Keynote

Dr. Karen Livescu
Associate Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Research Interests
Dr. Livescu’s research interests are in speech and language processing, as well as related problems in machine learning. Her recent work includes representation learning, acoustic word embeddings, visually grounded modeling of speech and language, and automatic sign language recognition. She is happy to discuss what all of these things mean and why they are interesting! At TTIC she teaches graduate courses on Speech Technologies and Unsupervised Learning. A list of her publications and additional information can be found at: http://ttic.edu/livescu/

Accomplishments
Dr. Livescu's PhD thesis was titled "Feature-Based Pronunciation Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition." After her PhD, she was a Clare Boothe Luce Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT before becoming a Research Assistant Professor at The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) and then Assistant Professor at TTIC. She has been an Associate Professor at TTIC since 2017. She also has a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science department at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Livescu has served as a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spoken Language Technical Committee, an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, a technical co-chair of Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) 2015, 2017, and 2019 and of Interspeech 2022, and a program co-chair of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2019. She has received faculty research awards from Google and Amazon. She is a 2021-22 IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer.

Her papers with her students and collaborators have garnered several Best Paper Awards and nominations. But her favorite accomplishments are those of her students!