In August, 2011 Ben Hixon and Eric Schneider attended Interspeech 2011 in Florence, Italy to present their paper, “Phonemic Similarity Metrics to Compare Pronunciation Methods.” Interspeech is the world’s major conference on speech communication between people and computers. Their paper, co-authored with mentor Professor Susan Epstein, describes original research performed to support an ongoing project in learning to have a dialogue with a computer. Their work has been supported by Dr. Epstein’s Research Education for Undergraduates award from the National Science Foundation, and by Hunter College.