In the last few years, foundation models for speech and audio have advanced rapidly.  Today’s pre-trained speech and audio encoders allow for quick adaptation to a variety of tasks, such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, spoken language understanding, audio event detection, and music understanding and generation.  Recent work has also been developing general-purpose language models for speech and audio, which promise to perform arbitrary tasks in a single model, similarly to LLMs for text.  This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners at the forefront of speech and audio foundation model development to discuss foundational principles, emerging trends, and current challenges. Topics include model architectures and pre-training strategies, multilingual and multimodal models, and evaluation benchmarks. The workshop will include speakers and participants across academia and industry to foster an exchange of ideas and help chart a path for the emerging crop of robust, general-purpose speech and audio foundation models.

Venue: TTIC, Chicago, USA (September 4 - September 5)

Registration is free here

There are several hotels nearby the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park, where TTIC is located. These include:

• The Study (a five minute walk from TTIC)

• Hyatt Place Chicago-South

• Sophy Hotel

• There are also several reasonable options in downtown Chicago, such as Hotel Felix. To search for more options, you can check nearby hotels.

Parking:

Free parking is available in the commuter parking lot at 60th St. and Stony Island Ave. and free street parking on many streets near TTIC (just beware of "permit parking" and "street cleaning" signs!). Parking can be found on 61st Street (between Woodlawn Ave and Blackstone Ave), on Dorchester Street (between 60th and 61st Streets).

Registration is free. Please sign up before August 13 below if you are interested to attend the workshop. To present your work as a poster or talk, please also complete the poster submission below. We are awarding a limited number of small grants to attendees including students/junior researchers/presenters who are traveling from outside the Chicagoland area. Please fill out this form to indicate your need.