Attendees at the Third Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop

The Third Frederick Jelinek Memorial Summer Workshop, organized and hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing, is under way. The six-week workshop—which marks the 21^st summer workshop in CLSP’s history—seeks to advance and promote machine learning for speech language and computer vision technology.

Workshop attendees—comprising researchers from academia, government and industry professionals, graduate students, and undergraduates—collaborate in teams to advance the state of human language technology. Forty-four researchers from seven countries will participate in this year’s workshop.

“Every one of them brings their own perspective, their own point of view, into solving and creating interesting and unexpected solutions to important challenges,” said T.E. “Ed” Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, in introductory remarks to the audience.

Twenty-five proposals were submitted for consideration for this year’s workshop, and three projects were ultimately selected. The research teams will work towards:

• designing a system to monitor neurodegenerative diseases—such as Alzheimer’s disease—over the phone
• detecting risks and monitoring health through the language used on social media, and
• building a speech recognition system from untranscribed data.

“This year we wanted to pull in people working at the interface of language and health care,” said Sanjeev Khudanpur, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the workshop organizers. “We try to look for projects that really require bringing together people who aren’t already together.”

The Center’s commitment to fostering new collaborations and encouraging new approaches has resulted in great success. CLSP workshops have provided the foundation for Google Translate, Kaldi, and i-Vectors.

“This is a career-making kind of place. Undergraduates have reported that working at this workshop has really changed their outlook on their research, their career, and their life,” said Schlesinger.

Amazon, DARPA, Facebook, Google Research, and Microsoft Research are sponsoring the 2016 workshop session. The event runs from June 27 through August 5.

Click here to view the webcast of the opening day presentations of the 2016 workshop.