Workshops & Guest Lectures
April 11th, 2025: Voice Identity Acoustics and AVATAR Therapy for Hallucinations in Schizophrenia
This workshop will take place on April 11th at AND 4.55/57 from 9:00-12:00 with the following two keynote speakers:
- Prof. Mark Huckvale, University College London
- Prof. Jeremy R. Cooperstock, McGill University
Please register here to attend: https://forms.office.com/e/KA9HDPvDnh
This interdisciplinary workshop explores the intersection of voice identity acoustics and innovative therapeutic approaches for treating auditory-verbal hallucinations (“hearing voices”) in schizophrenia. We will dive into cutting-edge research on the perceptual space of voice identity, uncovering how specific acoustic features and dynamic cues shape how voices are experienced and differentiated. The workshop also highlights Avatar Therapy, a novel clinical approach in which patients interact with digital avatars representing their hallucinated voices—an intervention that has shown significant promise in reducing distress and, in some cases, eliminating persecutory voices altogether. In addition, we will examine the latest advances in voice simulation technologies, enabling more personalized and effective therapeutic applications within Avatar Therapy frameworks.
Program
| 09:00 | Welcome & Introduction Dr. Pavo Orepic, University of Zurich |
| 09:15 | New Insights into the Perceptually Relevant Voice Identity Space Dr. Claudia Roswandowitz, TU Dresden |
| 10:00 | Avatar Therapy: What Happens When People with Acute Psychosis Meet the Voices in Their Heads Prof. Mark Huckvale, University College London |
| 11:00 | Toward a Platform for Simulation and Synthesis of Multi-Modal Hallucinations with Applications to Schizophrenia Treatment Prof. Jeremy R. Cooperstock, McGill University |
May 14–15, 2025: «Boost your research with the LiRI Corpus Platform: Bring your own data!» LCP workshop @ SwissText 2025
The LiRI Corpus Platform LCP is a new web-based tool designed to handle and analyze linguistic data. It allows users to carry out various tasks on corpora, such as querying and performing analyses across multiple modalities: text (via the interface catchphrase), audio (via the interface soundscript) and video (via the interface videoscope). LCP is designed to support a range of linguistic research needs, from corpus import to complex analysis, offering both user-friendly interfaces and advanced query options for researchers. Users can query corpora directly from their browser and import their own corpora using a command-line interface. In this workshop, researchers from various disciplines who use language data are invited to come with their own corpora and relevant research questions to learn how they can use LCP to extract the information they seek from their corpus.
Read more here!
