International Workshop for Speech to Speech Machine Translation (IWSSMT) was organized by Natural Language Translation Mission (NLTM) and was supported by PSA and MeitY, Government of India. From IIITH, Prof. Dipti Misra Sharma was a member of the organizing committee and Prof. Rajeev Sangal was a member of the  advisory committee. The workshop began with a welcome address and an introduction to the workshop and its goals by Prof. Dipti Misra Sharma and Prof. Rajeev Sangal who presented a larger vision of developing speech to speech machine technologies and ecosystems for the Indian situation. IWSSMT was held online from 5 – 7 November. 

It was organized under the Natural Language Translation Mission, as a step towards learning from/share ideas with scholars/researchers/developers who have worked on similar projects elsewhere.  The workshop had a small group of experts  from different countries who have worked on such projects  to have intense deep discussions. The following eminent scholars from the US, Europe, Japan, China and India participated in the workshop:

• Kevin Duh is a senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE). He is also an assistant research professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP). 
• Bhuvana Ramabhadran currently leads a team of researchers at Google, focusing on multilingual speech recognition and speech synthesis. Previously, she was a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager in IBM Research AI, at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where she led a team of researchers in the Speech Technologies Group and coordinated activities across IBM’s world wide laboratories in the areas of speech recognition, synthesis, and spoken term detection.  
• Hua Wu is the technical chief of Baidu’s natural-language processing department and the president of the Baidu Technical Committee. Before joining Baidu, she was with Microsoft Research Asia and Toshiba Research Center, where she worked on NLP and machine translation.
• Dr. Fei Huang is a Senior Director and Principal Research Scientist of Language Technology Lab, Alibaba DAMO Academy. He leads NLP foundation and machine translation teams, which developed AliNLP platform in AliCloud. 
• Josef van Genabith is Scientific Director for Language and Multilingual Technologies (MLT) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Full Professor and Chair of Translation-Oriented Language Technologies at Saarland University.
• Tanja Schultz is a German computer scientist specializing in speech processing. She is professor of computer science at the University of Bremen and the former president of the International Speech Communication Association.

• Dr. Okazaki, who has served as an adviser to SmartNews since 2013, is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University. 
• Kalika Bali is a researcher at Microsoft Research India working in the areas of Machine Learning, Natural Language Systems and Applications, as well as Technology for Emerging Markets. She is also very passionate about NLP and Speech technology for Indian Languages.
• Vikas Joshi is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft India from past one year and is leading the acoustic modeling and end-to-end modeling efforts for Indian languages. Prior to Microsoft, Vikas worked as language modeling lead at Amazon Alexa for three years, managing the language modeling efforts for India, UK and Australia region.
• Srinivas Bangalore is the Director of AI Research technologies at Interactions LLC. He was a Lead Inventive Scientist at Interactions (2015-2017) and a Principal Research Scientist at AT&T Labs–Research (1997-2014).

• Sanjeev Khudanpur has been on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University Since 1996. Until June 2001, he was an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Language and Speech Processing and, from July 2001 to June 2008, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. He became an Associate Professor in July 2008.