Aloft Chicago O’Hare, 9700 Balmoral Ave, Rosemont, IL 60018. There’s a dedicated shuttle between the airport and the hotel. Here is some information about the shuttle.
Everyone can park in the Aloft’s parking structure. The hotel is right next to the conference center.
For people who are not staying at the Aloft, you will have to take your tickets to the front desk to get them validated. Make sure to do it at the end of each day before you leave the parking structure.
| Day and Date | Times | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Tue, June 4 | 8:30-9:30am | Breakfast at the conference center |
| 9:30-12:30pm | Session 1 | |
| 10:30am | Snack | |
| 12:30-2:00pm | Lunch | |
| 2:00-5:00pm | Session 2 | |
| 3:00pm | Afternoon snack | |
| 6:30pm | Dinner at Crust Brewing, 5500 Park Pl, Rosemont, IL 60018 | |
| Wed, June 5 | 8:30-9:30am | Breakfast at the conference center |
| 9:30-12:00pm | Session 3 | |
| 10:30am | Snack | |
| 12:00-1:30pm | Lunch | |
| 1:30-4:30pm | Session 4 | |
| 2:00pm | Afternoon snack |
Speech science courses have historically been at the forefront of pedagogical innovations, with a focus on experiential learning, project based learning, and practical application. However, our observation is that speech science courses have lagged in terms of their representation of cultural and linguistic diversity in the classroom. (M. Baese-Berk & P. Reed, 2023, Addressing diversity in speech science courses, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154, https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0020613)
The Big Ten has an enormous wealth of expertise in speech and language science, and every Big Ten institution teaches courses in phonetics. We will engage in four focused discussion sessions across two days dealing with important current challenges and opportunities in the delivery of phonetics courses, including artificial intelligence, data science, participation and inclusion in science, and technologies for speech analysis. The workshop will begin on Tuesday (June 4) morning and end on Wednesday (June 5) evening. The overall goal is to build a community of phonetics faculty across the Big Ten (and beyond), and to promote the sharing of innovations in phonetics training, research, dissemination and outreach.
Many of the current challenges in higher education span across all disciplines, such as the response to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, or the need to incorporate data science into the curriculum and the goals of promoting participatory and inclusive approaches to science. Fortunately, phonetics courses offer some unique opportunities in facing such challenges, and can serve as models for innovations that could be adopted in other disciplines. For instance, speech science is uniquely positioned to evaluate voice assistants (such as Siri and Alexa) in terms of text-to-speech and speech recognition, and the relative lack of voice assistant support for under-represented languages and dialects. Many phonetics courses include the opportunity for students to analyze their own speech and compare their speech to their classmates’ speech, enhancing their understanding of the variation and diversity of speech patterns in a community. Speech science has also adopted new biosensing technologies, such as MRI and pupillometry, which offer new opportunities for data analysis and visualization.