Keynote Speakers
Olivia Fox Cabane
Title: “Self-Promotion for the Ethical Scientist”
Abstract: In the scientific community, most researchers are taught that “if your work is good enough, it should speak for itself.” This belief leads to discomfort with promotion of one’s work or one’s self, and disregard of the essential role of visibility in scientific success. In today’s crowded and chaotic landscape, branding—both of one’s research and one’s self—is vital for achieving impact. Charisma, persuasion, and influence are often neglected in STEM education, yet they are powerful tools for advancing science. Scientists must embrace these skills to secure research funding, combat the current attacks on science, and become evangelists for their work. This talk explores the critical need for scientists to not only conduct high-quality research but also to actively promote their work, unlocking the potential of the charismatic scientist.
Bio: Olivia Fox Cabane is a renowned keynote speaker, author, and expert in leadership and charisma development. She has lectured on leadership, innovation, and charisma at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the United Nations – and was the Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford University’s startup accelerator, StartX. Now, she serves as executive coach and keynote speaker for Fortune 500 companies. Cabane’s first book, The Charisma Myth, became a worldwide bestseller and went into second printing before it even launched; her books have been translated into 32 languages, including Mongolian. In addition to her books, she has been a frequent contributor to publications like The New York Times, Forbes, and BBC. In her keynote at ProComm, she will share her experience about what professional oral communication is all about and how it should be explained and taught to people – across cultures.
Ingo Siegert
Title: “Beyond Words: The Transformative Power of Speech Technology in Professional Communication”
Abstract: In a world where communication is at the core of professional interaction, speech technology is rapidly becoming a key enabler of efficiency, accessibility, and innovation. This keynote will explore the evolution of professional communication, from traditional written correspondence to AI-driven voice assistants, highlighting the transformative role of speech technologies in contemporary contexts. We will provide a comprehensive overview of current advancements, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and multimodal systems that integrate voice, text, and non-verbal cues. The practical applications of these technologies across diverse sectors will be examined, from real-time transcription in business meetings to speech-assisted documentation in healthcare, inclusive learning environments in education, and automated customer interactions via voicebots. Beyond technical developments, the keynote will address critical ethical considerations, such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the misuse of synthetic voices. As these systems increasingly shape professional communication, ensuring transparency, fairness, and trust becomes paramount. Finally, we will outline future trends in the field, emphasizing the potential of emotionally intelligent, collaborative AI systems to create more human-like, context-aware interactions. This session will provide researchers, practitioners, and industry leaders with insights into the opportunities and challenges of leveraging speech technology for more effective and responsible communication in the digital age.
Bio: Ingo SIEGERT (https://www.ingo-siegert.de/): Ingo Siegert’s research is focused on reliable and trusted (spoken) dialog systems, in particular in interdisciplinary investigations of human-computer interaction and speaker anonymization. Recently, inclusive speech technology for people with mental disabilities is a further research topic. Thereby, he investigates the acoustics in terms of anonymization, perceived charisma as well as incorporating a more diverse user group within the scope of voice assistants. Furthermore, Ingo Siegert creates corpora of human computer interactions, such as the Voice Assistant Conversation Corpus, and the Voice Assistant in the Wild Corpus. Currently, he is leader of a research group at Otto von Guericke University on mobile dialog systems, comprising 4 PhD students. He is Secretary of the ISCA Special Interest Group Security and Privacy in Speech Communication (SPSC), starting 2025 and general chair of the SPSC Symposium organized every year as a satellite event of Interspeech. He was workshop chair of the ICMI 2024. He is also organizing several national workshops and is reviewer of several journals, as well as the leading guest editor of a special issue regarding security and privacy in speech communication in Computer Speech and Language. Furthermore Ingo Siegert is active in science communication by organizing an AI and Music festival (https://www.felicia-festival.ai/) and he is part of the Institute for AI and Stage (IKIB) connecting AI and Arts.