Summer school

Igor Szöke is senior researcher in BUT Speech@FIT at the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) of BUT. He obtained Ing. from BUT in 2004 and PhD from BUT in 2010. His research area is machine learning and speech data mining (automatic speech recognition, spoken term detection and data augmentation). He was BUT's PI in H2020 CleanSky2 project ATCO2 developing a unique platform allowing to collect, organize and pre-process air-traffic control (voice communication) data from air space. He is currently coordinating CNECT/LUX/2022/OP/0030 - aiming at the development of ASR system usable for the EC services and European industry.

Karel Veselý, Ph.D. (Ing. [MS]. Brno University of Technology, 2010, Ph.D. Brno University of Technology, 2018, SCOPUS h-index 13) is senior researcher in the BUT Speech@FIT group. He was on research internships at LIA Avignon (France), IBM Speech R&D group in Prague and at Johns Hopkins University. He is one of co-founders of the KALDI toolkit, is the 3rd contributor in terms of lines of code, and author of the nnet1 module. He is known for his work in multilingual and semi-supervised ASR training, while he also worked on Goodness of pronunciation systems for child speech. He was instrumental in several EC projects (ATCO2, HAAWAII), DARPA RATS, IARPA Babel and IARPA MATERIAL and is the key ASR developer in the European CNECT project.

Hynek Hermansky received his Doctor of Engineering degree, Electrical Engineering, University of Tokyo (1979-1983); has done Doctoral Graduate Studies, Technical University Brno, Czech Republic (1973-1978); and received Ing. (MS equivalent), Technical University Brno, Czech Republic (1967-1972). His current appointments are Research Professor, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic and Julian S. Smith Professor Emeritus, The Johns Hopkins University. He is a Life Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of International Speech Communication Association (ISCA. He has been awarded the Medal for Scientific Achievements from ISCA (2013) and the Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award from IEEE(2020). He has over 250 peer reviewed publications and has been granted thirteen patents.

Dr. Oldrich Plchot (Ing. [MS]. Brno University of Technology, 2007, Ph.D. Brno University of Technology, 2014) is a senior researcher in BUT Speech@FIT research group. He worked on EU-sponsored project MOBIO (7th FP) as well as in several projects sponsored at the local Czech level. He was the technical lead of US-Air Force EOARD-sponsored project “Improving the capacity of language recognition systems to handle rare languages using radio broadcast data”, and a key member of personnel in the BEST project and RATS Patrol project sponsored by U.S. IARPA and DARPA, respectively. He participated in several high-profile international research workshops: BOSARIS held in Brno in 2010 and 2012 and at the Johns Hopkins University (MD, USA) summer research workshop in 2013. He significantly contributed to the success of BUT team in numerous international evaluations organized by NIST (Speaker recognition since 2010, Language recognition since 2007) as well as in evaluations organized within IARPA and DARPA projects. He is currently serving as a PI on H2020 project ELOQUENCE coordinating BUT efforts in NLU, conversational LLMs and dialogue systems. He authored or co-authored more than 70 papers, including IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and high-profile conferences such as ICASSP and Interspeech. He is the recipient of the 2016 “Josef Hlávka Prize” awarded to the most talented PhD students and young researchers of Czech technical Universities.

Federico Landini obtained his PhD from Brno University of Technology (BUT) where he was advised by Lukáš Burget and Mireia Diez while working on speaker diarization. He has contributed to both modular diarization systems (e.g., VBx) and end-to-end neural models (e.g., EEND and DiaPer) always open-sourcing recipes and models. During his PhD he has also partnered in R&D collaborations with companies and participated in diarization challenges, including leading the BUT team to successful results in DIHARD and VoxSRC challenges. Besides, he has also done internships at Meta, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft and obtained his Computer Science degree from the University of Buenos Aires. He has served as a reviewer for IEEE/ACM TASLP, EURASIP/ISCA Speech Communication, Interspeech, ICASSP, IEEE SLT, IEEE ASRU, ISCA Odyssey and has won the Best Reviewer Award in ASRU 2023. He is now working at Deepgram as a Research Scientist.

