Keynote Speakers

Characterizing and assessing the oral reading fluency of young readers

Gérard Bailly is a senior CNRS Research Director at GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble-France of which he was deputy director (2007-2012) and headed the « Cognitive Robotics, Interactive Systems & Speech Processing” team (CRISSP). He has been working in the field of speech communication for 40 years. He supervised 33 PhD Thesis, authored 50 journal papers, 24 book chapters and more than 200 papers in major international conferences. He coedited “Talking Machines: Theories, Models and Designs” (Elsevier, 1992), “Improvements in Speech Synthesis” (Wiley, 2002) and “Audiovisual speech processing” (CUP, 2012). He is an elected member of the ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) board and a founder member of the ISCA SynSIG and SproSIG special-interest groups. His current interest is multimodal interaction with conversational agents – in particular humanoid robots – using speech, hand and head movements and eye gaze. He also works in the field of computer-aided training, in particular reading and cognitive therapy.

 

Diverse Conversational Spoken Language Generation

Antonio Bonafonte joined Amazon TTS Research in January 2019 as Senior Researcher. The team leads the research and innovation that defines the future of Amazon Alexa and AWS Polly voices. Previously, he worked for over 25 years as Associated Professor at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, leading the TTS Research Group. Most of his career has been focussed on speech synthesis, co-authoring around 200 technical papers, and participating or leading more than 50 national or international research projects. Some of the produced technology has been included in widely available products, as the Festival Catalan voices in debian repositories, the upcTV (Catalan Educative Program) and the pioneer TaP, distributed in the 90s by CEAPAT/IMSERSO.