IEEE NORSIG-2004: Nordic Signal Processing Symposium, in Espoo, Finland ...

John Hansen presented the Keynote Address entitled: "SPEECHFIND: Spoken Document Retrieval for a National Gallery of the Spoken Word", at the IEEE NORSIG-2004: Nordic Signal Processing Symposium, in Espoo, Finland, June 2004.

ICA 2004 in Kyoto, Japan ...

John Hansen recently attended the Inter. Congress on Acoustics, April 2004 in Kyoto, Japan and presented the following papers. He also co-chaired the Special Session on Speech Recognition in Cars at ICA.

J.H.L. Hansen, X. Zhang, M. Akbacak, U. Yapanel, B. Pellom, W. Ward, "Robust Speech Processing for In-Vehicle Voice Navigation Systems", ICA-2004: International Congress on Acoustics, vol. 4, pp. 2603-2606, Kyoto, Japan, April 2004.

X. Zhang, K. Takeda, J.H.L. Hansen, T. Maeno, "Audio-Visual Integration for Hands-Free Voice Interaction in Automobile Route Navigation", ICA-2004: International Congress on Acoustics, vol. 4, pp. 2821-2824, Kyoto, Japan, April 2004.

Here is the link to the conference: http://www.ica2004.or.jp/home.htm

Xianxian Zhang wins best student paper award at INTERSPEECH-2003 ...

Congratulations to Xianxian Zhang, for her winning the best student paper award at the latest Interspeech-2003/Eurospeech-2003 conference for her paper: X. Zhang, J.H.L. Hansen, "CFA-BF: A Novel Combined Fixed/Adaptive Beamforming for Robust Speech Recognition in Real Car Environments," INTERSPEECH-2003/Eurospeech-2003, pp.1289-1292, Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 2003.

International Workshop on Multilingual Language Training Tutors ...

This summer between June 30 and July 25, 2003, 15 visitors from Chile, France, Italy, Mexico will attend a workshop at CSLR to develop Interactive Books in French, Italian and Spanish. The workshop is sponsored by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities. For more information on the workshop, click here.

Congratulation to John Hansen, the next Chair of The Dept. of SLHS ...

John Hansen will be serving as the next Chair of the Dept. of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences (SLHS), starting July 1, 2003. This arrangement will further strengthen the collaboration of students and faculty in speech sciences and language technology between SLHS and CSLR. For more information about SLHS, please visit this web site.

Ron and Pam's Best Road Trip: A Model for Speech Technology Reseach ...

In an article written for Eurospeech03, Ron Cole waxes nostalgic about his best road trip, and concludes that a roadmap for the future of speech technology research is less important than the choice of destination and the nature of the journey. Click here to read the article.

CSLR visited by Ministerial Delegation from the P.R. of China ...

On June 4, 2003, Mr. Zhang Xinsheng, the Vice Minister, Ministry of Education, People's Republic of China, and Dr. Jiang Bo, the Director, Education Section, Chinese Consulate General in Chicago, as well as several of their collegues visited CSLR. Mr. Zhang is responsible for the education of more than 230 million children in the P.R. of China. Sarel van Vuuren welcomed the guests with a talk showcasing interactive reading books and intelligent tutors. Mr. Zhang tried some of these technologies first hand. Pictures of the presentation are available here.

John Hansen presented an invited paper at the DSP In-Vehicle Workshop in Nagoya, Japan ...

On April 3-4, 2003, Prof. John Hansen gave an invited talk and served on a discussion panel at the IEEE Workshop on DSP in Mobile and Vehicular Systems. CSLR continues to be very active on in-vehicle speech and navigation system research and system development. Click here to read the paper.

Ron Cole and Lori Ramig give a talk at the University of Chile in Santiago ...

Under a grant from the National Science Foundation to support international collaboration, Professors Ron Cole (CSLR) and Lori Ramig (Department of Speech Language and Hearing Sciences at CU) visited Professor Nestor Becerra Yoma at the University of Chile. Their research presentations and collaboration with Professor Yoma were featured in the following article in Santiago's main newspaper.

NSF Talk entitled "Perceptive Animated Interfaces"...

On April 17, 2003, Ron Cole presented a talk entitled "Perceptive Animated Interfaces" to the National Science Foundation's CISE Distinguished Lecture Series. The abstract and powerpoints slides are available here.

Colorado Literacy Tutor Introduced to Colorado State Legislators ...

On February 27, Walter Kintsch, Donna Caccamise, Ron Cole and Sarel van Vuuren presented an overview and progress update of the Colorado Literacy Tutor Project to members of the Colorado State Legislature and their associates at the quartely Smart Luncheon held at the Colorado Historical Museum. The Summary Street comprehension training program was demonstrated for the first time using Interactive Books; electronic books that interact with students using intelligent animated characters. Powerpoint slides of the presentation are available here.

