▲ Professor Hanseok Ko from the School of Electrical Engineering

Professor Hanseok Ko from the School of Electrical Engineering at the College of Engineering, Korea University (Dean: Haigun Lee), has been named a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the world’s largest association focused on speech and language-based technologies. ISCA recently gained significant attention due to advancements like ChatGPT.

The Fellow certificate will be presented at the opening ceremony of the INTERSPEECH international conference in August 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.

Recognized for his "Continuous Innovation in Korean and English Speech Language Technology," Professor Hanseok Ko has developed conversational avatar-based AI models that closely mimic human interactions. He has especially developed innovative service models capable of emotion recognition and generation, which can be applied to healthcare and call center platforms where high-quality customer service is essential. These models significantly enhance the performance of existing chatbots and have broad potential applications.

The ISCA Fellow designation is intended to acknowledge and honor outstanding ISCA members who have made significant scientific and technological contributions to speech and language. To qualify, candidates must be recognized for exceptional technical leadership in their field worldwide. Fellows are nominated by ISCA members and elected by the ISCA Fellow Selection Committee, which consists of nine ISCA Fellows representing various research areas from around the world. Since the inception of the ISCA Fellow program, Professor Hanseok Ko is the first person from South Korea to be appointed.

The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), established in 1988, aims to promote activities and exchanges in all fields related to the science and technology of speech and language at an international level. It targets anyone and any institution interested in basic research and technological development aimed at explaining, understanding, and replicating various aspects of human speech communication. This includes fields such as phonetics, linguistics, cognition, computational language models, computer speech recognition and synthesis, speech compression, speaker recognition, and clinical applications. ISCA organizes the annual INTERSPEECH conference and supports and co-sponsors various workshops and challenges in the field of speech communication science and technology. /College of Engineering Newspaper