Description

The EU project LISTEN (http://www.listen-project.eu/) is concerned with various aspects of far-field large-vocabulary speech recognition. As part of this project, we will organize a three-day workshop in Bonn/Germany, 17-19 July 2018 (Tuesday-Thursday).

The workshop intends to bring together experts from academic and industrial research in this fast developing area of speech recognition. The workshop will include regular talks and keynote talks. In total, we expect an audience of about 50 researchers.

Organizers

	Hermann Ney, Volker Steinbiss, Ralf Schlüter RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany
	Athanasios Mouchtaris Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Heraklion, Greece
	Volker Fischer EML, Heidelberg, Germany
	Emilio Giannotti Cedat85, Rome, Italy

Venue

The workshop will take place in the Ameron Hotel Königshof, Adenauerallee 9, 53111 Bonn, Germany, Tel.: +49 228 260 10, Email: info@hotel-koenigshof-bonn.de.
The hotel is located next to the Rhine river; 20 km distance from airport Cologne/Bonn; 1 km from train station Bonn; 30 km from train station Cologne.

Program

  - Tuesday, July 17:    08:50-18:40 technical session,
  - Wednesday, July 18:  08:50-12:45 technical session,
                         14:00-21:00 social event (*),
  - Thursday, July 19:   08:50-18:00 technical session.
  (*) Please note that the social event is a boat trip, so you cannot leave in between.

Detailed program

Keynotes

Confirmed keynote talks (45 minutes + questions/discussions):

Industry:

• Alex Acero, Apple, USA: Our work on HomePod.
• Jasha Droppo, Microsoft, USA: The Microsoft 2017 conversational speech recognition system.
• Erik McDermott, Google, USA: Next generation acoustic models for automatic speech recognition.
• Björn Hoffmeister, Amazon, USA: Building far-field speech recognition for Amazon Alexa: Challenges and solutions

Academia:

• Chin-Hui Lee, GeorgiaTech, USA: Two-stage enhancement of noisy and reverberant microphone array speech or automatic speech recognition systems already trained in clean conditions.
• Jon Barker, U Sheffield, UK: The CHiME-5 challenge for far-field conversational speech recognition in domestic environments.
• Satoshi Nakamura, NAIST, Japan:Toward Machine Speech Chain with Semi-supervised Learning by ASR-TTS coupling and Next Generation Speech-to-speech Translation.
• Reinhold Häb-Umbach, U Paderborn, Germany: Neural network supported acoustic beamforming and source separation for ASR.

Detailed program

Travel

We encourage the workshop participants to arrive on Monday, July 16, and to leave after the end of the last session.

By plane

Several airports can be used to travel to Bonn:

• Cologne/Bonn (Köln/Bonn, CGN): 23 km to the venue by car, 25 minutes with bus SB60 from CGN to Bonn main station (4 stops) then 1 km walking or taxi
• Dusseldorf (Düsseldorf, DUS): 83 km by car, about 1h50 with public transport
• Frankfurt (FRA): 154 km by car, about 1h15 - 2h00 with public transport

if you need assistance with your travel planning, our secretary will be happy to help you (+49 241 80-21601, e-mail sek@i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de).

Watch out: There are two airports which have names similar to some of the above but lie badly remote in the countryside, notably Frankfurt-Hahn (HHN) and Düsseldorf Weeze (NRN; also Airport Weeze, Verkehrsflughafen Niederrhein). If you end up there, we will have a good laugh at the workshop.

By train

The hotel is in walking distance to Bonn main station (Bonn Hbf). Bonn is typically reached via Cologne (Köln).

Accomodation

The venue, Ameron Hotel Königshof, also provides accomodation for all workshop participants. (If you intend to stay at another place, please inform our secretariat.)

Hotel Information

• Room rate: 129.00 EUR per night for a room "smart standard", which is either single room or double room with single use, incl. breakfast buffet.
  (For use with two people, a double room is 149.00 EUR per night incl. breakfast buffet.)
• Check-in: from 15:00 (3:00 PM). Important note: If you are likely to check in after 18:00 on arrival day, pls. inform the hotel about it.
• Check-out: until 12:00 (noon)

Booking Information

• Unfortunately, the special rate for the rooms allocated for the workshop cannot be booked online, but you need to book directly with the hotel, either by phone call (+49 228 260 10) or by email. Please mention the booking code "LISTEN Summer School" to access the allocated rooms with the above room rate.
• In case of problems with your hotel booking, please contact our secretaries, who will be pleased to provide help.
• If you are a keynote speaker, please contact our secretaries, who will take over the booking of your accomodation.

Leisure activities

The Culture Trip (in English)
Kunstmuseum (art museum) Bonn (in English)
Museum overview on wikipedia (in English)
Traveling Tips of Bonn (in English)
German History Museum (in English)
Events calendar Bonn (in German)
Museumsmeile Bonn (information on the so called "museum mile", a conglomeration of several museums, in German)

Contact

For organizational issues, especially in case of questions w.r.t. travel and accommodation/hotel booking, please contact our secretariat:
Anna Eva Andersen, Stephanie Jansen, phone: +49 (241) 80-21601 or -21606

During the workshop please call Volker Steinbiss, mobile: +49 (I79) 6679I8

Acknowledgements

		This workshop has received funding from the chair of computer science 6, Human Language Technology and Pattern Recognition, RWTH Aachen University, from the Verein zur Förderung des Lehrstuhls Informatik 6 der RWTH e.V. (registered charitable association) and from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 644283. Any work presented reflects only the authors' views and neither the Research Executive Agency (REA) nor the European Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.