Organizers

Robin is a EECS PhD candidate advised by Gopala Anumanchipalli and Bin Yu at the University of California, Berkeley. With particular interest in building technology for gender-affirming voice training, Robin specializes in modeling speaker perception and identity alongside community members and leaders. 

Juliana is a PhD Student in the Speech, Music, and Hearing (TMH) department at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, supervised by Joakim Gustafsson and Éva Székely. Her research interest is focused on expressive and controllable speech synthesis speech, in part for augmentative and alternative communication devices. Juliana is also a current editor for the ISCA LGBTQI* webpage. 

Brooklyn (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Linguistics, supervised by Dr. Stephen Winters, where her research aims to bridge the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and speech modelling. In industry, she has been an advocate for fair and inclusive speech and language technology, with hands-on experience leading a collaborative dataset creation process for misogynistic language in English as an NLP Scientist at Mila - Quebec AI, and an internship project with Meta dedicated to developing a conceptual framework for community-led speech dataset creation by, for, and with marginalized communities.

Kimi Wenzel is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Her research centers on understanding the downstream representational harms of speech AI, with a focus on psychological impacts. Her work examining speech diversities in AI has won awards from CHI and the Center for Machine Learning and Health. She has previously co-led workshops on speech AI and representation at CHI and FAccT.

Norman Makoto Su is an associate professor in the Department of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. His research interests lie in human–computer interaction (HCI) and computer–supported cooperative work (CSCW). He directs the Authentic User Experience Lab (AUX Lab), where they integrate empirical and humanistic methods in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to study and design with subcultures. He has published work on collective action and around new forms of and challenges with AI work and the techlash.

Anna Leschanowsky is a Senior Scientist at Fraunhofer IIS, specialising in the intersection of voice technology, HCI and privacy-preserving systems. She has been part of the FairEVA project, an open-source project gathering resources and building tools to help researchers and developers, technology activists, and voice technology users evaluate and audit bias and discrimination in voice technologies.

Dr. Abraham Glasser is an Assistant Professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, USA. Dr. Glasser is a born-Deaf person who can and does use his voice, and experiences barriers with speech-based technologies. He is a faculty member in the Accessible Human-Centered Computing and Policy program, where he and his students conduct Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on accessible technologies for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing users. At Gallaudet, Dr. Glasser is also co-director of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Technology Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (DHH-RERC), and an active member of the Coalition for Sign Language Equity in Technology (CoSET).

Bowon Lee is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Inha University and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Artificial Intelligence. He served as General Chair of the IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) 2025, Local Operations Chair for Interspeech 2022, Awards Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2018, and a member of the organizing committee for the Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop (YFRSW) 2022. His research interests include automatic speech recognition, speech signal processing, and speech-based inclusive technologies.

Christine Murad is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the SPIRL lab at Carleton University, and a Research Associate at the University of Waterloo, in the Technologies for Aging Gracefully lab. Christine is currently based in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada). Christine earned her PhD (2024), MSc (2019), and her Honours B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Christine’s research involves exploring the design of human-centered AI, with a focus on conversational voice interfaces and the development of design heuristics and tools to assist in conversational voice interface design. Christine is a founding member of the ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) Steering Committee since its inception in 2019.

Cosmin Munteanu is an Associate Professor and Schlegel Research Chair in Technology for Healthy Aging at the Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, and Director of the Technologies for Ageing Gracefully lab. They are a transdisciplinary scholar, drawing from a wide range of disciplines such as engineering, computing sciences, critical theory, and technology and society studies. Cosmin takes a primarily ethnomethodological approach to study how to design intelligent applications that improve access to information, support social connections late in life, and reduce digital marginalization for underrepresented groups such as older adults. Their work is situated at the intersection of user experience design, digital inclusion, aging, natural language processing, and ethics, primarily focusing on the sociotechnical design of inclusive interfaces with and for older adults.

Dr. Jay L. Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM), where he directs the Responsible AI Systems & Societal Experiences (RAISE) Lab. His interdisciplinary HCI scholarship spans over a decade, focusing on human-centered AI, language technology equity, and responsible data governance. Dr. Cunningham critically examines how algorithmic harms, and structural inequities emerge through data practices—especially affecting underserved communities. His work combines empirical research with equity-centered and participatory approaches, and has appeared in premier venues such as ACL, ACM CHI, AIES, and FAccT. He has convened cross-sector collaborations with stakeholders from academia, government, and industry (including Apple, Google, and Microsoft).

Shaomei is a person who stutters and the founder and CEO of AImpower.org, a tech nonprofit dedicated to research and develop inclusive AI technologies for, with, and by the disabled community. Her recent research focuses on fair and inclusive speech research and technologies for stuttered speech.