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Florian Metze, Editor-in-chief Haizhou Li, Editor Andrew Rosenberg, Editor Izhak Shafran, Editor

Florian Metze

Edited by Andrew Rosenberg

Edited by Andrew Rosenberg

Shanghainese, also known as the Shanghai or Hu dialect, is a form of Wu dialect spoken in the central districts of Shanghai and in the surrounding region. Wu speakers represented about 8% of the total Chinese population by 1984. Shanghainese is a proper representative dialect of Northern Wu and in English "Shanghainese" sometimes refers to all Wu dialects. With nearly 14 million speakers, it is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin.

The Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) was recently hosted in Scottsdale, Arizona from December 9-13, 2015. The conference included lectures and poster sessions in a variety of speech and signal processing areas. The Best Paper award was given to Suman Ravuri of UC Berkley for his paper "Hybrid DNN-Latent Structured SVM Acoustic models for Continuous Speech Recognition". In this article, we go through the main themes during each day.

The twenty ninth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), a single track machine learning and computational neuroscience conference, was held in Montreal, during a relatively balmy winter week, spanning December 7th to 12th. The conference saw a record number of registered attendees in all three categories -- tutorials, conference, and workshops; and the number of attendees in tutorial more than doubled since last year!