Keynote 1: Prof. Dr. Sharon Gannot, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

"Multi-Microphone Speaker Localization and Tracking on Manifolds"

        

Sharon Gannot received the B.Sc. degree from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, in 1986, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Tel-Aviv University, Israel, in 1995 and 2000, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In 2001, he held a postdoctoral position at KU Leuven, Belgium. From 2002 to 2003, he held a research and teaching position at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel. Currently, he is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he is heading the Speech and Signal Processing laboratory and the Signal Processing Track. His research interests include multi-microphone speech processing and specifically distributed algorithms for ad hoc microphone arrays for noise reduction and speaker separation, dereverberation, single-microphone speech enhancement, and speaker localization and tracking.
Prof. Gannot has served as an Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing (2003-2012), Associate Editor and Senior Area Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2009-2017) and as a Guest Editor of the Elsevier Speech Communication and Signal Processing journals. Currently, he serves as a moderator for arXiv in the field of audio and speech processing. Since 2017 he is the chair of the IEEE SPS Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing technical committee. He was the general co-chair of the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC) in 2010 and the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) in 2013. He was selected to present several tutorials and keynote talks at signal processing conferences and is a co-recipient of 10 best paper awards.

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Keynote 2: Prof. Dr. Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University, USA

"Neural End-to-End Architectures for Speech Recognition in Adverse Environments"

        

Shinji Watanabe is an Associate Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. He received his B.S., M.S., and PhD (Dr. Eng.) Degrees in 1999, 2001, and 2006, from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. From 2001 to 2011, he was a research scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. From January to March 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. From 2012 to 2017, he was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, USA. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, spoken language understanding, and machine learning for speech and language processing. He has published more than 150 papers in top journals and conferences, and received several awards including the best paper award from the IEICE in 2003. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, and is a member of several technical committees, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Technical Committee and Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee.

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Keynote 3: Dr. Thomas Brand, University of Oldenburg, Germany

"Modeling human speech recognition"

        

Thomas Brand received his diploma in physics from the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 1994, and his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) degree from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in 1999. He is researcher and lecturer at the University of Oldenburg, and head of the research group “Speech Audiology” within the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics. His research interests are the development of subjective and objective procedures for assessing speech and loudness perception, psychoacoustic models of speech intelligibility in adverse acoustic conditions for listeners with normal and with impaired hearing, binaural hearing as well as linguistic processing and attention in human speech perception. Thomas Brand is the coordinator of the master program “Hearing Technology and Audiology” at the University of Oldenburg.

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