Invited speakers
Keynote speaker 1:
Nick Campbell
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology & ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Labs, Japan.
How to follow a conversation without listening to the words
Abstract:
This talk describes the use of nonverbal speech sounds in spoken interaction and shows
how a technology can be trained to follow the flow of a conversation or dialogue without
any understanding any of its propositional content. The first part of the talk describes
the collection of a very large corpus of natural conversational speech, the second part
outlines the major findings from its analysis, and the third part describes the
development of a multimodal device for tracking participant status in such conversational
dialogues.
Keynote speaker 2:
Vaclav Hlavac [www]
Center for Machine Perception, Czech Technical University, Prague
Structure and images
Abstract:
Statistical pattern recognition methods have had difficulties to deal
with images for several decades. The main obstacle is that a standard
statistical approach cannot directly cope with the structure induced
by the neighborhood relation in images. The talk will demonstrate
this issues on several examples. Many researchers think that attempts
to apply structural pattern recognition methods in the 1960s and
1970s led to the dead end. I like to advocate that the structural
pattern recognition can be embedded into the statistical pattern
recognition framework. This step has the potential to bring
robustness to the structural approach. There are several
possibilities in which such approach solves practically applicable
tasks. A few examples from our recent research will be given, e.g.,
(a) optimizations on Markovian random fields applied to non-rigid
matching in images or segmentation; (b) the structural construction
applied to grammar-based recognition of the on-line hand written
text.