Prof. Cosmin Munteanu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at University of Toronto Mississauga. His research includes speech and natural language interaction for mobile devices, mixed reality systems, learning technologies for marginalized users, usable cyber-safety, assistive technologies for older adults, and ethics in human-computer interaction research.
Prof. Pourang Irani is a Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Manitoba and Canada Research Chair in Ubiquitous Analytics. His research sits at the crossroads of mobile/wearable computing and data visualization.
Dr. Sharon Oviatt is internationally known for her multidisciplinary research on human-centered interfaces, multimodal and mobile interfaces, spoken language and digital pen interfaces, educational interfaces, technology design and evaluation, and the impact of interface design on human cognition. Her latest textbook, The Paradigm Shift to Multimodality in Contemporary Computer Interfaces (co-authored with Phil Cohen) was published by Morgan Claypool in 2015.
Dr. Matthew Aylett has over 15 years of commercial and research experience in speech synthesis. He is a founder and Chief Science Officer of CereProc, which offers unique emotional and characterful synthesis solutions and has been awarded a Royal Society Fellowship to explore the role of speech synthesis in the perception of character in artificial agents.
Prof. Gerald Penn is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is one of the leading scholars in Computational Linguistics, with significant contributions to both the mathematical and the computational study of natural languages. Gerald's publications cover many areas, from Theoretical Linguistics, to Mathematics, and to ASR, as well as HCI.
Dr. Shimei Pan is an assistant professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Before joining UMBC, Dr. Pan was a research scientist at IBM T. J Watson research center in New York. Her primary research interests include Natural Language Processing, Multimedia Multimodal Conversation Systems, User Modeling and Human-Computer Interaction.
Dr. Nikhil Sharma is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. He leads the user experience research for Voice Search. He's worked on both multimodal and voice only experiences on a range of devices including smartphones, smartwatches and cars.
Dr. Frank Rudzicz is a Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research focus is on machine learning and signal processing in atypical speech. He is the President of the ACL/ISCA SIG on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies and Young Investigator of the Alzheimer’s Society.
Dr. Randy Gomez is a senior scientist at the Honda Research Institute Japan (HRI-JP). His interests include speech recognition, speech enhancement, multi-modal interaction and intelligent systems. Currently he oversees the research work in robust multimodal interaction with context awareness at HRI-JP.
Dr Benjamin R. Cowan is an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin's School of Information and Communication Studies. His primary research focuses on the psychological aspects of speech interface interaction. In particular he studies how the design of speech interfaces affect user's perceptions, their mental models as well as their language production.
Dr. Keisuke Nakamura is a senior scientist at the Honda Research Institute Japan. His research interests are in the field of robotics, control engineering, signal processing, computational auditory scene analysis, multi-modal integration, and robot audition.
Dr. Janice Tsai is a Senior HCI Research Scientist at Mozilla. Her main goal is to make privacy information usable through a variety of natural modalities and to translate between the policy/legal realm & engineering.
Dr. Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye is principle research scientist working in the Mozilla Emerging Technologies Team. He uses a variety of methods including big data and qualitative research to understand user needs and practices in the HCI space.
Dr. Frank Bentley is a Senior Principal Researcher at Yahoo where he leads research for Communications and Video products. He studies how technology is adopted into daily life and uses insights from this work to invent new applications and services for mobile and home environments. Frank also teaches a course at Stanford called Understanding Users and a MOOC called Mobile Application Experiences on MITx.
Tawfiq Ammari is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research interests are in human computer interaction and social computing.