Research challenges in speech technology International seminar celebrating the 60th birthdays of Rolf Carlson and Björn Granström Thursday, 13 October 2005 from 9.00 to 17.00 in “The Svedbergssalen” at AlbaNova, Roslagstullsbacken 21, Stockholm Click here to see the final program The Centre for Speech Technology (CTT) and the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH is organizing a special seminar to celebrate the 60th birthdays of Rolf Carlson and Björn Granström. The seminar will honor Rolf’s and Björn’s exceptional contributions and life-long commitment to the field of spoken language research and speech technology. The theme of the seminar is “Research challenges in speech technology.” 10 leading international and Swedish speech researchers have been invited to speak at the seminar. The invited speakers, their affiliations and the preliminary titles of their contributions are listed below: Gunnar Fant, Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, KTH, Stockholm. “Introduction” Gösta Bruce, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University. “Simulation of intonational varieties of Swedish” Nina Grönnum, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University. "Danish phonetically annotated spontaneous speech (DanPASS) - a corpus and a preliminary investigation" Julia Hirschberg, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York. "Charismatic Speech:  Acoustic, Prosodic and Lexical Cues in English" Björn Lindblom, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. “Coping with phonetic variability in phonetic theory and speech technology” Joseph Mariani, Department of Communication and Information Technology, French Ministry of Research. "Supporting Language Technologies for Multilingualism" Dominic Massaro, Department of Psychology, University of California - Santa Cruz. “From Robotic Voices to Talking Heads" Catherine Pelachaud, Technologies and Communication, University of Paris 8. “Communicative and Emotional Embodied Conversational Agents” Yoshinori Sagisaka, Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University, Tokyo. “Corpus-based computational prosody modeling for communicative speech synthesis" Victor Zue and Stephanie Seneff, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts. “Lexical Access via Broad Phonetic Categories: Theory and Practice.” Participation in the seminar is free, however, we would like to ask all participants to register before 5 October, 2005, to help us in our planning of the seminar. Please register by sending an email to 13okt@speech.kth.se Organizing committee: Mats Blomberg, Cathrin Dunger, Kjell Elenius, David House, Inger Karlsson The seminar is sponsored by VINNOVA