Conference Announcement

Dear Speech Researcher,

In 2011 INTERSPEECH will be held in Florence, ITALY.

As one of the most popular visitor destinations in the world, ITALY offers a vast array of diverse opportunities, unique experiences and world-class services to potential INTERSPEECH attendees. The Hotel hospitality is very important in a Congress destination, and Florence offers a high number of hotels in different range to host delegates.

Florence is a city to be preserved with great care as patrimony of us all, and this has also meant to save its original structure: in the city center most of the hotels are located within historical palaces that underwent elegant restauration to become five or four stars hotels, but the majority of them have less than two hundred rooms and it is therefore impossible to host large number of delegates or visitors under one roof.

For large events, it is therefore necessary to find rooms in the many hotels located in the city center, within walking distance from the congress citadel and the historical monuments, or in the modern and functional premises located in the immediate sorrounding of the city center.

In the field of Speech Science and Technology, although it is a small community, Italy has played an active role from the beginning, organizing the Second EUROSPEECH Conference in Genoa, Italy, late in 1991, and it will be really fantastic to replicate this experience exactly 20 years later.

Despite the known great individualism of various Speech and Language Communities, especially in Italy, following ISCA trend, we succeeded in founding the Italian Speech Science and Technology Association (AISV) in 2003. Moreover AISV become the ISCA Italian Regional SIG Group in 2004. Our Association held an annual Italian Conference on Speech Science and Technology and an annual Summer-School for young scientists on cross-disciplinary studies of spoken language processing. Speech and hearing scientists, computer scientists, communications engineers, linguists, psycholinguists, phoneticians have rubbed shoulders at AISV conferences and schools. This invariably produces an interesting cross-fertilization of ideas that is a buzz for new entrants to the field and old hands alike.

That is exactly what it can be expected from an Italian INTERSPEECH 2011 - a certain breadth of perspective on spoken language processing and a friendly but vigorous rivalry of ideas. Even if our comparatively small pool of researchers and limited funding base clearly places us outside the major league speech technology players, Italian speech scientists have made notable international contributions in areas ranging from automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, multimodality and in general "speech technology" to psycholinguistics, phonetics, phonology and in general "linguistics".

Italy hosted the second EUROSPEECH in GENOVA in 1991. The conference was a huge success and the standard of contributions was high also with respect to the first conference held in Paris in 1989. The social program was enjoyable and many lasting collaborations were built. It would be exactly 20 years later that EUROSPEECH now INTERSPEECH would be held in Florence ITALY in 2011. For those not at EUROSPEECH 1991 it will provide the opportunity to make a wonderful and long-awaited trip and experience the fine weather, good science, great history, and excellent travel options. Moreover, we believe that for everybody, even for those who already came to Italy to EUROSPEECH 1991, this will provide, a part from extra travel opportunities or the possibility to do some of those things they didn’t have time for last time, a great and special occasion to taste the usual Italian friendly atmosphere and also the new and renovated Italian look.

A part from underlining the beauty of Florence, and of Italy, we strongly believe that Speech and Language science will receive a great impulse and that the network of Italian researchers and their worldwide colleagues will greatly benefit by this great opportunity.

INTERSPEECH 2011 will cover all the scientific and technological aspects of speech and language. We are expecting more than 1000 participants from all over the world and more than 800 papers presented in oral and poster sessions.

We look forward to welcoming you to INTERSPEECH 2011 in Florence!

Dr. Piero Cosi and Professor Renato De Mori, Chairs, INTERSPEECH 2011.