Memories from ASRU 2009, Merano, Italy
Giuseppe Riccardi and Renato de Mori
SLTC Newsletter, February 2010
We hosted ASRU 2009 in Merano (Italy), a lovely Italian town at the heart of Europe, close to the border with Austria and Switzerland. This town and the surrounding region are reminiscent of past history when the multilingual European elite would gather here for important social events.
We have had 180 attendees from all over the world, mostly from North America, Europe and Japan. Central and Southern America as well as Asia were not well represented, similarly to past ASRUs, and we believe as a scientific community we should make efforts to extend our reach to those countries. A total of 223 papers were submitted for the poster sessions and 96 high-quality papers were accepted. We also assigned the best paper and best student awards, selected by the technical chairs.
The technical program was a high-paced schedule with interleaved paper presentations and thematic invited lectures. The invited lectures were outstanding and gave the opportunity to junior and senior researchers to review and appreciate the fundamentals and challenges of topics ranging from human speech recognition to acoustic modelling, to machine learning. The keynote speakers addressed important research issue in ASR , generalization, and new trends in speech and language processing, social computing. We would like to thank our invited speakers for their technical contributions that made ASRU 2009 greatly appreciated by attendees.
The social events are an important part of the workshop and is important create the network between community newcomers, colleagues and friends. The central event was the banquet at the Katzenzungen castle, one the hundreds of privately and publicly owned castles in this region. This castle is famous for hosting one of the oldest winery in Europe. We had the opportunity for once to have dinner in a magic medieval setting and closed the dinner with a special guest appearance from our talent gifted colleagues ( Video ).
One of the objective we had for ASRU 2009 was to make it long-lasting event and preserve the scientific contributions as well as discussions and impressions from our community at this point in time. For this reason we have launched an initiative to record such memories in terms of knowledge that was shared ( invited talks ), discussions, pictures and interviews to members of the community. As of now we are in the process of populating such archive and turn it into a searchable multimedia event. We believe such digital content could be used, tagged and augmented for research by our (extended) community. Researchers will be able to access, contribute and peruse the ASRU2009 digital event starting from the website , as we make progress in the sponsoring research project at University of Trento, Livememories . Stay tuned! Not to leave this effort isolated we hope future ASRU organizers share the same vision and will be glad to help.
Last but not least we would like to thank the members of the workshop technical and organizing committee, public and private sponsors for making ASRU 2009 a memorable event, so they say. See you at ASRU 2011.
For more information, see:
If you have comments, corrections, or additions to this article, please contact : Giuseppe Riccardi, riccardi [at] disi [dot] unitn [dot] it.
Giuseppe Riccardi is Professor at University of Trento (Italy). Renato De Mori is Professor Emeritus at McGill University (Canada) and University of Avignon (France)
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