Dan Jurafsky wins 2002 MacArthur Fellowship ...

CU Professor Dan Jurafsky, one of CSLR's founders, has received the prestigious MacArthur genius award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. For additional information, visit MacArthur web site.

CSLR has been selected as a 2002 Tech Museum Technology Laureate ...

CSLR has been selected as a 2002 Tech Museum Technology Laureate in the category of technology innovation for education. Click here to see more information.

ICSLP 2002 has just taken place in Denver, CO September 16-20 ...

CSLR has recently organized ICSLP 2002, the International Conference for Spoken Language Processing, in Denver Coloroado Sept 16-20. Click here for details on the Technical Program, our Corporate Sponsors and Exhibitors, and obtaining a copy of the program on CD-ROM or Book of Abstracts and 4 volume proceedings of this world class conference.

ITR/Reading participatory design project funded by the Coleman Institute ...

The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities has funded a pilot project on participatory design in support of the ITR/Reading Tutor Project The project will bring educators, students, researchers and parents together to design learning tools for use in the schools and home.

CU Move: In-Vehicle Speech Research and Corpus Development ...

CSLR has been involved in In-Vehicle speech research for voice navigation and route planning. We have completed the CU-Move corpus collection which includes 500 speakers from 6 U.S. from across the United States. The speech data consists of speech in 5 phases (route navigation requests, phone and credit card numbers, route destinations and street addresses, phonetically balanced sentences, Wizard of Oz route navigation between field subjects and WOZ operators here at CSLR). The entire corpus in it's original format consists of over 600GB of data. We have completed the distribution of this data in 3 hard-disk releases (includes data preparation - downsampling & microphone beamforming, as well as transcription of all recordings). If you are interested in obtaining this diverse and valuable in-vehicle corpus, see CSLR License Agreement page. For more information on the CU-Move project, see CU-Move web page.

Summer pilot project for children with autism spectrum disorder conducted at CSLR ...

The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities sponsered a summer pilot project for children with autism spectrum disorders at CSLR. The pilot project used the Vocabulary Tutor and the Rapid Application Developer (RAD) in the Speech Toolkit to teach vocabulary, social and emotional concepts, academic curriculum and life skills.

The center is offering a new short course ...

CSLR periodically offers a short course entitled, "Interactive Spoken Dialog System Design". The course covers the design and practice of inventing, constructing, and deploying mixed initiative spoken dialog systems. The last time the course was offered it received great reviews. Based on feedback from the attendees, we will be improving the course and offering it again soon.

More information can be found by clicking this link to the course description page. Materials from the previous short-course (taught April 2nd-6th, 2001) are available by clicking this link to the CU Communicator page.

If you wish to try our Spoken Dialog System for Airline, Hotel, & Rental Car Information, go to The CU Communicator page for more information.

Our work was showcased on ABC's PrimeTime ...

Our work with the Tucker-Maxon Oral School for deaf children and our Reading Tutor Project was showcased in a story on ABC's PrimeTime Thursday on March 15th, 2001 (click here to read their story). The work was also featured on the National Science Foundation's home page (click here to read their story). An overview of the project can be found in our press release.

Baldi, the Vocabulary Tutor and the CSLU Toolkit software are free for noncommercial use by all educational institutions and parents wishing to use it. Click here for a description of this software and instructions on how to obtain it.

Recent Conference Papers ...

CSLR researchers have been active at professional conferences! For example, we will be presenting 8 papers at Eurospeech in September. Click here to see these papers and the other presentations we have made recently at conferences.

Research Experiences for Undergraduates ... 

The Institute for Cognitive Science and Center for Spoken Language Understanding have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to provide Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) for students at CU who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Students may apply to work up to 10 hours per week during the academic year and full time during summer months to conduct research within the Colorado Literacy Tutor, an exciting project that is developing computer-based literacy tutors in which animated agents interact with students to teach them to read and comprehend text. Research opportunities are available in areas of software design, user testing, speech data collection and transcription,observing students and assessing results.

Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities Funds
Participatory Design Group ... 

The Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities is sponsoring a participatory design group consisting of researchers, teachers, parents and students as part of the ITR/Reading grant. Learning tools such as interactive books and reading tutors are proposed, discussed and tested by the group.

CU Communicator Now Ready for You to Experience ...

Try our Spoken Dialog System for Airline, Hotel, & Rental Car Information: The CU Communicator

The National Science Foundation has featured on their home page (http://www.nsf.gov) a story about one of the current projects at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR). This story highlights the animated agent "Baldi" and it's use in our NSF project at the Tucker-Maxon Oral School. For the complete story see: Virtual Tutor Helps Hearing-Impaired Children to Learn Speech.