Opening Symposium of the Icelandic Language Biobank
July 6, 2026
The Opening Symposium of the Icelandic Language Biobank will take place on Tuesday, August 25th, from 14:00 to 17:00. In addition to a presentation on the Icelandic Language Biobank, the agenda features lectures from the project's international partners within the Speech Accessibility Project and the DELAD initiative.
The subjects include the use of language technology and AI tools for the benefit of people with speech and language disorders, with an emphasis on building data infrastructure.
The schedule is as follows:
- 14:00–14:45: Mark Hasegawa-Johnson - The Speech Accessibility Project
- 14:45–15:15: Alice Lee and Satu Saalasti - DELAD - An initiative for facilitating sharing of corpora of speech disorders
- 15:15–15:30: Coffee break
- 15:30–16:00: Alice Lee - Building a speech corpus of disordered speech for teaching and assessing Speech and Language Therapy students in Ireland
- 16:00–16:30: Satu Saalasti - Studying speech, sharing data: Behavioral and neuroimaging approaches at the Logolab infrastructure, University of Eastern Finland
- 16:30–17:00: Iris Edda Nowenstein - Íslenski málsýnabankinn / The Icelandic Language Biobank
The symposium is held in collaboration with the Language Technology Research Center (Máltæknisetur) and takes place in the Edda lecture hall. The event will be conducted in both English and Icelandic and is open to everyone.
The Icelandic Language Biobank
The Icelandic Language Biobank is a three-year project funded by the Strategic Research and Development Programme in Language Technology. It is directed by Iris Edda Nowenstein, Assistant Professor of Icelandic linguistics and language technology at the University of Iceland and speech-language pathologist at Landspítali (the National University Hospital of Iceland).
The overall goal of the project is to build the necessary infrastructure for clinical speech and language data collection in Iceland, an important step to ensure access to clinical language technology tool. This is done by leveraging collaboration with clinicians and robust linguistically-informed data collection against data scarcity. In contrast with the most comprehensive data collection efforts in high-resource languages, the Icelandic Language Biobank will contain language samples for communication aid development as well as the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders.
Speech Accessibility Project
The Speech Accessibility Project is a multi-year initiative with unprecedented cross-industry support from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft that aims to improve voice-recognition technology by collecting audio samples from volunteers with a variety of speech-impacted disabilities. The project is directed by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
DELAD
DELAD stands for Database Enterprise for Language And speech Disorders. It is an initiative that facilitates the sharing of corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) among researchers in a GDPR compliant way and at secure repositories in the CLARIN infrastructure. Satu Saalasti and Alice Lee are both in the DELAD steering committee. Satu Saalasti is a speech-language pathologist, Associate Professor at the University of Eastern Finland, and researcher at LogoLab. Alice Lee is a speech-language pathologist and Associate Professor in speech and language therapy at University College Cork in Ireland.