On Nov.2, Prof. Victor Zue from MIT visited our institute and gave us a wonderful report. Prof. Victor is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Director of the Institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). During his stay in our institute, he had a talk with Director TIAN Jing and paid a visit to the ThinkIT Lab.

Prof. YAN Yonghong told us Prof. Victor was a magical person. He can understand your words by just seeing the spectrogram. Prof. Victor showed his ability at spot and won warm applause. Prof. Victor was the first to put the speech researches into practical use.

In his report, Prof. Victor first introduced MIT and his lab-CSAIL. His following speeches consisted of our aspects: MIT Lecture Browser (Glass/Barzilay); Mobile Information Access: Multi-modal natural interactions (Seneff/Glass); Summarization of Reviews from the Web (Barzilay); Language Learning (Seneff). All these aspects were closely connected to our daily life. The Lecture Browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology; Mobile Information Access is a system for vehicle navigation or getting the detailed information about the building; Summarization of Reviews from the Web can automatically deduce the average opinion from lots of written comments; Language Learning is a study system to teach Americans Chinese.

Prof. Victor's visit brought us MIT's latest development fruits in speech processing research, which provided us lots of cherish ideas to perfect the speech researches in our institute and upgraded the communication and cooperation between IACAS and the first-class universities in the world.

BIO:

Victor Zue is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Director of the Institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).  In the early part of his career, Victor conducted research in acoustic phonetics and phonology, codifying the acoustic manifestation of speech sounds and the phonological rules governing the realization of pronunciation in American English. Subsequently, his research interest shifted to the development of spoken language interfaces to make human-computer interactions easier and more natural.  Between 1989 and 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, which has pioneered the development of many systems that enable a user to interact with computers using spoken language. Outside of MIT, Victor has consulted for many multinational corporations, and he has served on many planning, advisory, and review committees for the US Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academies of Science and Engineering.  From 1996-1998, he chaired the Information Science and Technology, or ISAT, study group for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Dapartment of Defense, helping the DoD formulate new directions for information technology research.  In 1999, he received the DARPA Sustained Excellence Award.  Victor is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.