza Nemeth
Short CV:
Dr. Géza Németh is an Associate Professor with habilitation and the Head of the Speech Technology and Smart Interactions Laboratory of the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME TMIT SmartLab). He has led several R&D projects as a pioneer of speech technology and smart platform (phone, TV, robot, watch, etc.) applications in Hungary. His outstanding work was honoured by several awards, including the Officers Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2004. He has 170+ scientific publications and four patents. Currently he is the Hungarian National Contact Point for the European AI On-Demand Platform (AI4EU project) and serves as the International Relations Workgroup Leader of the Hungarian AI Coalition.
Title: Text-to-Speech from Kempelen to Tacotron and Beyond
Abstract: The science and engineering of text-to-speech has gone through incredible improvents since the inventions of Wolfgang von Kempelen. The paper will give an overview of technology trends and state-of-the-art results and challenges from a Central-European perspective.