Michal Hradiš is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, specialising in computer vision and machine learning. He is the principal developer of PERO OCR, a printed and handwritten text recognition system used by libraries and archives. Currently, his team focuses on semantic document understanding, information retrieval and efficient exploration of large databases of historical documents in projects semANT, Smart Digilinka, and Orbis Pictus. He has experience from several computer vision startups and now, he is developing a medical device assisting gastroenterologists during colonoscopies and other procedures.

Lukáš Sekanina (Senior Member of IEEE) received all his degrees from the Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic (Ing. in 1999, Ph.D. in 2002), where he is currently a full professor and Head of the Department of Computer Systems. He was awarded the Fulbright scholarship and worked on the evolutionary circuit design with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in 2004. He was a visiting lecturer with Pennsylvania State University (2001), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (2012), and a visiting researcher with the University of Oslo in 2001. He has worked as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and an editorial board member of the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Journal. As a PC co-chair, he contributed to organizing conferences such as ICES, EuroGP, DDECS, DTIS, and DATE. He was a principal investigator of eight projects supported by the Czech Science Foundation. Prof. Sekanina co-authored one patent and over 250 research papers, mostly in genetic programming, approximate computing, evolvable hardware, and automated design methods.

Josef Sivic holds a distinguished researcher position at the Czech Institute of Robotics, Informatics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he heads the Intelligent Machine Perception team and the ELLIS Unit Prague. He received the habilitation degree from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2014 and PhD from the University of Oxford in 2006. After PhD, he was a post-doctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent more than 10 years at Inria Paris where he received an ERC Starting Grant. He was awarded the British Machine Vision Association Sullivan Thesis Prize, three test-of-time awards at major computer vision conferences, and, in 2023, an ERC Advanced Grant. From 2019 to 2025 he served on the board of the European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

Ondřej Bojar is an Associate Professor at ÚFAL (Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics), Charles University, and a lead scientist in Machine Translation in the Czech Republic. He has been co-organizing a well-known series of shared tasks in machine translation and machine translation evaluation (WMT) since 2013. He produced many successful works on pre-neural statistical machine translation, as well as newer neural approaches. Apart from text-based translation, he has also been focusing on speech translation and meeting minuting.

Ondřej Dušek is an Assistant Professor at ÚFAL, Charles University, focusing on natural language generation and human-computer dialogue. His research focuses on generative language models, mostly applied to the data-to-text and dialogue response generation tasks. He is specifically interested in semantic accuracy and grounding in language generation, as well as ways of evaluating generation accuracy.

Jan Chorowski is the CTO at Pathway building Live AI systems, underpinned by a proprietary real-time data processing engine and an AI framework. He received his M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Wrocław University of Technology and Ph.D. from University of Louisville. He has worked at the University of Wroclaw and has collaborated with several research teams, including Google Brain, Microsoft Research and Yoshua Bengio’s lab.

Marek Adamczyk is a theoretical computer scientist with a passion for empirical validation of mathematics. His fields of expertise are probability theory, algorithmics, and high-dimensional geometry. He works on algorithms that predict the future. The problems on which he focuses in his research are combinatorial in nature but come from the context of stochastic optimization, online optimization, mechanism design, algorithmic game theory, and core machine learning. Simply speaking, optimization under uncertainty.

Adrian Łańcucki is a senior engineer at NVIDIA. His research focuses on representation learning and generative modeling for text and speech, as well as improving quality and efficiency at scale. In 2019, Adrian obtained a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. Since then, he has actively collaborated with academia.

Jindřich Matoušek is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia (UWB) in Pilsen, Czech Republic. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from UWB and has been active as a researcher at the university since 1999, joining the New Technologies for the Information Society (NTIS) research center in 2012. His primary research and teaching interests are computer speech processing, especially speech synthesis. J. Matoušek is the author or co-author of over 180 scientific publications and has served as Area Chair for “Speech Synthesis and Spoken Language Generation” at Interspeech 2021 and 2022 and Publication Chair of Interspeech 2021. He has extensive experience leading and participating in research projects. In 2020, he was on the team awarded the Czech Technology Agency (TAČR) Award for the project “Elimination of the Language Barriers Faced by the Handicapped Viewers of the Czech Television”. For his leadership of the TAČR project “Automatic voice banking and reconstruction for patients after total laryngectomy”, he received the 2020 City of Pilsen Award. J. Matoušek is also active in the scientific community as a member of the evaluation committee for the Antonín Svoboda Award for the best Czech Ph.D. thesis in cybernetics and informatics.

