We have an exciting list of big-name plenary session invited speakers this year, with one representing the research area of each of our four major constituent events. The plenary sessions will be held before each morning and afternoon workshop session commences on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th of December during SummerFest '09 and are not to be missed!

Eckart Altenmüller

On Thursday morning Professor Eckart Altenmüller from the University of Music and Drama, Hanover, Germany, will discuss Music and Emotion.

Eckart Altenmüller (MD, MA) is full Professor and Director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians Medicine and the University of Music and Drama, Hanover, Germany. After graduating in Medicine and Music he held a postdoctoral position in the department of Clinical Neurophysiology in Freiburg where he carried out research into brain activation during auditory processing of music and learning of fine motor skills. He received his clinical training in Neurology at the Department of Neurology at the University of Tübingen. Since 1994 he is a chair and director of the Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine. He continues research into movement disorders in musicians and into motor and sensory learning as well as in the effects of music on emotions.

Click here for the presentation abstract.

Jonathan Harrington

On Thursday afternoon Professor Jonathan Harrington from the Ludwig-Maximillians Universität, Munich, Germany, will be covering Experimental Phonetics. Professor Harrington is also presenting a course entitled "An Introduction to Experimental Phonetics" at the SummerFest '09 SummerSchool earlier in the week.

Jonathan Harrington is Professor of Phonetics at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, University of Munich. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1986 and has held appointments at the University of Kiel (2002-2006), Macquarie University (1989-2001) and Edinburgh University (1983-1989). His research is in laboratory phonology and with a particular emphasis in recent years on the phonetic bases of sound change. His book publications include Techniques in Speech Acoustics (with Steve Cassidy) and most recently The Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora. From 2001-2007 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Phonetics. Jonathan Harrington is also an Adjunct Professor of Macquarie University's Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.

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David Traum

On Friday morning Dr David Traum from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, will share with us the latest on Spoken Dialogue Models for Virtual Humans. Dr Traum will also be presenting a Summer School course entitled "An Introduction to Dialog Systems" in the earlier half of SummerFest.

David Traum, PhD, is a research scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), and a research assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, both at the University of Southern California. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Rochester in 1994. His research focuses on collaboration and dialogue communication between human and artificial agents. He has engaged in theoretical, implementational, and empirical approaches to the problem, studying human-human natural language and multi-modal dialogue, as well as building a number of dialogue systems to communicate with human users. Dr Traum leads the natural language dialogue group at ICT, which collaborates with other groups on research and development of virtual humans. Dr. Traum is author of over 150 technical articles, has served on many conference program committees, and is currently the president emeritus of SIGDIAL, the international special interest group in discourse and dialogue.

Mark Sanderson

On Friday afternoon Dr Mark Sanderson from the University of Sheffield, UK, will delve into Information Retrieval. Dr Sanderson is also presenting a course entitled "An Introduction to the Inner Workings of Information Retrieval Systems" as part of the SummerFest '09 Summer School.

Mark Sanderson is a Reader at the University of Sheffield in the Information Studies Department. He is a researcher in information retrieval (IR). He has a strong interest in the evaluation of search engines, but also works in geographic search, cross language IR (CLIR), summarization, image retrieval by captions, word sense ambiguity and has also built searching systems. Mark is on the editorial board of 4 of the leading IR journals and this year was co-PC chair of ACM SIGIR 2009. He is currently an investigator on three active research projects. He teaches courses in Web search, introduction to IR as well as contributing to courses in multimedia, essay writing and information security.

Click here for the presentation abstract.