Keynote Abstracts (Click Here To View)

About Dr. James Glass : Dr. James Glass is a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where he heads the Spoken Language Systems Group. He is also a Lecturer in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He received his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1982, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 1985, and 1988, respectively. After starting in the Speech Communication group at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, he has worked since 1989 at the Laboratory for Computer Science, and since 2003 at CSAIL. His primary research interests are in the area of speech communication and human-computer interaction, centered on automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding. He has lectured, taught courses, supervised students, and published extensively in these areas. He is currently a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer, an associate editor for Computer, Speech, and Language, and the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing, and has been a past associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.

About Professor Keiichi TOKUDA: Prof. Keiichi Tokuda received the M.E. and Dr.Eng. degrees from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 1986 and 1989, respectively.  From 1989 to 1996, he was a Research Associate in the Department of Electronic and Electric Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology.  From 1996 to 2004, he was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, Nagoya Institute of Technology, where he is currently a professor.  He is also an invited researcher at NICT/ATR from 2000, and was a visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, from 2001 to 2002.  In 2005, Dr. Alan Black and Keiichi Tokuda organized the largest ever evaluation of corpus-based speech synthesis techniques, the Blizzard Challenge, which has progressed to an annual event.  He published over 70 journal papers and over 160 conference papers, and received 5 paper awards.  He was a member of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 2000 to 2003. Currently he is a member of ISCA Advisory Council and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech & Language Processing, and acts as organizer and reviewer for many major speech conferences, workshops and journals.  His research interests include speech synthesis and recognition, and statistical machine learning.

About Dr. Pramod Kumar Saxena : Dr. P. K. Saxena was born on 5th July 1952. He received his M.Sc. (Mathematics) from Kanpur University in 1971 and Ph.D. (Algebra) from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1978. There after he worked as Mathematics Lecturer for a brief period in National Institute of Technology (formerly called Regional Engineering College), Silchar (1979-80) and National Defence Academy, Pune, (1980-81). He joined Scientific Analysis Group (SAG), DRDO in 1981 as Scientist ‘C’ and became Scientist ‘G’ in 2002.

On 30th May 2003, he was entrusted with the responsibility of heading SAG as Director. Dr. Saxena has been elevated to the rank of Scientist ‘H’ (Outstanding Scientist) w.e.f 31st July 2009.

His areas of interest include Algebra, Cryptology, Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Neural Networks and Speech Technology. He has worked extensively in the area of Speech/Speaker Recognition for more than 20 years, headed the Speech Division and specific Speech projects guided. He has published about 59 research papers in National, International Journals and Conference Proceedings. He has been Project Leader for Basic Research and some important Research and Development Projects. He has also guided many BE and ME projects. He has been supervising Ph.D. work for few of Scientists registered at Delhi University, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Jadhavpur University. One of the Scientists has been awarded PhD degree by Delhi University in 2007 under his guidance, whereas one Scientist has submitted PhD thesis at IIT, Delhi in 2009.

Apart from techno managerial activities, he has been very actively involved in organizing National, International conferences, technical reviews of research papers for journals and delivering invited lectures at different forums and in DRDO Labs and academic institutes.

He received Commendation Certificate for his significant contributions in the area of Fuzzy Logic. The book on Cryptography written by him in Hindi was awarded first prize of DRDO in the year 1997.

About Professor Madhav Prasad Pokharel : Madhav P Pokharel is a Professor at Central Department of Linguistics Tribhuvan University Nepal. He completed his PhD in Experimental Analysis of Nepali Sound System from the University of Pune (India 1989). He got a workshop training course in Lexicography given by Tulu Lexicon Project at Rastrakavi Govinda Pai Research Center (Karnataka 1988). Two times he was a Visiting Professor in Kobe University Japan when he was awarded with the Japan Foundation Fellowship: once in 1994-1995 when he worked with Masayoshi Shibatani on Comparative Nepali and Japanese Syntax and secondly in 2009-2010 when he worked with Yo Matsumoto on Cognitive Similarity in the Conceptualization of Nepali and Japanese Classifiers. He worked at China Radio International (CRI) as a Nepali Language Expert (2000-2001) and also taught Nepali in Beijing University of Communications (2001). He gave lectures on Nepali grammar at the University of North Bengal (India 2002). He also worked at Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) as a Nepali Language Expert (Mysore 2003). He participated in the documentation of Kusunda, an endangered language and a language isolate spoken in Nepal. He can communicate in about 12 different languages including Hindi, Sanskrit, Japanese, Chinese and Kusunda. He discovered two Austroasiatic languages (Khadia and Munda), a Kiranti language Lulam and an Indo-Aryan language Malpode during his fieldworks in Nepal. He has collected data of more than 30 mother tongues spoken in Nepal and has developed orthography in almost half of the total 100 Nepalese languages. He has supervised more than 10 PhD and more than 20 MA students. He has taught phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, historical linguistics and language typology. He has published, translated and edited more than 15 books. He is a prolific writer. He has also attended audit courses in linguistics given by Chomsky, Halle, Kiparsky, Labov, McCarthy, Melchert, Prince and Kenstowicz in 2005 Linguistic Institute of LSA in MIT and Harvard. Before joining Central Department of Linguistics (1996-), he taught Linguistics and Literature in Central Department of Nepali (1985-1996) and Institute of Science and Technology (1974-1985).