In a world where computer technology is maturing, it is highly desirable that the new machines will serve humans and not the opposite. This require machines to become simpler, address humans needs and help humans increase their productivity. Simpler machines do not mean fewer controls or fewer capabilities, however. On the contrary, true easy of use involves means of interaction that are natural for humans and therefore require no new learning effort from them. For thousands of years, speech and vision are the primary means of interaction between people. These two modes of interaction have a distinctive role in natural communications. With vision, humans perceive a huge amount of information. However, when speech is available, it always takes over as the preferred mode of human communication. Therefore, speech processing is the key in building natural human-machine communication as well in facilitating the communication between humans via machines.

The Speech Processing Courses in Crete (SPCC) are targeting to teach graduate students and researchers the latest advancements of speech processing covering theory, hands on, and establishing contacts between the academics and industry. The school will provide the chance to students and professionals to meet world leaders in speech technology, exchanging ideas, sharing experiences and vision.

For 2014, the school aims to cover the following areas:

• Speech Production and Modelling
• Mechanism of Hearing
• Speech Intelligibility and Hearing Aids
• Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems
• Distant Speech Recognition

Participants, if they wish, are expected to present their work as a poster, during 1 hour in each day (mid of each school day). Especially for students:

• There will be an award for the best student poster which will be announced during the last day (closing ceremony).
• We will support 5 students to participate to the school with 500€/student for covering air-ticket cost, accommodation and daily allowance. A letter from the student's supervisor should be submitted with the registration. We will announce the winners by July 18.