Interspeech 2018

Interspeech is the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing

Interspeech conferences emphasize interdisciplinary approaches addressing all aspects of speech science and technology: fundamental theories, advanced applications including computational modeling and technology development inspired by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Speech processing is undeniably at the heart of multimodal AI and ML. In fact, advanced ML tools were first conceived and successfully deployed towards building speech based applications. Recent rapid strides and advances in AI and ML have provided a further impetus and accelerated speech based system development and deployment. Contributions to all areas of speech science and technology are welcome. In addition to regular oral and poster sessions, Interspeech 2018 will feature plenary talks by internationally renowned experts, tutorials, special sessions, show & tell sessions, and exhibits. A number of satellite events will also take place around Interspeech 2018.

Interspeech 2018 will be held during September 2-6, 2018 in Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana state in India. The venue is the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC), a state-of-the-art convention centre for holding large (over 5000 delegates) conferences, and it compares with the best in the world in terms of technological, communication, and audio-visual tools. The adjoining Novotel Hyderabad convention centre is a modern 4-star hotel with 287 guest rooms. The surrounding High-Tech City area has several options for transport, accommodation, food, shopping and entertainment within 7 kilometres distance from the HICC. There are many historic places to visit in Hyderabad, and for shoppers, the city offers a wide variety of antiques, handicrafts, jewellery, dresses, leather goods, etc.. The HICC is about 40 minutes drive from the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA), which is rated as among the best in the world for Airport Service Quality. The airport provides domestic flight connections to enable travellers to reach almost any major city in India within about two to three hours.

India has a large diversity in language, culture, food habits, etc, but remains unified as a single nation. The diversity makes communication among people, especially in spoken form, unique and challenging for scientific exploration. With a huge market in the country and a large penetration of mobile communication (with over 800 million mobile phones) for doing business, the IT-enabled services face the challenge of handling conversations in multiple languages. The large speech research community in India is already addressing these issues with generous support from the federal and state governments and from the industry. The theme of the conference is not only topical but also apt: “Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies.” The participants of the conference would get a first-hand feel for the unique challenges of providing IT-enabled services to a large population in a multilingual society like India.