Candidates for 2015 - 2016
Candidate for President
Name: Frank Rudzicz
Affiliations: Toronto Rehabilitation Institute; University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science
Biography: Dr. Rudzicz is the author of about 46 papers generally about natural language processing but focusing mostly on atypical speech and language in individuals with physical disorders (e.g., cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease) and in individuals with cognitive disorders (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease). He is the founder and CEO of a company, Thotra Inc., that transforms speech signals to be more intelligible, a co-author on a best student paper award at Interspeech 2013, an Ontario Brain Institute entrepreneur, and winner of the Alzheimer’s Society Young Investigator award. Dr. Rudzicz is a guest editor for special issues of the ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, and Computer Speech and Language. He developed the speech recognition and interaction being used in HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, which has received international attention.
Statement: I have been the secretary-treasurer of the joint ACL-ISCA SLPAT SIG for the past two years and have co-organized both of its main workshops during this time. I’ve had papers in each of SLPAT’s five workshops and have had the privilege of meeting many of you over the years in LA, Edinburgh, Montreal, Grenoble, and Baltimore. The purpose of SLPAT is to serve as a big tent in which the confluence of speech-language pathologists, clinicians, users, and technologists should foster innovation with actual real-world impact. Because our work has such potential to improve the quality-of-life for so many millions of people, it is vital for our community to re-assert itself with strong partnerships and an involved membership. My goal will be to strengthen the participation of our members and to establish our SIG more firmly within both the ACL and ISCA.
Candidate for Vice-President
Name: Keith Vertanen
Affiliations: Montana Tech, Department of Computer Science
Biography: Keith Vertanen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Montana Tech. He completed his PhD in 2009 at the University of Cambridge. Prior to his PhD, he completed an M.Phil at the University of Cambridge in speech and language processing and a masters in Computer Science from Oregon State University. Dr. Vertanen's research focuses on designing intelligent interactive systems that leverage uncertain input technologies. In particular, he has worked on research supporting users who are blind or visually-impaired and users of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices. He has served as a reviewer and a program committee member for numerous conferences and journals in human-computer interaction and speech and language processing. Currently he is an associate editor for the International Journal of Human Computer Studies and a senior program committee member for IUI 2015. For further details, see: http://keithv.com.
Statement: I was at the Closing the Gap conference on assistive technologies during my PhD when I first realized the problem. The vendor hall was chock-full of predictive AAC devices and, more-or-less, their predictions all sucked. Despite decades of research in speech recognition and language processing, not much had seemed to "trickle down". Firstly, I believe SLPAT's mission is to ensure the best ideas from the larger speech and language processing communities makes it into the hands of end users. I believe an equally important role of SLPAT is to serve as a community for discussing and addressing the unique challenges and constraints inherent in assistive technology research (e.g. diverse user abilities, lack of large data sets, difficulty in evaluation and comparison). In the past, I have co-organized successful CHI workshop and SIG meetings. As vice-president, I would seek to promote and grow the SLPAT community by helping to organize a strong, thought-provoking, and collaborative workshop.
Candidate for Secretary-Treasurer
Name: François Portet
Affiliations: Maître de Conférences, University of Grenoble
Biography: He obtained his PhD in computing science at the University of Rennes 1 in 2005 after which he joined, as Research Fellow, the University of Aberdeen. Since 2008, he is researcher (Speech/NLP group) at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble. His research interests lie in the areas of speech interface, Ambiant Intelligence, assistive technologies, decision support and NLG. He is currently involved in the Sweethome project, where he is working on distant speech recognition and decision-making from uncertain and inaccurate sensor data to assist daily elderly people. He was co-organiser of the SLPAT 2013 workshop at Interspeech 2013, of a special session on Speech technologies for AAL at Interspeech 2014 and member of several PCs of international conferences related to NLP and AI. He is currently co-guest editor of the ACM TACCESS special issue on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology.
