Workshop of Multimodal, Multilingual and Multitask Modeling Technologies for Oriental Languages (M3Oriental)

Prof. Tatsuya Kawahara received B.E. in 1987, M.E. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1995, all in information science, from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently, he is a Professor of School of Informatics, Kyoto University. From 2020 to 2023, he was the Dean of the School. Before that, he was also an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT. 

He has published more than 450 academic papers on automatic speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several projects including open-source speech recognition software Julius, the automatic transcription system deployed in the Japanese Parliament (Diet), and the autonomous android ERICA. 

Dr. Kawahara received the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2012. From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee. He was a General Chair of IEEE ASRU 2007. He also served as a Tutorial Chair of INTERSPEECH 2010, a Local Arrangement Chair of ICASSP 2012, and a General Chair of APSIPA ASC 2020. He was an editorial board member of Elsevier Journal of Computer Speech and Language and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. From 2018 to 2021, he was the Editor-in-Chief of APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing. Dr. Kawahara is the President of APSIPA, a board member of ISCA, and a Fellow of IEEE. 

Prof. Björn W. Schuller received his diploma, doctoral degree, habilitation, and Adjunct Teaching Professor in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing all in EE/IT from TUM in Munich/Germany. He is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Head of GLAM at Imperial College London/UK, Full Professor and Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing at the University of Augsburg/Germany, co-founding CEO and current CSO of audEERING – an Audio Intelligence company based near Munich and in Berlin/Germany, independent research leader within the Alan Turing Institute as part of the UK Health Security Agency, and permanent Visiting Professor at HIT/China amongst other Professorships and Affiliations. Previous stays include Guest Professor at Southeast University in Nanjing/China, Full Professor at the University of Passau/Germany, Key Researcher at Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria, and the CNRS-LIMSI in Orsay/France. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Golden Core Awardee of the IEEE Computer Society, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the ELLIS, Fellow of the ISCA, Fellow and President-Emeritus of the AAAC, Elected Full Member Sigma Xi, and Senior Member of the ACM. He (co-)authored 1,200+ publications (50,000+ citations, h-index=100+ ranking him number 7 in the UK for Computer Science), is Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health and was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing amongst manifold further commitments and service to the community. His 50+ awards include having been honoured as one of 40 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 by the WEF in 2015. Currently, he was awarded IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer 2024. He served as Coordinator/PI in 15+ European Projects, is an ERC Starting and DFG Reinhart-Koselleck Grantee, and consultant of companies such as Barclays, GN, Huawei, Informetis, or Samsung. Schuller counts more than 300 public press appearances including in Business Insider, Guardian, International Business Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, Times, The Economist 1843, UK Daily Mail, and national and international podcast, radio, and television contributions such as in MIT Technology Review and “The World” and “The Why”.

Prof. Emilia Barakova received her Ph.D. in Mathematics and Natural Sciences from the University of Groningen in 1999, and her master’s degree in Electronics and Automation engineering from the Technical University of Sofia in Bulgaria. She is presently affiliated with the Industrial Design department and serves as the Head of the Social Robotics Lab at the Eindhoven University of Technology. She formerly worked at Riken Brain Science Institute, Wako-shi, Japan, the German-Japanese Robotics Research Lab, Kitakyushu, Japan, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Barakova specializes in embodied social interaction with and through technology and social and cognitive robotics.  She has expertise in modelling social behaviour by merging artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and robotics. Her present research focuses on the use of social robots for enhancing the well-being of people with visual impairments and intellectual disabilities, dementia, and also education and special education (i.e. social skills training of children with autism spectrum disorders. Barakova has served as the program chair for several conferences (including IJSR, IEEE RO-MAN, and IEEE Hybrid Intelligent Systems), and she is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, as well as an editor of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Interaction Studies, and Transactions of Human-Machine Systems. She has co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed papers.

Prof. Zhizheng Wu is an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Prior to that, he led teams and performed research at Meta, JD.com, Apple, the University of Edinburgh, and Microsoft Research Asia. Zhizheng received his Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2015. Zhizheng is the creator of Merlin, an open-source speech synthesis toolkit. He initiated and co-organized the first speaker verification spoofing and countermeasures challenge as a special session at Interspeech 2015, the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016, and the Blizzard Challenge 2019. He also gave a tutorial on spoofing detection at APSIPA ASC 2015 and a tutorial on deep learning-based speech synthesis at Interspeech 2017. Zhizheng is an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing and a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. He is also the General Chair of IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop 2024.

Prof. Yu Tsao (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2008. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Researcher with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo, Japan, where he engaged in research and product development in automatic speech recognition for multilingual speech-to-speech translation. He is currently a Research Fellow (Professor) and the Deputy Director with the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is also a Jointly Appointed Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taoyuan, Taiwan. His research interests include assistive oral communication technologies, audio coding, and bio-signal processing. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING and IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS. He was the recipient of the Academia Sinica Career Development Award in 2017, national innovation awards in 2018– 2021, Future Tech Breakthrough Award 2019, Outstanding Elite Award, Chung Hwa Rotary Educational Foundation 2019–2020, and NSTC FutureTech Award 2022. He is the corresponding author of a paper that received the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), Young Author, Best Paper Award.

Dr. Jianlong Fu is currently a senior research manager who is responsible for the research and innovation in multimodal computing group at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). He received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

His research focuses on multimedia content understanding, and multi-modal perceptual computing in images, videos, and embodied agents. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed technical papers and over 20 US patents. His Google Scholar h-index is currently 47. 

Dr. Fu serves as the vice-chair for the Automotive CE Applications Technical Committee under the IEEE Consumer Technology Society, as well as an editorial board member for IEEE TMM, IEEE CTSoc-NCT, and guest editor for IEEE TPAMI from 2019-2021. He has also chaired several specialized committees at international multimedia flagship conferences such as ACM Multimedia 2021 and ACM ICMR 2021/2023. He has received multiple awards, including the ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award 2022, Best Paper Award at the 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference, and over 10 international competition championships in CVPR/ICCV/ECCV. Additionally, his research has been applied to various Microsoft products such as Windows, Office, Bing, Edge, and XiaoIce.

Prof. Zuchao Li is currently an Associate Researcher at Wuhan University. He obtained his PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, under the guidance of Prof. Hai Zhao. Prof. Li has also spent time at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan as a Limited Technical Researcher, hosted by Dr. Masao Utiyama and Dr. Eiichiro Sumita. His research interests encompass language sequence modeling, linguistic structure parsing, and language representation learning from various types of data, such as unlabeled or noisy data and structured data like trees and graphs. Specifically, Prof. Li concentrates on theoretical and algorithmic approaches for syntax/semantic parsing, self-supervised/weakly supervised learning, structure learning, and related NLP tasks. Recently, he has delved into the realm of Multimodal Large Language Models (LLM).

Dr. Xianchao Wu received his Ph.D. degree in NLP field from The University of Tokyo in 2010. He is currently a senior solution architect and data scientist at NVIDIA. He worked at Baidu until 2015 and then Microsoft until 2020. He helped developed chatbots of Rinna and XiaoICE who have 32-million users in Japan and more than 80-million users in China. His research interests include large-scale pretrained language models, conversational AI, creative AI and financial NLP. He is an (co-)author and (co-)inventor of 50+ papers and 110+ patents in conversational AI and creative AI fields. During these 10+ years, he has served as a PC member/session chair of ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, NAACL, COLING, AAAI, AACL, and UAI for more than 30 times.