Lukáš Burget is an associate professor at the Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology (FIT BUT), and the scientific director of the BUT Speech@FIT group. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert in speech processing. He received his Ph.D. from Brno University of Technology in 2004. From 2000 to 2002, he was a visiting researcher at OGI, Portland, USA, and in 2011–2012, he spent a sabbatical at SRI International in Menlo Park, USA. His research interests include various areas of speech processing, such as acoustic modeling for speech, speaker, and language recognition. He has played a leading role in several JSALT workshops, notably leading the 2008 team that introduced i-vectors, the first widely adopted speech embeddings, and contributing in 2009 to the creation of the widely used Kaldi ASR toolkit. In 2006, he co-founded Phonexia, a company that now employs over 50 full-time staff and delivers speech technologies to clients in more than 60 countries.

Samuele Cornell is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Carnegie Mellon University at the Language Technologies Institute within Prof. Shinji Watanabe research group (WAVLab). He got a doctoral degree in Information Engineering at Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy in 2023. His research interests are mainly in the area of robust speech processing (speech enhancement, speech separation, diarization, automatic speech recognition) for distant multi-talker conversational scenarios, and also in the broader field of machine listening (sound event detection and classification). He is author and has significant contributions in several popular open-source speech-processing toolkits (e.g. SpeechBrain, ESPNet, Asteroid source separation) and in the organization and co-organization of popular audio processing challenges such as DCASE (Task 4 2022, 2021, 2024), CHiME (CHiME-7/8 DASR lead organizer) and URGENT (2024 and 2025).

Yoshiki Masuyama is a visiting research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) and a collaborator with the Ono Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Systems Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University. He received his Ph.D. from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 2024. His research interests focus on the integration of signal processing and machine learning technologies for efficient and robust audio processing. He has worked on a wide range of audio signal processing tasks, especially multichannel speech separation, robust automatic speech recognition, and multimodal learning. He is the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop 2022.

Alexander Polok is a Junior Researcher and PhD student at the Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology (BUT). His research focuses on speech recognition, with an emphasis on practical and efficient methods for applying ASR models in conversational settings. His work has received several honors, including the Brno PhD Talent Scholarship, the Jury Award for CHiME Task 2: NOTSOFAR, recognition at IT SPY 2023 for one of the best diploma theses, and a nomination for the Government Award for Talented Students. He also participated in the JSALT 2023 workshop.

Dr. Salima Mdhaffar is a full-time senior researcher at Avignon University (LIA). She received a PhD in Computer Science from Le Mans University in 2020. In 2020, as a postdoctoral researcher in LIA, she worked on neural end-to-end systems for the named entities recognition, spoken language understanding, and self-supervised learning, as part of the European SELMA H2020 project. She has also worked on federated learning and privacy preserving for ASR systems as part of the ANR (French National Research Agency) DeepPrivacy project. During her postdoc, she spent a few months as a visiting researcher at MILA within the SpeechBrain team. In 2024, she became a full-time senior researcher at LIA. She is involved in many ANR collaborative projects: E-SSL, TRADEF, SpeechPrivacy and Pantagruel. She also works in some industrial projects with Airbus, Elyadata, and Sonos.Her main research interests are automatic speech recognition, semantic information extraction from speech, speech translation, and SSL.She is (co-)author of more than 35 international conferences. She co-supervises 2 Ph.D. students in the field of low-resource speech processing.

Ricard Marxer is a Full Professor at the University of Toulon and a researcher at the Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes (LIS), affiliated with the CNRS. He also serves as the founding director of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's Degree in Marine and Maritime Intelligent Robotics (MIR) and leads the DYNI (DYNamics of Information) research team. His research interests encompass machine learning, artificial intelligence, unsupervised learning, machine listening, speech and language processing, music technology, bioacoustics, AI and robotics, marine robotics, AI safety, and responsible AI. Marxer has contributed to numerous publications in these fields and collaborates extensively with researchers in speech, music, and marine bioacoustics. His recent work includes developing systems for underwater audio processing and marine mammal monitoring, as well as applications of deep learning to hearing aid technology and speech enhancement.

