2019 Speech Processing Courses in Crete

Catherine Pelachaud is Director of Research in the laboratory ISIR, Sorbonne University. Her research interest includes embodied conversational agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, and gesture), expressive behaviors and socio-emotional agents. With her research team, she has been developing an interactive virtual agent platform Greta that can display emotional and communicative behaviors.She is recipient of the ACM - SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award 2015 and was honored the title Doctor Honoris Causa of University of Geneva in 2016. Her Siggraph' 94 paper received the Influential paper Award of IFAAMAS.

Tomoki Toda received the B.E. degree from Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, in 1999 and the M.E. and D.E. degrees from NAIST, Nara, Japan, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He was a Research Fellow of the JSPS from 2003 to 2005. He was then an Assistant Professor (2005-2011) and an Associate Professor (2011-2015) at NAIST. Since 2015, he has been a Professor in the Information Technology Center, Nagoya University. His research interests include statistical approaches to speech, music, and sound information processing. He has received more than 10 paper/achievement awards.

Vassilis Tsiaras received his degree in Mathematics from the University of Thessaloniki in 1990, his M.Sc in Mathematics from the QMW College, University of London in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 2009. His research areas of interest include graph algorithms, biomedical signal processing, statistical speech synthesis, and machine learning.

Alex Papangelis is currently with Uber AI, on the Conversational AI team; his interests include statistical dialogue management, natural language processing, and human-machine social interactions. Prior to Uber, he was with Toshiba Research Europe, leading the Cambridge Research Lab team on Statistical Spoken Dialogue. Before joining Toshiba, he was a post-doctoral fellow at CMU's Articulab, working with Justine Cassell on designing and developing the next generation of socially-skilled virtual agents. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington, MSc from University College London, and BSc from the University of Athens.

Matt Shannon received his PhD on speech synthesis from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is currently at Google working on sequence-to-sequence models for speech synthesis. His research interests include speech recognition, speech synthesis and machine learning, particularly new loss functions, neural net architectures and optimization methods.