Previous News Items from Timo Baumann:

• 2021-03: The book stemming from the Speech quality special session at Interspeech 2017 is finally available and includes my chapter. → Baumann (2021)
• 2021-02: Our SMOOTH submission to HRI's late-breaking reports was accepted ... and got nominated for the award. Yay! → Fischer et al. (2021)
• 2021-01: Volkswagenstiftung continues to fund our Rhythmicalizer project. Yay!
• 2020-12: our paper on subtitling for lecture2go has been accepted for ESSV. Congrats, Benjamin, Robert and Irina! → Milde et al. (2021)
• 2020-11: Our COLING submission on MT in on/off-screen dubbing has been accepted. Great work, Alina, Shravan, and Supratik! → Karakanta et al. (2020)
• 2020-10: I've been appointed acting professor for machine learning for the winter term (and probably longer). Thanks for trusting in me, @fbihh!
• 2020-09: congrats to our summer interns, who've got their first paper accepted at the Deep Video Understanding workshop, great work! → Nayak et al. (2020), Video available!
• 2020-08: thanks for electing me as member (starting in fall) of the UHH informatics department's faculty council
• 2020-07: we've got funding to add automatic subtitling to Lecture2Go; Benjamin and two students will be working on improving students' ability to use and search lecture videos during #corona.
• 2020-06: our GermEval Shared Task on inferring Cognitive and Motivational style from text was a huge success. Thanks to Dirk and all participants! → Johannßen et al. (2020)
• 2020-06: find Ingo's and my contribution on prosodic differences in how you address your smart speaker at Mensch und Computer!
• 2020-05: welcome Shravan and Supratik, the two interns working on automated dubbing and video analysis this summer.
• 2020-03: both our/my Speech Prosody submissions made it. Hope to see you for the conference!
• 2020-02: I'll give a TwinTalk at DHN in Riga in MarchOctober. Hope to see you thereonline!
• 2020-01: I'll be speaking at the ITG Workshop on Speech-based Assistants in Magdeburg in March. Hope to see you there!
• 2019-12: Our contribution for DhD 2020 Punctuation Reconstruction for Translation of Post-modern Poetry has been accepted, and likewise our related paper for ESSV 2020. Yay!
• 2019-10: I found that wikidata.org knows me as Q60422208. I'm an instance of human.
• 2019-09: Google once again awarded me 5k$ in cloud credits, this time for work on listener behaviour in dialog.
• 2019-08: Meriem's and my proposal for the UHH ideas fund is getting some funding. We propose to have a workshop on aspects of Cognitive Science in speech technology and NLP – stay tuned!
• 2019-07: I'm planning to be at the Dagstuhl meeting on spoken language interaction with virtual agents and robots. Hope to see you there!
• 2019-06: I'll be at WMT 2019 with a paper on Dubbing-optimal MT (joint work with Ashutosh Saboo). Yay!
• 2019-04: I'll be speaking at the tell-me days 2019 at HAW in June. Stay tuned!
• 2019-03: I'll be speaking at the Dahlem Humanities Center's Digital Humanities im Gespräch meeting in May, see you there!
• 2019-02: I'm back in Hamburg, yay! Thanks everyone and hello LT@UHH!
• 2018-07: I've been awarded a Google research award for cloud credits! I, the intern working on the project, and my laptop's fan are really thrilled about this.
• 2018-06: three papers accepted to Interspeech: syntax-prosody interface, attention in a HAN that classifies post-modern poetry, demo on DialogOS. See you in Hyderabad!
• 2018-05: Scientific American asked me about the implications of Google Duplex, the system that supposedly can make restaurant reserverations for you. Short version: why not build an engineering solution for scheduling instead of using AI?
• 2018-05: New paper with Vivian Tsai, Florian Pecune and Justine Cassell that shows faster responses are better responses at IWSDS. Great job, Vivian!
• 2018-05: Paper on style detection for free verse poetry accepted for Coling 2018. See you in Santa Fe!
• 2018-04: Popular Science interview about Amazon Alexa laughing out of the blue.
• 2018-03: I'll be judging at the International Science and Engineering Fair and look forward to engaging and inspiring conversations with the young inventors that will shape our future!
• 2018-02: Two papers, on speech quality estimation and prosodic styles in post-modern poetry, have been accepted at Speech Prosody 2018. See you all in Poznań in June!
• 2018-01: Our article on the Spoken Wikipedia Corpus collection is finally out (consider the if you don't like paywalls)!
