Keynote Talks
Jean-Marc Valin (Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google)
Keynote
From Paper to Production: the Engineering and Standardization Challenges of Neural Speech Coding
Bio
Jean-Marc Valin is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google and a long-time contributor to the Xiph.Org Foundation. He received his B.A.Sc., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada. He is a lead architect of the Opus and Speex audio codecs and also contributed to the AV1 video codec. His research focuses on speech and audio coding, neural vocoders (LPCNet, FARGAN), and deep-learning-based speech enhancement. He was previously at Amazon Web Services and Mozilla.
Nicola Pia (Senior Scientist, Fraunhofer IIS)
Keynote
Design Choices and Effective Evaluation of Modern Speech and Audio Codecs Based on Neural Networks
Bio
Nicola Pia is a Senior Scientist at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany. He studied Mathematics at the Università di Cagliari and spent the final year of his master’s degree at the Université de Strasbourg. He later pursued a PhD in Mathematics, conducting his research between the Università di Cagliari and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich. After receiving his doctorate in 2019, he won a DAAD grant and completed a brief post-doctoral fellowship at LMU.
Since joining Fraunhofer (2019), his work has focused on speech and audio coding, with a particular emphasis on communication with mobile devices. He authored many papers and is the inventor of several patents on this subject. Moreover, he teaches a course on deep generative models for signal processing at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Since joining Fraunhofer (2019), his work has focused on speech and audio coding, with a particular emphasis on communication with mobile devices. He authored many papers and is the inventor of several patents on this subject. Moreover, he teaches a course on deep generative models for signal processing at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Cullen Jennings (Fellow and CTO for Collaboration AI, Cisco Systems)
Keynote
More Bandwidth, More Problems: Audio Codecs in the Machine Learning Era
Bio
Cullen Jennings is a Fellow and CTO for Audio/Video Collaboration and AI at Cisco, where he drives the vision and strategy for collaboration technology, including AI research and development. Since the '90s, he has worked on VoIP systems that now host billions of minutes of audioconferencing daily, driven internet voice communications standards, and spearheaded the development of WebRTC. His industry leadership has shaped numerous open-source and standards organizations, and he holds 100+ patents.
Cullen joined Cisco in 2000 through the acquisition of Vovida Networks, where he was VP of Engineering. He is also co-founder of Jasomi Networks and Point Grey Research, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of British Columbia.
Cullen joined Cisco in 2000 through the acquisition of Vovida Networks, where he was VP of Engineering. He is also co-founder of Jasomi Networks and Point Grey Research, and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of British Columbia.