Conference marking 10 years of AVIOS organization's activity in Israel

Leading industry experts lectured in this year's conference about process technologies, speech and language, human- machine interfaces and interaction technologies in the field of accessibility.

The conference's program

The conference's audience heard lectures by speakers from three leading industries: Dr. Sara Basson, Accessibility Evangelist at Google, who said that Google has made Accessibility it its chief priority, with technologies which enable people with various disabilities to find their way in the digital array in a flowing, friendly and effective manner.

Dr. Sara Basson Accessibility Evangelist at Google

Dr. Ute Winter, General Motors R&D, Israel, presented the user adaptation for Automotive Speech Interfaces. Her presentation reviewed the latest usability researches done in order to establish the users preferred methods.Mr. Shai Nissim,Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Kinedio, VP R&D at VivoText, presented their abilities, in the field of speech synthesis to create vocal data bases of celebrities which exist on line, and how to integrate them in off the shelf products such as toys, tutorials etc. AVIOS – Applied Voice Input Output Society, in an international organization, established over 30 years ago' in order to become a center which unites all those that are interested in the language processing field and to pass the knowledge to as many factors in both the academic and the business world. Its home- base is the USA's west coast and it has active branches around the USA Dr. Nava Shaked,a faculty member of the engineering faculty at HIT, had established the Israeli branch in 2005 and serves as its head: "In all the annual meetings we have conducted, we have introduced our audience (both from the academic and the industry worlds) to the leading edge of technology, by bringing opinion leaders from abroad, and by conducting unique workshops led by famous global experts. Thanks to this unique meeting point of academy and industry, this conference has become a major event and a "Mecca" for international companies. Photo credit: Ron Hoory, manager of the Speech Technologies group at IBM Haifa with Dr. Nava Shaked

"The organization's members come from many disciplines: Tech. companies, academic and research institutions as well as end users who wish to embed the applications in the best possible manner. It is a nonprofit organization whose members are academy researches that specialize in fields touching on NLP, industry members and big clients."

Dr. Yosef Ben Ezra, Dean of the Engineering Faculty:" Hit, had offer to host the conference this year. For the Engineering Faculty it is a very important evnet which promotes HIT's multidisciplinary vision.

Mr. Shai Nissim,Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Kinedio, VP R&D at VivoText

"We've launched a series of courses which enable us to offer knowledge and experience in a variety of topics: wearable computing, design software, Natural LanguageProcessing– NLP, as well as building tools to handle Big Data. The courses are aimed at the various faculties and allow the introduction of these fields to students whose major is different.

We believe that lateral thinking will bring creativity to higher places and will enable the next generation's development as seen in many Israeli Start-ups. This is our vision and we're working hard at achieving it".