Invited talk by Prof. Nilesh Madhu at ICEIC 2024, Taipei.

Prof. Nilesh Madhu from IDLab gave an invited talk at the ICEIC 2024 conference, which was held from Jan 28th - Jan 31st 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan.

The talk, titled "All the better to understand you with", was about the exciting opportunities and open challenges in listening augmentation.

He showcased our recent work in this field, which was well received.

Abstract

Effective communication is important for a harmonious, well-adapted society. This requires a clear and timely exchange of messages and intent. Especially in the field of tele-communications, engineers have been working on this problem for decades and, given the wide range of challenges in this field, they will remain busy for several years to come. In this talk I shall introduce the 3 fundamental hurdles to an effective communication and show how almost all of speech- and audio-related research is focused on tackling these hurdles. Further, I shall present how the solutions to these challenges fit a standard machine learning framework and demonstrate these solutions in practical scenarios encountered in daily life. Lastly, I will briefly reflect upon the value of domain knowledge and simplified stochastic models, and their role in the data-driven algorithmic landscape of today. The ultimate goal of the talk is not only to develop a good understanding of the open challenges in the field of speech communication, but also to stimulate discussion on how to best leverage current progress in deep learning to overcome these challenges.