Thursday October 27, 2016 at 1:00 p.m. Prof. Sadaoki Furui, IEEE Fellow and President of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, will be presenting “Perspectives of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Technology”. Speaker: Prof. Sadaoki Furui IEEE Fellow President of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago Day & Time: Thursday, October 27, 2016 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: TRS 1129 Ryerson University Toronto Abstract: DNNs (Deep Neural Networks) based on “deep learning” have significantly raised the automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance as of several years ago. This talk gives an overview of major DNN-based techniques successfully used in acoustic and language modeling for ASR. However, what we can do with ASR technology is still very limited, and we still have many challenges that cannot be solved simply by relying on the capability of DNNs. Data sparseness is one of the most difficult problems in constructing ASR systems, since speech is highly variable and it is too costly to construct annotated “big speech data” covering all possible variations. We need to focus on how to collect rich and effective speech databases covering a wide range of variations, active learning for automatically selecting data for annotation, cheap, fast and good-enough transcription, and efficient supervised, semi-supervised, or unsupervised training/adaptation, based on advanced machine learning techniques. We also need to extend current efforts and think deeply about and analyze how human beings are recognizing/understanding speech, and implement various knowledge sources in ASR systems using machine learning techniques to achieve innovations. This talk focuses on my personal perspectives for the future of speech recognition research. Biography: Sadaoki Furui Received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1968, 1970, and 1978, respectively. After joining the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) Labs in 1970, he has worked on speech analysis, speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech synthesis, speech perception, and multimodal human-computer interaction. From 1978 to 1979, he was a visiting researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was a Research Fellow and the Director of Furui Research Laboratory at NTT Labs. He became a Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1997. He was Dean of Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, and Director of University Library. He was given the title of Professor Emeritus and became Professor at Academy for Global Leadership in 2011. He is now serving as President of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTI-C). He has authored or coauthored around 1,000 published papers and books. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). He received the Paper Award and the Achievement Award from the IEEE SP Society, the IEICE, and the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ). He received the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, and the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. He received the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Broadcast Cultural Award and the Okawa Prize. He also received the Achievement Award from the Minister of Science and Technology and the Minister of Education, Japan, and the Purple Ribbon Medal from Japanese Emperor.