Sergio Burdisso is a postdoctoral researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland, specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. His research interests encompass reinforcement learning, natural language processing, and multimodal systems, with applications in areas such as depression detection, media bias analysis, and fake news detection. Burdisso has contributed to numerous publications in top-tier conferences and journals, collaborating with international experts in the field. His work reflects a commitment to advancing AI technologies for societal impact, particularly in healthcare and media literacy.

Antonio Almudevar is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Zaragoza. Previously, earned a Bachelor's degree in Telecommunication Engineering and a Master's degree in Modeling, Mathematical Research, Statistics, and Computing, from the University of Zaragoza. His primary research focus is representation learning, specifically leveraging Information Theory and Variational Inference methods to design and analyze the properties of representation spaces in Deep Learning models.

Alessa Carbo is a rising junior at Johns Hopkins University majoring in computer science, with research interests in AI alignment and safety, mechanistic interpretability, NLP, and the theoretical foundations of learning and generalization in deep neural networks.

Severin Baroudi is a PhD student at University of Toulon, he works on self-supervised models to improve speaker diarization and source separation. I possess a Master degree in Machine Learning applied to Audio and Image signals obtained at Paul Sabatier University, in Toulouse. Work aside, I like pop culture (movies in particular), workout at the gym, running and traveling.

Isabella Gidi is a rising Junior undergrad at Harvard University studying Applied Math with a minor in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. She is interested in interpretability, natural language processing, and semantics.

Ramani Duraiswami is Professor and Associate Chair (for Graduate Studies) at the Department of Computer Science, and in UMIACS, at the University of Maryland. Prof. Duraiswami got his B. Tech. at IIT Bombay, and his Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University. After spending a few years working in industry, he joined the University of Maryland, where he established the Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Lab. He has broad research interests, including both algorithm development (for machine learning, statistics, wave propagation and scattering, the fast multipole method), and systems development/applications (spatial audio capture rendering and personalization; computer vision, acoustics). He has published over 280 peer-reviewed archival papers, co-authored a book, has several issued patents, and according to Google Scholar has an h-index of 64 (in 2023). Some of his research has been spun out into a startup, VisiSonics, whose technology is in millions of devices. A particular theme of Prof. Duraiswami’s recent research has been combining machine learning with scientific simulation, and the understanding the interaction of waves with objects - electromagnetic, acoustic, and visual. Prof. Duraiswami has affiliate appointments in UMIACS, ECE, AMSC, MRC and NACS.

Santosh Kesiraju received his PhD from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. He is currently a senior researcher in the Speech@FIT group from Brno University of Technology. His research interests are in the intersection of speech and language technologies, mainly speech recognition, speech-to-text translation and spoken dialogue systems. He collaborates with universities in India, Europe and USA. He has supervised 4 Bachelor and 3 Master thesis and currently co-supervising 3 PhD students.

Alicia Lozano-Diez received the double degree in Computer Science Engineering and Mathematics from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Spain, in 2012, and the postgraduate Master in Research and Innovation in Information and Communications Technologies (I2-TIC) from the same University in 2013. Since 2012, she has been with the Audias research group at UAM. During her Ph.D., in 2015 and 2017, she joined for 4 and 2 months research internships the Speech group (Speech@FIT) at Brno University of Technology (BUT, Brno, Czech Republic). In the 2016 summer, she interned at SRI International (STAR Lab, California, USA). Her research is mainly focused on deep neural networks (DNN) based systems for automatic language and speaker recognition. She finished her Ph.D. in 2018 and got an assistant professor position at the UAM, continuing her research at the Audias group. In 2019, she got the H2020 Marie Curie funding for the project “Robust End-To-End SPEAKER recognition based on deep learning and attention models” and joined the Speech@FIT (BUT) for almost two years as a post-doc researcher.