Invited talks

In addition to the various seminar series run by the Speech and Hearing research group, the Natural Language Processing research group, and our host department, the CDT runs two seminar series focused on Industrial R&D and Entrepreneurship and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as well as organising keynote talks at our Annual Conference (2021, 2022, 2023). 

Our recent talks have included:

Mary Paterson

University of Leeds

AI analysis of voice to aid laryngeal cancer diagnosis

Dr Emily Clements

King’s College London & Outside Consulting Ltd

Science and Business: How to Speak Both Languages

Professor Odette Scharenborg 

Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

Inclusive speech technology: Developing automatic speech recognition for everyone

Dr Celia Cintas

IBM Research Africa

A tale of adversarial attacks & out-of-distribution detection stories in the activation space

Dr Benjamin R Cowan

University College Dublin

Perspective taking, partner models and user language use in speech technology interaction

Professor Pascale Fung

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Safer Generative ConvAI

Professor Emily M Bender

University of Washington

Meaning making with artificial interlocutors and risks of language technology

Dr Giorgos Dritsakis

SOUND Laboratory, University of Cambridge / University of East Anglia

Health Technologies for Hearing Loss: Speech and beyond

Professor Maria De-Arteaga

Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Fairness concerns in semantic representations: from compounding injustices to social norm bias

Dr Matthew Aylett

Chief Scientific Officer, CereProc

Why is my social robot so slow? How developing technology for the severely disabled will make better robots.

Alisa Milchevskaya

Associate Data Scientist, Beamery UK

Beamery: scale-up insights; overview of NLP to optimise hiring; approaches to developing ethical and unbiased AI solutions.

Dr Vincent Wan

Research Scientist, Google UK

Is the data enough? A TTS perspective

Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Director of the Statistical Speech and Technology Group, University of Illinois, USA

Child-rearing families, language families, and the support for people with disabilities: Thoughts about what it means to be human

Dr Emmanuel Vincent

Senior Research Scientist & Head of Science, Inria Nancy - Grand Est

Speech anonymization

Professor Emine Yilmaz

Professor and Turing Fellow, University College London UK and Amazon Scholar for Amazon, UK

Research Challenges in Devising the Next Generation Information Retrieval and Access Systems

Professor Laurence Brooks

Professor of Technology and Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, UK

The Ethical and Human Rights Implications of AI

Dr Duc Le

Research Scientist Manager at Meta AI Speech, USA

Automatic Speech Recognition Research at Meta

Dr Bhuvana Ramabhadran

Google, USA

Large Scale Self/Semi-Supervised Learning for Speech Recognition

Therése Svensson

Data science and AI ethics solution specialist, IBM

Trustworthy AI put into action

Yvonne Soh

Co-founder and CEO, NoodleFactory

The practical dilemma, tech vs business in AI startups

Dr Dirk Hovy

Associate Professor, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

More than words – Integrating social factors into NLP

Jesse Shemen

Co-founder and CEO, Papercup

Startups, tech giants, or academia? How to decide your career path

Dr Catherine Breslin

Founder, Kingfisher Labs

Voice technology in industry

Dr Jason Baldridge

Research scientist, Google

Substantiating words

Dr Peter Waggett

Director of Research, IBM UK

IBM Research - Our Strategic Focus in 2022

Dr Steve Beet

Principal R&D engineer, Aculab

Answering machine detection AI R&D in a commercial environment

Professor Susan M Fitzmaurice

Vice President and Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sheffield, UK

Language and Speech Research at Sheffield: transdisciplinary approaches and perspectives

Professor Milica Gašić

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Towards dynamic dialogue models

Alex Chan

CEO, Babbobox

Lies, damned lies and AI. But what are you doing to change the world? Views of an Asian perspective.

Professor Jochen Leidner

Director of research, Refinitiv, UK

NLP and ML applications for fun and profit

Professor Mark Sanderson

RMIT University, Australia

Creating a Conversational Search System

Emilio Monti

Amazon, UK

Natural Language Understanding as Machine Translation

Dr Giuseppe 'Pino' Di Fabbrizio

VUI Inc., USA

Conversational agents for e-commerce

Alan Nichol

Co-founder, Rasa Technologies

What do developers need to build great conversational AI?