Meet Yaroslav Getman, PhD Candidate at Aalto University, specializing in self-supervised speech representation learning and its applications in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech technology for underrepresented languages.
Host: Priyanshi Pal
Post-production: Wenxi Fei
Meet Catarina Bolteho PostDoctoral researcher in INESC-ID and one of the original hosts of Speech Pitch this time as a guest.
Host: Pascal Hecker
Post-production: Wenxi Fei
Meet Björn Professor of Health Informatics at TUM and Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee Professor at National Tsing Hua University.
Host: Pascal Hecker
Post-production: Wei Xue
Meet Takayuki Arai Professor in Sophia University with research interest in Speech Communication, Acoustics, Acoustic Phonetics, Speech Processing for People with Communication Disorders. He was a part of Show and Tell
Host: Paige Tuttösí
Post-production: Snigdha Banik
Meet Robin Netzorg PhD researcher at UC Berkeley and Juliana Francis PhD researcher in KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Host: Paige Tuttösí
Post-production: Snigdha Banik
On Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th
Meet us in Ahoy Center at Dock 17
From 09.00 – 11.00 and from 14.00 – 17.00
Overall 105 mentees and 40 mentors registered, will meet us on 19th of August 2025, during Interspeech 2025.
This is the highest participation EVER!!
Round table event
Location: Foyer 2.2
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:30pm
One-on-one mentoring is up to the participants availability during Interspeech.
Meet us on 21st of August 2025
Location: room Port 1B
Time: 12:00pm - 1:30 pm
Registration Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScUo0xDH5la8yjr9B4TWYrw3lRwsyTfR7wqwOpDu-_cCqn2sg/viewform
Mentors: Felix Burkhardt (audEERING GmbH, Germany), Ting Dang (University of Melbourne, Australia), José González-López (University of Granada, Spain), Catherine Lai (Universita of Edinburgh, Scotland)
In this episode we share information about Rotterdam, the host city of Interspeech 2025. You will learn how you can travel from the airport to the conference venue itself, what to pack for this trip, the food culture of Netherlands, fun activities and some survival Dutch.
Listen to:
Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Wei Xue
Guest Host: Marjolein van Os
Editors: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi, Mohammed Mosuily, Paige Tuttösí, Snigdha Banik, Wenxi Fei
0:00:00 - Intro
00:00:32 - Introduction Marjolein
00:01:23 - Rotterdam
00:03:22 - View Points and Architecture
00:07:11 - Sightseeing: Cube Houses
00:08:24 - Sightseeing: Markthal
00:09:04 - Other cities in the Netherlands
00:10:17 - Nicknames of buildings
00:11:23 - Survival Information: language
00:12:07 - Survival Information: currency and public transportation
00:14:25 - Survival Information: safety, red light district
00:17:04 - Survival Information: the weather
00:19:17 - Survival Information: what to pack
00:21:54 - Survival Information: how to get to the Interspeech venue
00:23:52 - Survival Information: trains
00:25:50 - Survival information: accommodation
00:27:47 - Food
00:33:01 - Customs in restaurants
00:39:55 - Desserts and candies
00:41:12 - Souvenirs
00:45:26 - Other cities to visit
00:50:53 - Windmills in the Netherlands
00:52:41 - Survival Dutch
00:53:31 - Emergency numbers
00:54:26 - See you all in Rotterdam!
00:55:02 - Outro
In this episode, Georgia Maniati, a Speech Scientist specializing in Text-to-Speech, shares her career path. She recounts her evolution from a linguist to a speech scientist, detailing her experiences in Greece, Edinburgh, and Italy, and how these shaped her current role. Georgia also discusses the current hurdles in text-to-speech technology, particularly for low-resource languages such as Greek.
00:00:11 - intro
00:00:49- Georgia's vita
00:10:20 - Fellowships for young researchers
00:17:04- Georgia's role at Samsung
00:21:31 - hard skills in her position
00:26:47 - recent, exciting projects she worked on
00:31:22 - challenges in developing synthetic voices
00:33:41 - Greek is a low-resource language, which challenges does it imply?
00:34:38 - naturalness of TTS
00:39:03 - mentoring and volunteering activities
00:43:37 - young female researchers in speech
00:45:20 - science communication for non expert audiences
0:53:32 - gender bias in TTS
00:53:37 - current blind spots in industry
00:56:08 - biggest challenges in her journey
00:59:38 - biggest motivation at work and what's next
01:01:11 - what did she wish to know earlier in her career?
01:02:33 - the question from Titouan Parcollet
01:03:49 - her question for the next guest
01:04:19 - outro
The most long-awaited episode of 2025, the mental health episode is here.
In this episode the Speech Pitch team asked your question to Jasmina Bakic, who is a scientific researcher and psychologist in a psychology practice person-centered in Amsterdam. You will hear 3 stories from our audience and Jasmina's responses to them and to the many questions related to burn out, self doubt, toxic enviroments, self-harm, ADHD and how to seek for help.
Hosts: Priyanshi Pal, Spyretta Leivaditi, Orchid Chetia Phukan, Sarthak Jain
Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kalliopi Kakamouka
0:00:00 intro
0:00:x introducing Jasmina and her areas of interest at work
0:04:52 first story: burn out
0:15:35 potential way outs for burnout
0:17:50 second story: depression upon entering a PhD
0:23:15 should you share mental health concerns with your supervisor?
0:25:25 if your advisor is not empathetic, how should you get help instead?
0:27:55 third story: how do I build effective relationships with my co-workers
0:37:50 how do you ensure better collaboration in the research effort?
