YFRM@ASRU

Young Female Researchers Mentoring at ASRU 2019

Time: 15 December, 11am-1.30pm

ASRU 2019 is pleased to announce that we will host a mentoring event, YFRM@ASRU, for young female researchers! YFRM@ASRU will be for female researchers, that include undergraduate, masters and PhD students as well as fresh PhD graduates, who are currently working in speech science and technology. Mentoring aims to provide a warm environment to discuss problems such as academia vs industry, woman in science, stress management, and professional development. The event will consist of two parts; Gender Diversity talk, followed by a lunch with mentors and registered female researchers.

We welcome all ASRU participants to join the Gender Diversity talk!

Talk: Gender diversity in speech science and technology – Statistics, research findings, and my perspective

Odette Scharenborg

Sunday, December 15, 11:15-11:55 (30 mins talk, 10 mins of discussion)– talk hosted by YFRM@ASRU

Abstract: It should not come as a surprise when I say that there are far fewer women researchers in speech science and technology than men. This is clear when visiting any speech workshop or conference or when reading the author list on any speech-related paper. But what is the distribution of male and female speech researchers in our field? And is this skewed distribution bad? Is there anything we can do about it? Spoiler alerts: 1) diversity is good for science; 2) both males and females can do lots to improve diversity! In this talk aimed at the speech community as a whole, I will present numbers, some research on the gender gap and hints and tips about what we, as a community, can do to make our community more diverse (in many respects). In the second part of my talk, I will talk about my perspective on being a (female) researcher in speech science and technology and will share some of the lessons I have learned over the years.

Biography: Odette Scharenborg (PhD) is an associate professor and Delft Technology Fellow at the Multimedia Computing Group at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. She does cross-disciplinary research on human and automatic speech processing with a focus on building speech technology for low-resource languages. She is a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) and the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), where she chairs the Diversity Committee. At TU Delft, she chairs the Diversity and Inclusion team of the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science and is a member of the board of the Delft Women in Science (DEWIS). For the past three years, Odette co-organised the Young Female Researchers in Speech Science and Technology Workshops (YFRSW) which are held in conjunction with Interspeech.

Odette’s talk hosted by YFRM@ASRU: 11:15-11:55  (30 mins talk, 10 mins of discussion), Venue: The Commune

YFRM@ASRU mentoring lunch: 12:00-13:30,
Venue: Revelry Hall, Event Centre Level 2

Mentors:

  • Nancy Chen (Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR)
  • Yun-Nung Chen (National Taiwan University)
  • Eunah Cho (Amazon, Alexa AI)
  • Dilek Hakkani-Tür (Amazon)
  • Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University, United States)
  • Dangna Li (Facebook)
  • Yulan Liu (Amazon)
  • Bhuvana Ramabhadran (Google)
  • Sakriani Sakti (NAIST / RIKEN AIP)
  • Odette Scharenborg (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
  • Tanja Schultz (University of Bremen, Germany)

Registration: 

The registration is closed. Thank you for your interest.

Travel Grant

YFRM@ASRU is only open to the participants of ASRU 2019 in Singapore. We will award travel grants to the selected participants of YFRM@ASRU. The travel grants will be disbursed to the successful applicants at the end of YFRM@ASRU. Please apply for travel grant through the ASRU registration portal.

Organizing Committee:

Co-chairs: 

  • Berrak Sisman (NUS & I2R, Singapore)
  • Bidisha Sharma (NUS, Singapore)

Organizing Committee:

  • Lori Lamel (LIMSI, France)
  • Catharina Oertel (TU Delft, Netherlands)
  • Odette Scharenborg (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
  • Isabel Trancoso (INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal)
  • Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University, United States)

Volunteers:

  • Yi Zhou (NUS, Singapore)
  • Qinyi Wang (NUS, Singapore)
  • Xiaoxue Gao (NUS, Singapore)
  • Junsi Lu (NUS, Singapore)
  • Wei Rao (NUS, Singapore)

Event Title Sponsor