Professor Harald Baayen, University of Tübingen

Harald Baayen studied general linguistics with Geert Booij in Amsterdam, and obtained his PhD in 1989 with a quantitative study on morphological productivity. From 1990 to 1998 he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In 1998, upon receiving a career advancement award from the Dutch Science Foundation, he became associate professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and received a Muller chair from the Dutch Academy of Sciences in 2005. In 2007 he took up a full professorship at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. In 2011 he received an Alexander von Humboldt research award from Germany, which brought him to the University of Tübingen, where he is now heading a research group investigating the role of learning in lexical representation and processing. Harald Baayen has published widely in international journals, including Psychological Review, Language, Journal of Memory and Language, Cognition, PLoS ONE, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He published a monograph on word frequency distributions with Kluwer, and an introductory textbook on statistical analysis (with R) for the language sciences with Cambridge University Press.

Professor Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering, and jointly in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience and Pediatrics, and Director of the Ming Hsieh Institute. Prior to USC he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His research focuses on human-centered information processing and communication technologies. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Shri Narayanan is Editor in Chief for IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, an Editor for the Computer, Speech and Language Journal and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, the Journal of Acoustical Society of America, and the APISPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing having previously served an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Speech and Audio Processing (2000-2004), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2005-2008) and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2008-2012). He is a recipient of several honors including the 2015 Engineers Council’s Distinguished Educator Award, the 2005 and 2009 Best Transactions Paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and serving as its Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-11, and as an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16. With his students, he has received a number of best paper awards including a 2014 Ten-year Technical Impact Award from ACM ICMI and Interspeech Challenges in 2009 (Emotion classification), 2011 (Speaker state classification), 2012 (Speaker trait classification), 2013 (Paralinguistics/Social Signals), 2014 (Paralinguistics/Cognitive Load) and in 2015 (Non-nativeness detection). He has published over 650 papers and has been granted 17 U.S. patents.

Associate Professor Leher Singh, National University of Singapore

Leher Singh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on early phonological and lexical development in monolingual and bilingual learners and on the perception and integration of lexical tones in infancy and early childhood. She has been awarded competitive research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (USA) as well as the Ministry of Education (Singapore) for her research on early language development. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Science from Brown University and served on the faculty at Boston University for nine years prior to moving to the National University of Singapore in 2010.