For the last 30 years, Each summer, Center for Language and Speech Processing of the Johns Hopkins University (CLSP JHU) organizes and hosts a few international teams for an intensive 6-week research workshop on speech and language engineering, nowadays tightly linked to machine learning, and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). These very successful workshops have had a widespread impact on the Human Language Technology community.
In 2025, for its 32nd edition, this workshop will be held in Brno, Czechia, from June 23rd to August 1st. It will be co-hosted by the Brno University of Technology (Speech@FIT group at the Faculty of Information Technology) and Phonexia.
Each workshop team spends 6 weeks together (after some advance preparation), working in close proximity on a challenging problem or a promising solution technique that has not yet been well studied. Many teams have had a lasting influence on subsequent research and industrial implementations through the publications, software, and data that they produce. For many workshop participants, the biggest benefit is the interaction with other researchers, seeding new and lasting collaborations.
The workshops also contribute to the pool of trained specialists in the fields of speech and natural language processing machine learning and artificial intelligence by providing immersive training to undergraduate and graduate students, allowing researchers from different backgrounds to learn from one another, and educating all workshop participants through guest lectures, participant seminars, and team research updates.
Workshop topics are chosen through a bidding process with Interactive Peer Review. Initial 1-page proposals are broadly solicited early the previous fall; those that survive a screening are invited to a weekend retreat where they are presented, debated and fleshed out.
The workshop is preceded by a 2-week summer school in Human Language Technology, run for the benefit of the student participants and other attendees. Each day of the summer school features two invited lecturers and an all-afternoon hands-on lab exercise.