Invited speakers

Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where she served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and spent the following eighteen years at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs Research, where she worked on prosody for text-to-speech synthesis and created the Human-Computer Interface Research Department. She joined Columbia in 2002. Her research spans prosody, spoken dialogue systems, and the automatic detection of emotion, deception and charisma in speech. She served as President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 2005 to 2007 and is a fellow of AAAI, ISCA, ACL, ACM and IEEE, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and holds honorary doctorates from KTH Stockholm (2007) and Tilburg University (2018). She received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, both in 2011.

Tomas Riad is Professor of Nordic Languages at Stockholm University and a member of the Swedish Academy. Born in Uppsala in 1959, he spent his early childhood in Egypt before returning to Sweden. He completed his doctorate at Stockholm University in 1992 with a dissertation on prosodic change across the Germanic languages, subsequently held a position at Stanford, and has been a guest researcher at universities in Vilnius, Paris and Berlin. His research covers phonology, prosody, verse metrics, historical linguistics and morphology. He is among the foremost authorities on Scandinavian tone accent: its origins, its typological variation across dialects, and its role in regulating Swedish morphology. His monograph The Phonology of Swedish (Oxford University Press, 2014) remains the definitive account of the sound structure of the language. He has been a member of the Swedish Academy since 2011.