Organized by:

University Of Crete
FORTH
Sponsored by:

TOSHIBA
Google
ILSP
Innoetics
LISTEN
ENRICH

2018 Speech Processing Courses in Crete
Towards Flexible and Intelligible End-to-End Speech synthesis systems

23-27 July 2018    University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece

WELCOME

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.

This year we will enhance and strongly support the hands-on sessions to provide to the participants a good balance between theory and practice. Morning sessions will include lectures on theory while all afternoon sessions will be dedicated solely to the hands-on sessions.

The Summer School is organized by the University of Crete, Greece and Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). It is sponsored by Toshiba, Google, Innoetics, ILSP Athena, Project LISTEN, and ETN ENRICH. We thank our sponsors for their support.

Co-chairs in this summer school are Prof. Yannis Stylianou (UoC) and Assoc. Prof. Athanasios Mouchtaris (UoC, FORTH).

For 2018, the school topic is: Towards Flexible and Intelligible End-to-End Speech synthesis systems

The topic includes:
  • Modern Acoustic Modelling Approaches (WaveNet, Tacotron)
  • Contemporary Unit Selection: The art of creating thousands of voices in real products
  • Advanced Voice Conversion using Deep Learning (Wavenet, GAN, etc)
  • Intelligibility and Cognitive Effort in Speech Synthesis


LATEST NEWS

  • 28-7-2018: The participants were asked to decipher the spectrogram of our poster. This competition had two winners:
    • Rebecca Williamson, from Apple Inc.
    • Ilaria Torre, from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
      • Congratulations!
  • 28-7-2018: Congratulations to the three "Best Student Poster Award" winners:
    • Lauri Juvela, from Aalto University, Finland, for his poster titled “Speaker-independent raw waveform model for glottal excitation”
    • Sneha Raman, from University of the Basque Country, Spain, for her poster titled “A study of intelligibility and self-reported listening effort of Spanish oesophageal speech”
    • Olina Simantiraki, from University of the Basque Country, Spain, for her poster titled “Does listening effort vary among different speech types?”
    • Note: Ilaria Torre, from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, won 2nd best poster award but only students are listed above.

  • 17-7-2018: The bus route and stops are available here.
  • 17-7-2018: Participation in the SPCC 2018 Summer School grants 3 ECTS to students in European Universities. Please send an e-mail to Dr Kafentzis (kafentz AT csd DOT uoc DOT gr) should you need such a certificate.
  • 17-7-2018: School poster is ready!
  • 17-7-2018: Poster session schedule is available! Please check this PDF.
  • 17-7-2018: Each school day ends at around 17h30, so you will have plenty of time to spend in the city. The Municipality of Heraklion has just published its "Heraklion2018 Summer Arts Festival" guide and I am pretty sure you will find very interesting events to attend. You can find the guide PDF (there is a short English description for each event at the end of each page).

  • 11-6-2018: Final programme announced! Check it here!
  • 11-6-2018: This year, the SPCC18 banquet will take place at the Historical Museum of Crete! We thank the museum's council for their support. Before the banquet, the SPCC18 participants will enjoy a free guided tour (in English) of the museum (approx. 30'-40')!
  • 11-6-2018: For personal reasons, Dr Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis from Google U.K. will not lecture in this summer school. Despite this unexpected change, Tacotron will be covered by Dr Vasilis Tsiaras. Furthermore, Dr Yannis Pantazis, Researcher in the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, will present Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that day along with a hands-on session on GANs. We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause.

  • 08-3-2018: Preliminary programme announced! Check it here!
  • 08-3-2018: School leaflet is ready! Check it here! and feel free to share it among your colleagues!



    • For any questions regarding SPCC18, please send an e-mail to: spcc AT csd.uoc.gr

    Registration Info

    Students: €350, Non-students: €600, to cover lunches, coffee breaks, banquet, school materials, bus transfer between city and campus. Limited number of places for highly motivated researchers and students, so reserve your position soon (yannis@csd.uoc.gr).

    Awards

    Participants, if they wish, are expected to present their work as a poster (119cm width x 97cm height, at most) or demo, during 1 hour in each day (at the mid of each school day). There will be an award for the best student poster/demo which will be announced during the last day (closing ceremony). Theory will be followed by hands on sessions while speech synthesis systems will be demonstrated by the lecturers during the last day of the school.

    School Poster

    To be announced.