Dear Colleagues,

Interspeech-2015 will start in about 3 months and it is time to announce our plenary speakers.

Following the tradition of most past Interspeech conferences, the organizing committee of Interspeech-2015 has decided to present four keynote talks in Dresden, one on each day of the conference. It is also tradition that the first keynote talk will be presented by the ISCA medaillist just at the end of the opening ceremony on Monday morning, Sept. 7, 2015. Information on this year’s ISCA medaillist will be published later in June.

Information on the other three plenary speakers will be however very soon available on the Interspeech-2015 website and here we provide already a brief introduction of the candidates:

Prof. Klaus Scherer from the University of Geneva will present a keynote talk about vocal communication as major carrier of information about a person’s physique, enduring dispositions, strategic intention and current emotional state. He will also discuss the importance of voice quality in comparision to other modalities, e.g. facial expressions, in this context. Prof. Scherer is one of the most prominent researchers in the area of emotion psychology and was holder of an ERC Advanced Grant covering these research topics.

Prof. Katrin Amunts from the Institut of Neuroscience and Medicine at the Research Centre Juelich/Germany will deliver a talk about her research within the European FET-Flagship „The Human Brain Project“. The expectations from this presentation are twofold: Firstly, many of the Interspeech attendants might have heard about the huge „EU Flagship Projects“ which are funded with more than $ 1 Billion each, but does not know what exactly is going on in such a project and how it is organized and structured. This talk will introduce the FET-Flagship project that is mostly relevant to the Interspeech-Community, the „Human Brain Project“. Prof. Amunts is not only the leader of the Subproject 2 “Strategic Human Brain Data”, but is additionally very well-known for her work on how language is mapped in regions of the human brain and how to create a 3D atlas of the human brain.. From her talk we can expect the perfect combination of speech & language research with neural brain research within the probably most prominent project in this area.

Everybody in the Speech Community knows the popular „Personal Digital Assistants“, such as Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. However, many of those people might not know exactly what detailed technology is behind these highly commercially successful systems. The answer to this question will be given by Dr. Ruhi Sarikaya from Microsoft in his keynote address. His group has been building the language understanding and dialog management capabilities of both Cortana and Xbox One. In his talk, he will give an overview of personal digital assistants and describe the system design, architecture and the key components behind them. He will highlight challenges and describe best practices related to bringing personal assistants from laboratories to the real-world.

I hope you agree that we will have truly exciting plenary talks at this year’s Interspeech and the Interspeech-2015 team is looking forward to sharing this experience with you soon in September in Dresden.

Gerhard Rigoll

Plenary Chair, Interspeech-2015