First Joint Seminar with Kazan Federal University and HIT

Only a few days after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding with Kazan Federal University  (KFU), the first joint Webinar between the Russian and Israeli institutions took place. The Webinar, which was conducted via Zoom, was attended by Dr. Nava Shaked from HIT and Dr. Dimitri Chirkin and Dr. Elena Gurobots from KFU.

Dr. Shaked, Head of the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies and a member of the Department of Computer Science, represented HIT as a keynote speaker. Her specialization is speech processing for intelligent systems, natural language processing (NLP) and optimized user interface. 
“My lecture demonstrated how speech processing is important for its contribution to creating intelligent computing systems which not only understand what you say but also what you mean.  

By incorporating AI within integrated systems which use speech recognition engines, we can convert speech to text, which in essence can then be analyzed. During the course of my lecture, I pointed to different applications of this phenomenon in our everyday life, like social robots, medical robots, avatars and bots.

She continued by explaining that “the ability to understand and produce repetitive speech is a huge challenge because of language ambiguity. There is a need to build models which can naturally process language comprehension (NLP) thereby providing a practical link to the world around us -- models which produce real understanding of the speaker’s intention and facilitates natural discourse on both sides.”

HIT has carried out several projects in this area which are considered groundbreaking in the field of automated speech processing. A notable example is the HERA Project, which developed an avatar for pregnant women. HERA was created by the HIT team after an in-depth study using focus groups to help gain insight into a pregnant women’s real needs.

Dr. Nava Shaked

The response of the professional community to HERA’s project’s findings was resounding.  Building such an operational end-to-end system, meticulously field-tested and, was truly innovative in terms of the positive user experience it achieved as a result of the product’s realistic ‘look and feel’ and system architecture. 

Keynote speakers from the Kazan Federal University included: 
Dr. Dmitry Chirkin, Head of the Department of Physical Cyber Technologies in the Institute of Physics and Head of the Center for Digital Transmission lectured on automatic speech scanning and methods for correcting speech using heterogeneous acoustics.
Dr. Elena Gurobots, Head of the Department of Applied and Experimental Linguistics in the Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication, lectured on Applied Linguistics and Psychology.

This Webinar represents the first of what will undoubtedly be many future discussions between HIT and KFU in the area of automated speech processing, with the aim of creating meaningful future collaboration between the highly qualified research teams from both institutions.