Interspeech 2020

This year’s Interspeech was not only the first Interspeech to be held as a virtual event but also my first Interspeech. The organizers in Shanghai did a great job at translating such a huge conference to the virtual space while catering for different time zones.

Personally, I profited the most from the longer events, such as the tutorials by Tatsuya Kawahara & Roger K. Moore, all the keynotes, and of course the events organized by the ISCA-SAC. I got to participate in a mentoring event on time management for PhD students with very helpful advice by Carol Espy-Wilson and Sarah Levitan and the students meet experts event, in which Jon Barker, Tara Sainath, Björn Schuller, and Sunayana Sitaram gave some interesting insights into their work in academia and the industry.

Finally, my fellow PhD students at UdS Iona Gessinger and Eran Raveh received the ISCA Award for Best Student Paper at Interspeech 2020 for their paper on ‘Phonetic Accommodation of L2 German Speakers to the Virtual Language Learning Tutor Mirabella’.