• 2017-10: I'm giving a talk in the CS research colloquium at Boise State University (it has been recorded so don't worry if you didn't make it there)
• 2017-09: Christine and our trial study week students did it again: they won the competition! See last year's amazing dialogue systems!
• 2017-05: I'm looking forward to meeting everyone at Interspeech! Also, before that, please join us at IWSDS near Pittsburgh!
• 2017-04: Tagesspiegel has a piece on our Rhythmicalizer project.
• 2017-02: I'm leaving Hamburg heading for Pittsburgh!
• 2017-02: <strike>we're hiring, I'm looking forward to your application!</strike>
• 2016-12: Sven Barske of the local station Hamburg 90,3 (which is part of Norddeutscher Rundfunk) recently interviewed me on Adobe Voco.
• 2016-11: I'm running a listening/rating experiment and I sincerely appreciate your participation. For the moment this is German only.
• 2016-11: I'm looking forward to seeing you in Osaka, at Coling, LT4DH or YRSNLP!
• 2016-10: My paper (together with Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek) describing an application of speech technology to free verse poetry is accepted for LT4DH. (UPDATE: Volkswagenstiftung will fund a three-year project to further extend this research.)
• 2016-10: I'll attend a Dagstuhl meeting on barking and meowing in November, yay!
• 2016-10: Christine and I will host group in the trial study week for prospective students -- update: our group won the competition, see the video!
• 2016-09: Arnes and my paper on incremental and predictive parsing for language modelling is accepted at COLING. Yay! We show how incremental parsing can improve LM perplexity on the Billion Word Corpus by ~6% with little compuational overhead and while allowing online decoding.
• 2016-08: I spoke at WikiCon 2016 about the Spoken Wikipedia Corpus and we had really interesting discussions on integrating better reading capabilities into MediaWiki.
• 2016-07: Marcel Rohde's Bachelor work on navigating the Spoken Wikipedia resulted in a paper at SLPAT. Yay! Update: also see the videos.
• 2016-05: Kolja Kirsch's Bachelor work not only received the 1st prize in the Informatik EXPO 2015 but he also got it accepted as a long paper at Mensch und Computer 2016, Germany's most important HCI conference. Congratulation! (There's also a Youtube-Video.)
• 2016-04: Christine and I will host a Girls' Day group next week on Spoken Dialogue Systems.
• 2016-03: I'll be at LREC in May presenting our paper on the Spoken Wikipedia Corpus.
• 2016-02: I'm teaching the MSc course on speech processing and co-teaching a project on subtitling this summer.
• 2015-11: Join us at the Science Fair in Hamburg!
• 2015-11: Casey's, Julian's, David's and my paper that compares incremental performance of ASR systems has been accepted at IWSDS. Yay!
• 2015-10: I'll be teaching an ESSLLI 2016 introductory course on Incremental Speech and Language Processing for Interactive Systems together with Arne Köhn.
• 2015-09: Listen to Maël and me live-interviewed on Interspeech Radio on Monday morning (or tune into the Podcast afterwards)
• 2015-02: I will be teaching two "Proseminare" next semester: Speech Processing and Software Development Helpers. Please follow the links for the full announcements.
• 2015-01: I attended a workshop on science journalism at the Klaus-Tschira-Foundation last week and learned how press releases lead to reports first in local news, then specialized papers, and finally public radio. Too bad only my former supervisor is mentioned in the press release -- more details and authors in the original research paper.
• 2014-12: German Hackers are meeting in Hamburg between Christmas and New Year's. I'll give a talk on our student group project's results with sub-titling CCC talks.
• 2014-11: I'll be giving a talk at gipsa-lab in Grenoble on December 11th. Hope to see you there!
• 2014-09: I'll be in Singapore during Interspeech and then give an invited talk at a small workshop organized by Prof. Kai Yu in Shanghai afterwards. Hope to see you there!
• 2014-08: My stay in New York is great, and both AT&T and Yahoo!Labs seem to be very nice places to work in industry. However, I'm also looking forward to the calm atmosphere and cold weather back in Hamburg...
• 2014-06: My Interspeech submission has been accepted -- yay!
• 2014-06: I'll be speaking at the TU Darmstadt colloquium next Wednesday. Looking forward to seeing you there!
• 2014-05: I've booked my flight and will be staying in New York during all of August. Let me know if we should meet&greet there!
• 2014-04: Johannes Twiefel's (and my, as one of the supervisors) AAAI 2014 submission has been accepted -- we're going to revolutionize your Google ASR experience in limited domains (for now non-incrementally, but stay tuned).
