Chiori HORI (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL))

Dr. Chiori Hori has worked on spoken language processing technologies since 1998. In 2002, she worked on spoken interactive Q&A using a real-time Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) based on Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) with over-a-million word vocabulary, at NTT. She joined CMU in 2004 and then moved to ATR/NICT in 2007. She led the NICT ASR research group and their system to first place in the English TED talk recognition at IWSLT for three consecutive years from 2012. She invented a WFST-based dialog technology which was implemented on a humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO, at NICT. She has been working on neural network based technologies for Human-Robot communication at MERL since 2015. She is leading the 7th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC6 and DSTC7) and the track of Audio Visual Scene Aware Dialog (AVSD). She has been an editorial board of "Computer Speech and Language" since 2016 and a member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee.

Tim Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL))