ODYSSEY 2014: THE SPEAKER AND LANGUAGE RECOGNITION WORKSHOP 

June 16-19, 2014, Joensuu, Finland 

http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ 

IMPORTANT DATES: 

NIST i-vector challenge (details TBA): 

- Challenge opens: November 2013 

- Challenge papers due: February 2014 

- Submissions without a paper: April 2014 

 Regular paper submission: January 22, 2014 

Industry submissions + demos February, 2014 

Notifications: March 22, 2014 

Final papers: April 7, 2014 

KEYNOTE TALKERS: 

Dr. Samy Bengio, Google Research http://research.google.com/pubs/bengio.html 

'Large scale learning of a joint embedding space' 

Prof. Martin Cooke, University of the Basque Country http://laslab.org/martin

 'Speaking in adverse conditions: from behavioural observations to intelligibility-enhancing speech 

modifications' 

Third keynote XX (TBA) 

CONFERENCE TOPICS 

The general themes of the conference include speaker  and   language  recognition and 

characterization.

 The specific topics  include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Speaker characterization and adaptation
• Features for speaker and language recognition
• Multi-speaker training, detection and diarization
• Robustness in channels and environment
• Robust classification and fusion
• Speaker recognition corpora and evaluation
• Speaker recognition with speech recognition
• Forensics, multimodality, and multimedia speaker recognition
• Speaker and language confidence estimation
• Language, dialect, and accent recognition
• Speaker synthesis and transformation
• Human recognition of speaker and language
• Analysis and countermeasures against spoofing attacks
• Commercial applications

REGULAR PAPER SUBMISSIONS

 All regular submissions (max 8 pages) will be reviewed by at least  three members of the scientific review committee.The regular  submissions must include scientific or methodological novelty; the  paper has to review the relevant prior work and state clearly the  novelty in the Introduction part.The accepted papers will appear in  electronic proceedings. 

INDUSTRY TRACK AND DEMOS

Odyssey committee recognizes a large gap between theoretical research  results and real-world deployment of the methods. To foster closer  collaboration across industry and academia, Odyssey 2014 features an  industry submission track. This can include a description of your  target application, a product, a demonstrator, or any combination. In  addition to voice biometrics providers, we encourage submissions from  companies who are in need for speaker or language recognition  technology.The industry paper submissions do NOT have to present  methodological novelty, but the submission MUST address one or all of  the following aspects:  

• Description of the application, role of speaker/language recognition
• Research results and methods that worked well in your application
• Negative research results that have NOT worked in practice
• Unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention

The industry submissions will NOT undergo full peer review nor will be included to the proceedings. All the industry track submissions can be presented as a posters. The organizing committee may select a few most interesting ones for oral presentation.  

NIST SPECIAL SESSIONS: I-VECTOR CHALLENGE & NIST SRE-2012 FOLLOW-UP

In addition to regular and industry paper submissions, Odyssey 2014  features two special sessions co-organized with National Institute of  Standards and Technologies (NIST). NIST SRE-2012 special session  focuses on extended analyses on the latest, NIST 2012 speaker  recognition evaluation (SRE) benchmark, and is targeted for the  participants of NIST SRE 2012. The i-vector challenge is a new type of challenge targeted for anyone  interested for a 'quick start-up' in speaker recognition. Building  modern speaker and language recognition systems requires a lot of  preprocessing, corpus engineering and computations, making it  challenging for newcomers to enter the field. This prohibits piloting  of possibly promising modeling ideas developed outside of speaker  recognition community (e.g. machine learning and image processing  communities). To bridge this gap, NIST organizes a new type of  benchmark, i-vector challenge, synchronized with Odyssey 2014. Preliminary due-date for paper submissions to both special sessions is  February 2014. Submissions by this deadline will undergo review both  by NIST and by the scientific review committee, and will be included  to the conference proceedings if accepted. Late challenge submissions  (without a paper) are also encouraged; they can be presented as  posters, but will not undergo peer review nor will be included to the  conference proceedings. To ensure smooth organization, early (non-binding) preliminary sign-up  is required. More details and registration for the i-vector challenge  will be available in November 2013.   

AWARDS

Odyssey 2014 features three awards:

• A best paper award
• A best student paper award
• Free registration for 1 to 2 top-performers in the i-vector challenge

All regular and special session papers submitted in time are  candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review  reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student  paper award, the first author must be a student (does not yet hold a  PhD degree) at the time of paper submission. Best 1 to 2 teams (max 1 person per site) in i-vector challenge are  provided FREE REGISTRATION to the full Odyssey 2014 workshop.

VENUE and TRAVEL : 

Odyssey 2014 will be hosted by School of Computing of the University of Eastern Finland (UEF). 

Joensuu is a small town of 75,000 inhabitants in the lakeside Finland -- the capital of green. 

It is famous for its peaceful nature, excellent outdoor opportunities as well as many saunas. 

Joensuu can be easily reached from Helsinki (50 min flight), which can be reached via direct flights 

from several European, North American and Asian cities. 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: 

Tomi Kinnunen, chair University of Eastern Finland, Finland 

Pasi Franti, co-chair University of Eastern Finland, Finland

 Jean-Francois Bonastre University of Avignon, France 

Niko Brummer Agnitio, South Africa 

Lukas Burget Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 

Joseph Campbell MIT Lincoln Lab, USA 

Jan 'Honza' Cernocky Brno Univ. Technology, Czech Republic 

Haizhou Li Inst. Infocomm Research, Singapore 

Alvin Martin NIST, USA 

Douglas Reynolds MIT Lincoln Lab, USA

For more details: http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/ Email: odyssey@cs.uef.fi