• 2014-02: My paper on "Decision Tree Usage for Incremental Parametric Speech Synthesis" has been accepted for ICASSP 2014 -- yay, I get to travel to Florence!
• 2014-01: I have received one of 10 PostDoc awards by Daimler-und-Benz-Stiftung for a project on further developing incremental spoken dialogue processing systems. Yay!
• 2014-01: The German Science Year 2014 focuses on Digital Society and teachers and other educators can now invite me as an expert to speak at their school. I hope to raise broader interest in dialogue and computerized spoken language processing in high school students this way.
• 2013-12: I gave an InproTK hands-on programming tutorial in Bielefeld yesterday. Thanks to the DSG group for hosting me. The tutorial exercises, which give a good introduction to InproTK, are on Sourceforge.
• 2013-11: I participated (together with Christine and Arne Köhn) in Hamburg's Science Night 2013. This was one of our posters.
• 2013-09: our tutorial on incremental processing at Interspeech 2013 was a huge success! Slides can be found here
• 2013-07: Yay, David Schlangen's and my paper for the speech synthesis workshop has been accepted: "Interactional Adequacy as a Factor in the Perception of Synthesized Speech"
• 2013-06: Yay, David Schlangen's and my SigDial short-paper has been accepted: "Open-ended, Extensible System Utterances Are Preferred, Even If They Require Filled Pauses"
• 2013-05: what an exciting week: I defended my thesis on Thursday and got married on Saturday! Off to a week of vacation...
• 2013-04: I have submitted my thesis, at last!
• 2013-03: A poster describing our hybrid (incremental/non-incremental) prototype for playing Pentomino was presented last week at the DGfS computational linguistics poster session and will be presented in a talk next week at ESSV!
• 2013-02: David Schlangen and I will have an Interspeech Tutorial on Incremental Spoken Dialogue Processing (based on InproTK, of course)
• 2012-11: Rabih Hamadeh has turned in his thesis on Machine Learning methods for incremental ASR smoothing. Well done!
• 2012-10: The workshop on Architectures for Conversationally Competent SDS which I organized on 5th/6th October was a tremendous success, both scientific as well as community-wise and culinary. I will (have to) write up a documentation of the workshop in the upcoming weeks, some results are linked to in the programme.
• 2012-09: Last year's SDS project resulted in an exiting prototype for playing Pentomino using a hybrid system consisting of both standard techniques (using DialogOS) and incremental processing (using InproTK); I made a video out of some example interactions to show some of its highligths
• 2012-06: The workshop on Architectures for Conversationally Competent SDS is starting to take shape: Kristinn Thórisson will be the keynote speaker and the event will take place 5th/6th October. More news are at the link.
• 2012-06: Our (David Schlangen's and my) paper on "Evaluating Prosodic Processing for Incremental Speech Synthesis" was accepted to be presented at Interspeech 2012 in Portland, USA. Yay! Now, all I have to do is win in the lottery...
• 2012-06: I've been awarded a DAAD travel grant to attend ACL in Korea where I'll be presenting my work on incremental speech synthesis. yay!
• 2012-05: Last week's Girl's Day was a full success, with 12 young ladies building dialogue systems that you can discuss your schoolday with or that counsel you on your homework.
• 2012-05: Our (Hendrik Buschmeier's, Benjamin Dosch's, David Schlangen's, Stefan Kopp's and my) paper on Adaptive Information Presentation Through Incremental Language Generation and Incremental Speech Synthesis was accepted to be presented at SIGdial 2012. This features my work on incremental speech synthesis which I'm really proud of <img src="/pub/System/SmiliesPlugin/wink.gif" alt="wink" title="wink" border="0">
• 2012-04: Our (Kris Lohmann's and Ole Eichhorn's and my) paper on Generating Situated Assisting Utterances for Tactile Map Exploration was accepted to be presented at SLPAT 2012. We hope to get funding for Ole, who is a very bright Bacchelor student in Human Machine Interaction, to present the work in Montreal, CA.
• 2012-04: Our (David Schlangen and my) paper on incremental speech synthesis was accepted to be presented as a system demonstration at ACL 2012 in Korea. I hope this convinces DAAD to fund my travel to ACL/SIGdial/YRRSDS which are all co-located.
• 2012-03: I'm organizing a small workshop on Architectures for Conversationally Competent Dialogue Systems sponsored by the Körber-Fonds for Young Scientists, more information will become available shortly
• 2012-03: I'm now associated to the CINACS graduate school.