08:30 - 09:15

Networking & Registration

09:15 - 10:00

Welcome Remarks

• Prof. Moti Sokolov, President, Afeka
• Avi Hasson, Chief Scientist, Israeli Ministry of Economy
• Prof. Ami Moyal, Conference Chairman

10:00 - 11:00

Keynote

Prof. Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen University, Germany; LIMSI-CNRS, France
The Statistical Approach to Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing: Achievements and Open Problems

11:30 - 12:30

Session I

Chairman: Prof. Jean François Bonastre, VP University of Avignon, France

• Inter Dataset Variability Compensation for Robust Speaker Recognition
  Hagai Aronowitz, Cognitive Computing, IBM Research, Haifa, Israel
• On the Importance of Pre- and Post-Conditioning Procedures for Speaker Recognition Systems Based on Total Variability Factors
  Pierre-Michel Bousquet & Jean-Francois Bonastre, LIA, University of Avignon, Avignon, France
• Speaker Diarization in Commercial Calls
  Itsik Lapidot, Lidiya Aminov, Tal Furmanov & Ami Moyal, Afeka Center for Language Processing, Afeka Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Tel-Aviv, Israel

12:30 - 14:00

--- Lunch ---

14:00 - 15:00

Keynote

Prof. Jean François Bonastre, VP University of Avignon, France
The Notion of Performance: A Paradigm Shift in Speaker Recognition and Voice Comparison?

15:00 - 15:30

--- Coffee Break ---

15:30 - 16:30

Keynote

Prof. Richard M. Stern, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Robust Automatic Speech Recognition in the 21st Century

16:45 - 19:00

Workgroups

• Cognitive Computing
  Chairmnan: Moshe Wasserblat, INTEL
  Speakers: Moshe Wasserblat, INTEL; Michel Assayag, INTEL; Prof. Ronen Feldman, Hebrew University; Yoav Degani, Founder & CEO, VoiceSense

• Mobile Multimodality
  Chairmen: Dr. Nava Shaked, HIT & BBT and Eran Aharonson, Afeka
  Speakers: Nava Shaked, HIT & BBT & Eran Aharonson, Afeka college; Shlomo Peller, Rubidium; Eli Jacobson, Shenkar College & HIT; Boaz Zilberman, Project RAY; Itay Katz, Eyesight Technologies; Gal Melamed, WonderVoice

• Speech Recognition
  Chairman: Dr. Irit Opher, NICE Systems
  Speakers: Dr. Irit Opher, NICE Systems; Yishay Carmiel, CEO, S-Infinity; Prof. Sharon Gannot, Bar-Ilan University; Ron Hecht, GM Advanced Technical Center
   
• Speaker Verification/Recognition/Diarization (VRD)
  Chairman: Dr. Itsik Lapidot, ACLP, Afeka
  Speakers: Dr. Itshak Lapidot, ACLP, Afeka; Pierre-Michel Bousquet, University of Avignon; Alon Pinhasi, NICE Systems; Dr. Gennady Karvitsky, Principal Biometric Researcher, Nuance Communications

Student Poster Session

Afeka student posters on speech processing related topics will be presented in parallel to the workgroups

09:00 - 09:30

Networking & Registration

Welcome Remarks

Col. Yaniv Rotem, Head of Electronics Systems Division, Directorate of Defense Research & Development (DDR&D)

10:00 - 11:00

Keynote

Mr. Jay Wilpon, Executive Director NLP, AT&T, USA
The Connected World and Speech Technologies: It’s About “Effortless

11:00 - 11:30

Coffee break

11:30 - 12:30

Session II

Chairman: Mr. Jay Wilpon, Executive Director NLP, AT&T, USA

• Automatic Tools for Analyzing Spoken Hebrew
  Adiel Ben-Shalom, Doron Modan & Asher Laufer, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; Joseph Keshet, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel;
• Error Diagnosis and Classification of Errors in two Hebrew State-of-the-Art Speech Recognition Systems
  Vered Silber-Varod, The Research Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies, The Open University of Israel, Ra'anana, Israel; Nitza Geri, Department of Management and Economics, The Open University of Israel, Ra'anana, Israel
• Mobile Application for Real Time Monitoring of Speaker’s Rate of Speech Based on Phoneme Segmentation Techniques
  Katia Raichlin Levi, Aviv Sotzianu, Eran Aharonson & Zehava Blechman, Afeka Academic College of Engineering, Tel Aviv, Israel; Ofer Amir, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

12:30 - 14:00

--- Lunch ---

14:00 - 15:00

Session III

Chairman: Prof. Richard M. Stern, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

• Robust Convex Segmentation of Sequential Data
  Itamar Katz & Koby Crammer, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
• Glottal Pulse Estimation - a Frequency Domain Approach
  Anibal Ferreira & Sandra Diaz, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
• A Hybrid Keyword Spotting Approach Combining LVCSR and Phonetic Search
  Michal Gishri, Ella Tetariy, Noam Lotner & Ami Moyal, Afeka Center for Language Processing, Afeka Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Tel-Aviv, Israel

15:00 - 16:00

Expert Panel

Moderated by Prof. Hermann Ney. With the participation of:

• Prof. Jean François Bonastre
• Prof. Richard M. Stern
• Mr. Jay Wilpon

Satellite Event >>

16:00 - 17:00

Cocktail & Networking

17:00 - 18:00

Live Video Conference

Mr. Ray Kurzweil, Author, Inventor, Visionary and Director of Engineering at Google
The Future of Language in an Era of Accelerating Technologies