Interspeech 2014 special session : Speech technologies for Ambient Assisted Living.

Submission deadline: 24th March 2014

Singapore, 14-18 September 2014

http://www.interspeech2014.org/public.php?page=special_sessions.html#speech-technologies-ambient This special session focuses on the use of speech technologies for ambient assisted living, the creation of smart spaces and intelligent companions that can preserve independence and executive function, social communication and security of people with special needs. Currently, speech input for assistive technologies remains underutilized despite its potential to deliver highly informative data and serve as the primary means of interaction with the home. Speech interfaces could replace or augment obtrusive and sometimes outright inaccessible conventional computer interfaces. Moreover, the smart home context can support speech communication by providing a number of concurrent information sources (e.g., wearable sensors, home automation sensors, etc.), enabling multimodal communication. In practice, its use remains limited due to challenging real-world conditions, and because conventional speech interfaces can have difficulty with the atypical speech of many users. This, in turn, can be attributed to the lack of abundant speech material, and the limited adaptation to the user of these systems. Taking up the challenges of this domain requires a multidisciplinary approach to define the user's needs, record corpora in realistic usage conditions, develop speech interfaces that are robust to both environment and user's characteristics and are able to adapt to specific users. This special session aims at bringing together researchers in speech and audio technologies with people from the ambient assisted living and assistive technologies communities to meet and foster awareness between members of either community, discuss problems, techniques and datasets, and perhaps initiate common projects. Topics of the session will include: Assistive speech technology Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living Understanding, modelling, or recognition of aged and atypical speech Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR) Multimodal emotion recognition Audio scene and smart space context analysis Assessment of speech and language processing within the context of assistive technology Speech synthesis and speech recognition for physical or cognitive impairments Symbol languages, sign languages, nonverbal communication Speech and NLP applied to typing interface applications Language modelling for Augmentative and Alternative Communication text entry and speech generating devices Deployment of speech and NLP tools in the clinic or in the field Linguistic resources; corpora and annotation schemes Evaluation of systems and components. Submission instructions: Researchers who are interested in contributing to this special session are invited to submit a paper according to the regular submission procedure of INTERSPEECH 2014, and to select 'Speech technologies for Ambient Assisted Living' in the special session field of the paper submission form. Please feel free to contact the organisers if you have any question regarding the special session.

Organizers: Michel Vacher michel.vacher [at] imag.fr Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, François Portet francois.portet [at] imag.fr Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, Frank Rudzicz frank [at] cs.toronto.edu University of Toronto, Jort F. Gemmeke jgemmeke [at] amadana.nl KU Leuven, Heidi Christensen h.christensen [at] dcs.shef.ac.uk University of Sheffield,