Language and Voice Lab

The annual AI Festival was held at Reykjavik University two weeks ago on Nov 11, 2016. The focus of this year’s festival was AI and the economy. You can watch the entirety of the talks and discussions here (it was streamed live). There was no admission fee and the festival was open to everyone.

Many interesting lectures and discussions, including the one by Dr. Jacky Mallett, where they had written software to simulate an economy with several interesting results, but I have to mention here as she did at the beginning of the talk that

All economies described in this talk are artificial. Any relationship to any real economy is an open research problem.

and in fact that

This warning should be attached to all academic presentations on economics.

After the talks and discussions, there was a poster & demonstration session titled Innovation & AI in Industry & Academia where many people from within the University came to present their projects to interested parties. There were snacks, there was beer, there was fun and knowledge and ideas were shared.

The Language and Voice Lab of course had a strong presence there with 5 posters.

• Automatic Speech Recognition for Simulated Air Traffic Control
• Automatic speech recognition for Icelandic (two projects, Free and open large vocabulary ASR and ASR for parliament speeches)
• Cognitive workload monitoring using voice
• Eyra – data acquisition system for many languages
• Objective Assessment of Voice Quality

You can see more about our projects here on this site, and of course you can contact us if you want further information.

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Here’s the program:
14.00 Introduction Dr. Kristinn R. Þórisson
– Professor at RU, Director of IIIM
14.10 Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Technological Change
Prof. J. Doyne Farmer
– Director of Complexity Economics, Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford
15.00 Coffee
15.15 AI & Economics: Problem or Opportunity?
Dr. Jacky Mallett
– IIIM Senior Scientist / Adjunct Professor, Reykjavik University
15:50 Position statements: AI & the Economy: Monkeywrench or Moneysaver?
– Dr. Jón Gudnason, Dr. Magnús Torfason, Dr. Kristinn R. Thórisson
16.05 Coffee
16.15 Panel Discussion: AI & the Economy: Monkeywrench or Moneysaver?
Moderator: Jacky Mallett
17.15 Innovation & AI in Industry & Academia (room M201)
– Posters & Demonstrations / Refreshments