0:43:42 short question section: how can one stay focused if your supervisor doesn't support you
0:47:30 how can one cope with toxic behaviour of people around you?
0:57:00 how do you know that resigning is the right decision?
1:00:49 how to get out of a phase of self-doubt?
1:04:56 what is a healthy way of self-worth?
1:11:28 Balance between competition and your own pace
1:14:57 fear of being judged to ask "stupid questions"
1:19:35 how can you react to unfruitful feedback?
1:22:02 how to overcome the feeling of not being sufficient
1:25:56 how to spot someone who might be considering self-harm
1:29:40 how to persuade someone to seek help
1:32:08 how can a supervisor grief after an unfortunate event
1:36:40 ADHD in adults
1:43:08 take-home-message
1:43:48 outro
This is the uncut version of our episode with Say IT Labs. We meet Lukas Latacz and Erich Reiter, founders of Say IT Labs, and discuss their career, the founding process of their company, and their contribution to pathological speech using their Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.
Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi
Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kay Berkling, Kalliopi Kakamouka, Mohammed Mosuily
0:00:00 - Intro
0:00:30 - Introducing Erich Reiter and Lukas Latacz
0:04:22 - The origin story of SAY IT Labs
0:05:56 - How Erich came to Belgium
0:07:33 - Challenges when founding the company
0:12:18 - How did they secure initial funding
0:15:00 - SAY IT Labs as a company
0:19:43 - The science of stuttering and the game stutter stars
0:26:10- How is it validated?
0:30:00 - Different languages
0:31:35 - Smart glasses for Parkinson's
0:38:30 - Advice for young entrepreneurs
0:47:20 - Work life balance
0:53:08 - Question from Titouan: What is your biggest challenge to overcome for your product to succeed?
0:56:44 - Question for the next guest: How to transition from monolingual to multilingual approaches?
0:57:06 - Support SAY IT Labs: interns
0:57:50: - Outro
In this episode we meet Lukas Latacz and Erich Reiter, founders of SAY IT Labs, and discuss their career, the founding process of their company, and their contribution to pathological speech using their Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.
Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi
Editors: Pascal Hecker, Snigdha Banik, Spyretta Leivaditi, Kalliopi Kakamouka, Orchid Chetia Phukan, Sarthak Jain, Vishakha Choudhary
Titouan Parcollet is a “Research Scientist at the Samsung AI Center Cambridge” and an “adjunct researcher at the Cambridge Machine Learning Systems Lab from the University of Cambridge”. Further, he is an “Associate Professor on leave from the Laboratoire Informatique d'Avignon (LIA) and Avignon Université (FR)”. His current Research focus is on self-supervised / representation learning and on continual learning. He played an instrumental part in the development of SpeechBrain and Pytorch-Kaldi.
In this episode you will follow Titouan’s origin story, how he entered university, his PhD journey, his teaching approach and of course his current research topics.
Hosts: Spyretta Leivaditi, Pascal Hecker
Editors: Pascal Hecker, Janice Huang and Snigdha Banik
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:20 - Welcoming Titouan Parcollet
00:01:01 - Titouan's entry into university and early career
00:05:48 - Titouan's PhD journey
00:15:33 - PhD exchange with the Mila institute
00:17:58 - Importance of a PhD advisor and how to chose your PhD position
00:27:50 - Titouan's teaching approach and experience
00:35:50 - His current research topic and his view on the field
00:40:42 - His view on academia and industry
00:43:26 - Work-life balance, mental health, burnout
00:54:34 -Imposter syndrome
01:03:07 - The SpeechBrain toolkit
01:16:06 - The Flower framework
01:17:55 - The E-SSL project: Efficient Self-Supervised Learning for Inclusive and Innovative Speech Technologies
01:22:51 - Titouan answer's Florian Eyben's question
01:24:41 - Titouan's question for the next guest
01:25:49 - Outro
Florian Eyben spearheads technology and innovation at audEERING, focusing on developing industry-leading products for speech emotion recognition and deep learning-based audio analysis. He earned my PhD in Computational Paralinguistics from TUM in Munich, Germany. He also specialize in deep learning, audio feature extraction, signal processing, project management, and tech innovation. He is the lead author of the openSMILE toolkit and a co-author of the GPU-accelerated LSTM-RNN training toolkit, CuRRENNT.
In this podcast episode, Florian shares his academic and professional journey, gives insights about openSMILE and of course shares how audEERING was founded.
Enjoy !!
Hosts: Pascal Hecker, Spyretta Leivaditi
Editors: Janice Huang and Pascal Hecker
Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:26 Welcoming Florian Eyben
00:00:55 Florian's background and research journey
00:10:46 More about openSMILE
00:22:37 Founding audEERING and what it is
00:35:10 For young researchers
00:50:30 Encouragement from Florian
01:00:50 Fun questions
01:17:37 Outro
Meet Rob van Son, Senior researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute Amsterdam who shares his interests and his impressions on Interspeech 2024 in Kos.
Host: Zhengjun Yue
Meet Shrikanth Narayanan who is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering shares his research interests and his impressions on Interspeech 2024 in Kos.
Host: Orchid Chetia Phukan
Meet Shekhar Nayak, associate professor in Speech Technology in Campus Fryslân of University of Groningen. Listen about his interests, his academic journey and of course his impression on Interspeech 2024 in Kos.
Host: Spyretta Leivaditi
Siyang is a PhD student in KTH Royal Institute of Technology shares his experience and impression of Interspeech 2024 in Kos.
Host: Paige Tuttosi
Meet Suhas, Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at Penn State University, where he works at the intersection of Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction, and Health. He shares is interests and his impressions on Interspeech 2024.
Hosts: Spyretta Leivaditi