IWSDS 2025

Roberto Pieraccini has been an influential scientist and technologist in AI and human-machine spoken interaction since 1981. He has conducted research at institutions like CSELT (Italy), Bell Laboratories (NJ), and IBM Research. He held leadership roles as Technology Director at SpeechWorks International, CTO of SpeechCycle, CEO of the International Computer Science Institute, and Technology Director at Jibo Inc. (Boston). He joined Google (Zurich and New York) as Director of Engineering in 2018. He is now VP and Chief Scientist at Uniphore, leading the AI R&D team. Renowned for his work on statistical natural language understanding and reinforcement learning for dialogue systems, Roberto authored "The Voice in the Machine" (MIT Press, 2012) and "AI Assistants" (MIT Press, 2021). A fellow of IEEE and ISCA, he received the Primi Dieci award (2016) and an honorary Dr. of Science degree from Heriot-Watt University (2019).

Björn W. Schuller is a distinguished academic and researcher with extensive expertise in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing. He earned his diploma, doctoral degree, habilitation, and Adjunct Teaching Professor title in EE/IT from TUM in Munich, where he currently holds a Full Professorship and chairs Health Informatics. Additionally, he is a Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of GLAM at Imperial College London. Schuller co-founded audEERING, an Audio Intelligence company, and has numerous affiliations, including roles at the Munich Data Science Institute and the Munich Center for Machine Learning. He has held multiple prestigious professorships globally and served as an independent research leader at the Alan Turing Institute.

Schuller is a Fellow of several prominent societies, including the ACM, IEEE, BCS, ELLIS, ISCA, and AAAC. With over 1,500 publications, more than 60,000 citations, and an h-index exceeding 110, he is highly influential in the field of Computer Science. He has held editorial positions, including Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health and Editor in Chief of AI Open. Schuller has received over 50 awards, including being named one of 40 extraordinary scientists under 40 by the WEF in 2015. Currently, he is an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2024-2027) and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (2024). His work has been widely recognized in the media, with over 300 public press appearances and contributions to various international outlets.

Kristiina Jokinen is Senior Researcher at AIRC (Artificial Intelligence Research Center), AIST Tokyo Waterfront, Japan. After her PhD from UMIST, Manchester she was JSPS Research Fellow at NAIST in Japan and an Invited Researcher at ATR Research Labs in Kyoto. She was Nokia Foundation Fellow at Stanford University in 2006, NICT Visiting Professor at Doshisha University in 2009-10, and is a Life Member of Clare Hall at University of Cambridge. Before joining AIRC, she was Professor and Project Manager at University of Helsinki and at University of Tartu.

Her research focuses on spoken dialogue systems, multimodal communication (speech, gaze, gesturing), and human-robot interaction. She led the development of WikiTalk, a Wikipedia-based talking robot information system, and has been Principal Investigator in multiple international projects. She has published four books, and organised several international workshops including the northernmost spoken dialogue conference IWSDS 2016 in Lapland.