AFEKA SPEECH PROCESSING
​CONFERENCE 2020

For the past decade, the Afeka Center for Language Processing (ACLP) at Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering has held an annual speech processing conference.

Exemplifying Afeka’s core value of active dialog between academia and industry, the conference is the foremost gathering of Israel’s speech processing community, providing experts with a platform for discovering trends, raising issues, and forming collaborations.

This year, we are honored to have as our keynote speaker ISCA president Prof. John Hansen from the University of Texas, Dallas.

​Due to COVID-19, we will switch this year to a virtual platform and hold the conference by video. We hope you’ll join us on cyberspace, and we look forward to seeing you in person again at Afeka next year.

AFEKA CENTER FOR
​LANGUAGE PROCESSING (ACLP)

ACLP serves as a unique center for R&D in speech and language processing, with activities that include joint projects with industry and government, grant-funded research projects, specialized courses for speech professionals, and project opportunities for students.

ACLP’s researchers have decades of experience in state-of-the-art speech technologies in industry and academia. At ACLP, they research and develop the most advanced machine learning technologies, applying them to such diverse tasks as speech recognition, keyword spotting, speaker recognition, topic classification, speaker diarization, language identification, and more. These technologies serve numerous applications, such as, including civil and homeland security, healthcare.

Recently, ACLP has enlisted in the national fight against COVID-19, in order to identify coronavirus infections through voiceprint. We hope that ACLP and other groups around the globe will reach this goal in the near future.

ACLP promotes professional excellence by conducting the highest level of R&D activity; educational commitment by training a new generation of speech processing engineers; and social responsibility ​by taking on projects of social impact.


ACLP: A brief history and a look forward
ACLP was founded in 2009 by Prof. Ami Moyal. In 2014, Dr. Irit Opher took the lead, heading the center until 2018. Currently, Prof. Vered Aharonson, head of the ACLP, has many years of experience of research in speech processing, particularly in speech for healthcare.

As Israel’s foremost center for speech processing, ACLP continues to grow in the spirit of its founding goals: industry collaboration, independent research, and the educating of a new generation of speech technology experts. Our future mission is to become one of the leading global centers for applied R&D in this field.

Conference Program

17:00 Welcome Remarks:
Prof. Ami Moyal, President, Afeka College
Prof. Vered Aharonson, ACLP Manager, Afeka College
17:15 Keynote:
Prof. John Hansen, Center for Robust Speech Systems, The University of Texas at Dallas, U.S.A.
Robust Diarization in Naturalistic Audio Streams: Challenges for Multi-Speaker & Learning Spaces
17:45 Dr. Deborah Cohen, Google Research, Israel
Dynamic Composition for Domain Exploration Dialogues
18:05 Eliya Nachmani, Tel Aviv university & Facebook AI Research, Israel
Single-Channel Speech Separation for Unknown Number of Speakers
18:25 Dr. Itshak Lapidot, ACLP, Afeka College, Israel
Speech Database and Protocol Validation
18:45 Closing Remarks

Conference Keynote Speaker

Conference Speakers

Dr. Itshak Lapidot
ACLP, Afeka College
Eliya Nachmani
Tel Aviv university
& Facebook AI Research
Dr. Deborah Cohen
Google Research
Prof. John Hansen
The University of Texas
at Dallas, U.S.A.