Keynote Speakers

Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013 and his BTech from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning. He is a recipient of Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (ECASE), IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Google Focused Research Award, Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, Army Young Investigator Award (YIP), DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), and outstanding paper awards at ACL, CVPR, EACL, COLING, and CoNLL. He has been a keynote speaker for the AACL 2023, CoNLL 2023, and INLG 2022 conferences. His service includes EMNLP and CoNLL Program Co-Chair, and ACL Executive Committee, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee, ACL Americas Sponsorship Co-Chair, and Associate/Action Editor for TACL, CL, IEEE/ACM TASLP, and CSL journals. Webpage: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/

Johan Schalkwyk, a (former) Google Fellow, has been a leader in the speech industry for over 25 years. His passion is to make speech a usable interface that everyone in the world uses. He was instrumental in Google DeepMind’s Multimodal perception and Large Language Model efforts, and served as Google's Speech Area Tech Lead guiding research investments across speech recognition and synthesis.

In 2008, Johan built the first search by voice experience in the world, Google Voice Search. He has led Google's speech team, bringing research innovations such as on-device and neural models to products from Google Assistant to YouTube for over 80 languages.

Thanks to his continued leadership, Google speech research is leading in both industry and academia, publishing and launching numerous breakthroughs in Deep Learning for Speech Recognition and Synthesis. 

Most recently Johan has joined the exciting world of start-ups at Sesame AI, where he is working towards solving fluid conversations with large language models. When not building speech recognizers, Johan enjoys mountain biking around the world, cooking Vietnamese food, and baking desserts.

Navdeep Jaitly is a Research Scientist at Apple Machine Learning where he leads a team of researchers working on fundamental techniques for Machine Learning with an emphasis on speech and language. He got his PhD from University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton in the foundational days of Deep Learning. During a PhD internship at Google, he demonstrated how Deep Neural Networks could revolutionize speech recognition and this work was a part of a 2012 paper which received the test of time best award paper from IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2022. After his PhD he joined Google Brain, working on sequences models, introducing methods such as Listen Attend and Spell, Adversarial Autoencoders and PointerNetworks. He has also held machine learning research positions at Nvidia, Google Brain Robotics, D. E. Shaw and the National Labs.