Statement: I believe I can assume the role of secretary fairly well (I was the president of the PhD candidate association while in Rennes (~ 50 members) which was functioning somewhat similarly to a SIG) as well as the treasurer one having been responsible for the financial handling of SLPAT 2013 (registrations, grants, expenses, and writing financial reports to the universities and associations). Apart from this, I would like to continue to be involved in the scientific events organised by the SIG (I am involved in SLPAT 2015) and contribute (if I have time) to strengthen the links with industry and end users (associations). I am willing to broaden the community, particularly out of US-UK. Not all of the potential target users speaking English, it would be nice to extend even more the expertise of the community wrt the language and culture.
Candidate for Student Member
Name: Andrew Fowler
Affiliations: Oregon Health & Science University, Center for Speech and Language Understanding
Biography: I am a PhD student at Oregon Health and Science University, working with Brian Roark and Steven Bedrick. I study language modeling for text entry, focusing on the behavior of text entry in the presence of noise/errors internal and external to the user. Of primary interest are models for assistive technology and language models for mobile text entry. I have investigated the implementation of backspace/delete functionality in text entry systems, and how it differs from other input in fundamental ways. I have also studied the use of personalized and adapted language models in both Assistive Technology and soft keyboard text entry (smartphone touchscreens), domains with large possible benefits for personalization. My publications include work on co-construction presented at a SLPAT workshop. Recently, I won the Oregon statewide Three-Minute Thesis competition in 2014, in which graduate students are asked to explain their thesis to a non-technical audience in under three minutes.
Statement: I am involved in a Brain Computer Interface project called RSVPKeyboard (PI Melanie Fried-Oken) at OHSU. The RSVPKeyboard is a typing system for people with severe physical disabilities. It combines language model probabilities with EEG brain signals to generate text more quickly than is possible without such a combined approach. One of the most useful experiences for me in this project has been working directly with people with disabilities. As the Student Member of SLPAT, I would seek to foster an increased level of direct communication between engineers (especially students) and users of the technology. I have also found Assistive Technology to be a fascinating and rewarding field of study, but one that is often overlooked by researchers working in text entry and other natural language processing areas. I would attempt to address this oversight by reaching out to those researchers and interesting them in projects related to Assistive Technology.
Candidate for Student Member
Name: Maria Yancheva
Affiliations: University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science
Biography: Maria is a graduate of the University of Toronto Engineering Science program with a specialization in Computer Engineering, during which she completed an undergraduate thesis in natural language processing with Dr. Frank Rudzicz. Her thesis work focused on the use of supervised machine learning methods for disambiguation between truthful and deceptive speech obtained from young children awaiting court appearances for suspected child abuse cases; the work was presented at ACL 2013. She is a co-founder of GroceryGo Inc., a mobile application which uses lexical sense relations obtained from WordNet to classify sale items into useful categories and offer real-time price transparency; the startup received the 2013 Orbis Challenge Award and was selected for the 2013 Engineering Entrepreneurship Hatchery Program. Maria is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science as part of the Computational Linguistics group at UofT; her research interests lie in the use of linguistic features for early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, as well as exploring patterns within the space of linguistic impairment among people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Statement: Automated speech-based tools have great potential for improving the lives of dysarthric patients, and I am very interested in this practical area of NLP research. I have just begun my Master's this September, and am looking forward to becoming involved with the SLPAT interest group over the coming months. As a Student Member, I can bring my extensive experience with web programming to maintain and enhance SLPAT’s web presence. During my one-year internship as a software developer at the Global Capital Markets division of one of Canada’s leading financial institutions, I was involved in using many web technologies, in the context of both open-source (LAMP-based) and closed-source (C#.NET/MS SQL Server) systems. I have a lot of experience with both server-side (PHP, VB, C#) and client-side (HTML, Javascript, jQuery, AJAX) development, and would be happy to assist the SIG in this capacity. Additionally, I hope to use this opportunity to become more familiar with NLP research for assistive technologies, which would allow me to pursue this interest in my own work in the future.