IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems
Special Issue on Design and Applications of Neuromorphic Computing System

GUEST EDITORS:
Hai (Helen) Li, hal66@pitt.edu, University of Pittsburgh
Qinru Qiu, qiqiu@syr.edu, Syracuse University
Yu Wang, yu-wang@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn, Tsinghua University

TOPIC SUMMARY:
As artificial intelligence technology becomes pervasive in society and ubiquitous in our lives, the desire for embedded-everywhere and human-centric computational intelligence systems calls for an intelligent computation paradigm. However, the applications of machine learning and neural networks involve large, noisy, incomplete, natural data sets that do not lend themselves to convenient solutions from current systems. Neuromorphic systems that are inspired by the working mechanism of human brains possess a massively parallel architecture with closely coupled memory and computing. This special issue aims at the computing methodology and systems across multiple technology scales to accelerate the development the neuromorphic hardware systems and the adoption for machine learning applications. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Neuromorphic circuit, architectures, and systems
- Hardware-software co-design and optimization
- Computing system for neural network applications (machine vision, machine learning, sensor network, big data, signal processing & coding, pattern recognition, nature language processing, etc.)
- Software and hardware architecture for deep learning
- Bio-inspired computing model and/or hardware design

IMPORTANT DATES:
Open for submissions in ScholarOne Manuscripts: November 1, 2015
Closed for submissions: January 15, 2016
Results of first round of reviews: April 30, 2016
Submission of revised manuscripts: May 31, 2016
Results of second round of reviews: July 31, 2016
Publication materials due: August 31, 2016

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically after the ?open for submissions? date, adhering to the IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems guidelines (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tmscs/author). Please submit your papers through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmscs-cs) and be sure to select the special issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.

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Special Issue on Language and Interaction Technologies for Children
The link:
goo.gl/CFSjTR

Description:
The purpose of this special edition of CSL is to publish the results of new research in the area of speech, text and language technology applied specifically to children?s voices, texts and applications. Children are different to adults both at the acoustic and linguistic level as well as in the way that they interact with people and technology. To address these issues appropriately, it is necessary to work across many disciplines, including cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, phonetics and linguistics, health and education.

Linguistic characteristics of children's speech are widely different from those of adults. This is manifested in their interactions, their writings and their speech. The processing of queries, texts and spoken interactions therefore opens challenging research issues on how to develop effective interaction, language, pronunciation and acoustic models for reliable processing of children?s input. The behavior of children interacting with a computer or a mobile device is also different from that of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults. The aim of the special edition is to provide a platform for collecting mature research in this area.

Technical Scope:
The special issue will focus on how children use text and speech in all aspects of communication, including human-human and human-computer interaction. We invite the submission of original, unpublished papers on topics including but not limited to:

- Speech Interfaces: acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech, discourse analysis of spoken language in child-machine interaction, age-dependent characteristics of spoken language, automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems
- Text Analysis: Analysis of complexity and accuracy in children?s text productions, understanding progression and development in orthography and syntax skills, use of vocabulary and registers or handwriting skills.
- Multi-modality, Robotics and Avatars: multi-modal child-machine interaction, multi-modal input and output interfaces, including robotic interfaces, intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing, pen or gesture/visual interfaces
- User Modeling: user modeling and adaptation, usability studies accounting for age preferences in child-machine interaction
- Cognitive Models: internal learning models, personality types, user-centered and participatory design
- Application Areas: training systems, educational software, gaming interfaces, medical conditions, such as autism or speech disorders, diagnostic tools and (speech) therapy

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: March 1, 2016
Target publication date: January 1, 2017

Guest Editors:
Berkling Kay, Cooperative State University, Berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de
Russell Martin, University of Birmingham, m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk
Evanini Keelan, ETS, kevanini@ets.org

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 Computer Speech and Language Journal, Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding and Interaction

For more information:

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-speech-and-language/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-spoken-language-understanding-and-interacti/

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un numéro spécial de la revue TAL sera consacré à l'éthique dans le TALP.
Voici les informations, que vous retrouverez aussi sur :
http://tal-57-2.sciencesconf.org/

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Call for papers - Journal TIPA no 32, 2016

Tipa. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage

https://tipa.revues.org/

Conflict in discourse and discourse in conflict

Guest editors: Tsuyoshi KIDA* & Laura-Anca PAREPA**

*Language and Communication Science Laboratory (LCSL)-Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences (ICR), University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

**Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Description

Nowadays, conflict between individuals, countries or groups seems omnipresent. The reasons for this are numerous, be they religious, cultural, ideological, territorial, patrimonial or familial. Conflict manifests itself in numerous forms of expression and resolution, which can include diplomatic declarations, civil demonstrations, ideological clashes, family disputes, intercultural misunderstandings, lawsuits or other negotiations.

In the public or private sphere, conflict is triggered through the process of discourse being produced, disseminated, interpreted and amplified –therefore having an effect the opinions and attitudes of its receivers. At the same time, human beings are inherently endowed with the ability to manage and overcome these conflicts through lexical choice, ways of speaking, non-verbal communication, deconfliction techniques and conflict resolution methods. In other words, conflict is mediated through discourse.

The thematic concept for volume 32 of TIPA –conceived following collaboration between a linguist and an expert in political discourse – proposes to focus on the relations between discourse and conflict, within various disciplinary frameworks, in order to address the following questions: What type of discourse engenders conflict? What are the features specific to conflictual discourse in terms of prosody, semantics, pragmatics, discursive or interactional structure? How can conflict be dealt with and resolved? How can identities and images be constructed or deconstructed through speech acts? How can lexical choice influence the success or failure of strategic narratives in an official speech?

These are just some of the questions to which linguistics and language sciences, as well as other neighbouring disciplines, can be sensitive and to which the scientific community may propose comprehensive answers by engaging in interdisciplinary research.

This call for papers is open to theoretical and/or empirical contributions coming from researchers and experts from a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to: discourse analysis (political, media, forensic, international relations), pragmatics, sociolinguistics, interactional analysis, rhetoric, semantics, intercultural communication, discourse prosody, multimodality, neurolinguistics, etc.

The language of publication will be either English or French. Each article should contain a detailed two-page abstract in the other language, in order to make papers in French more accessible to English-speaking readers, and vice versa, thus insuring a larger audience for all the articles.

Important dates

June 30: due date for submission of articles

September 15: notification of acceptance

October 30: receipt of final version

December: publication.

Submission guidelines

Please send your proposal in three files to: tipa@lpl-aix.fr
- one file in .doc containing the title, name and affiliation of the author(s).

- two anonymous files, in .doc and .pdf format
 Instructions for authors can be found at http://tipa.revues.org/222

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Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Special Issue on Signal Processing Platforms and Algorithms for Real-life Communications and Listening to Digital Audio

Call for Papers:

Design of modern electronic communication systems involves diversified scientific areas including algorithms, architectures, and hardware development. Variety of existent multimedia devices gives rise to development of platform-dependent signal processing algorithms. Their integration into existent digital environment is an urgent problem for application engineers.

Considering a wide range of applications including hearing aids, real-life communications, and listening to digital audio, the following research areas are of particular importance: advanced time-frequency representations, audio user interfaces, audio and speech enhancement, assisted listening, and perception and phonation modeling.

This special issue aims at publishing papers presenting novel methodologies and techniques (including theoretical methods, algorithms, software, and hardware) correspondent to these research areas indicated above.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Speech modeling, analysis, and synthesis

• Signal processing for hearing aids and natural hearing

• Speech intelligibility improvement in noisy environment

• Low-delay speech and audio processing

• Automatic speech recognition

• Text-to-speech synthesis

• Speech-based assistive technologies

• Hardware platforms for real-time signal processing

• Rapid prototyping and project portability

Authors can submit their manuscripts via the Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/jece/signal.processing/spp/.

Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Hindawi publishing corporation) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece). According to the publisher policy, publishing a research article in this journal requires article processing charges ($600) that will be billed to the submitting author following the acceptance of an article for publication.

Important Dates:

• Manuscript Due Friday, 24 June 2016

• First Round of Reviews Friday, 16 September 2016

• Publication Date Friday, 11 November 2016

Guest Editors:

• Alexander Petrovsky, Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, Minsk, Belarus (Lead Guest Editor), palex@bsuir.by

• Wanggen Wan, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China, wanwg@staff.shu.edu.cn

• Manuel R. Zurera, University of Alcala, Madrid, Spain, manuel.rosa@uah.es

• Alexey Karpov, St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, karpov@iias.spb.su

Web: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/si/324109/cfp/

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CALL FOR
ARTICLES
Natural Language Processing and Ethics

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has always posed ethical or legal problems. These
problems are particularly sensitive in this age of Big Data and of data duplication,
areas in which NLP is involved. In addition to legal and economic matters (search for
patents and rights associated with data/software), there are military issues (monitoring
of conversations) and social issues (the ?right to be forgotten? imposed on Google).

The crucial problem today is access to data (including sensitive) and personal privacy
protection for citizens. Indeed, our domain produces applications considered to be
effective for both areas (data access and protection), but without their known
limitations being clear to the general public and governments.

Diversifying work on corpora has also led the community to be able to process more and
more sensitive sources, be it personal data, medical data or even that of a criminal
nature.

For privacy protection, anonymizing data, whether oral or written, is as much an
industrial as an academic stake, with sometimes strong coverage constraints depending on
the application or research needs, issues regarding the nature of the resources and the
information to be anonymized, or legal limits.

Some NLP tools also join the ethical concerns, such as tools for plagiarism detection,
facts checking and speaker identification. In addition, the advent of Web 2.0 and with it
the development of crowdsourcing raises new questions as to the way in which to consider
participants in the creation of linguistic resources.

This special issue of the TAL journal aims to highlight the NLP contributions to ethics
and data protection and to uncover the limitations of the field both in terms of real
possibilities (evaluation) and societal dangers.

We encourage submissions on all aspects related to ethics for and by Natural Language
Processing, and in particular on the following problems or tasks:


sensitive corpus processing, including medical, police or personal data
language resource production, in particular using crowdsourcing, and ethics
ethical questions linked to the use of tools or the result of NLP processing
ethical questions related to NLP practices
quality and ways of evaluating applications and/or language resources
anonymization, de-identification and re-identification of NLP corpora
plagiarism detection by NLP
facts checking
paralinguistic and ethics, in particular speaker identification or detection of
pathologies
historical perspective of ethics in NLP
definition of ethics as applied to NLP

We also welcome position papers on the subject.

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking authors are requested
to submit in French. Submissions in English are accepted only in case of one of the
authors not being a French speaker.



IMPORTANT DATES


** extension ** end of March 2016 Deadline for submission
end of May 2016 Notification to authors after first review
beg. of July 2016 Deadline for submission of revised version
mid-July 2016 Notification to authors after second review
end of Sept. 2016 Deadline for submission of final version
December 2016 Publication

PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to upload their contribution (no more
than 25 pages, PDF format) via the menu 'Paper submission' of the issue page of the
journal. To do so, you will need to have an account on the Sciencesconf platform. To
create an account, go to the Sciencesconf site and click on 'create account' next to the
'Connect' button at the top of the page. To submit, come back to this page, connect to
you account and upload your submission.

TAL perfoms double blind reviewing. Your paper should be anonymised.

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal
(http://www.atala.org/IMG/zip/tal-style.zip).

Invited editors: Karën Fort (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH), Gilles Adda (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI), K.
Bretonnel Cohen (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)

REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Maxime Amblard (U. de Lorraine/LORIA)
Jean-Yves Antoine (U. de Tours/LI)
Philippe Blache (CNRS / LPL)
Jean-François Bonastre (LIA/U. D'Avignon)
Alain Couillault (U. de La Rochelle/L3i)
Gaël de Chalendar (CEA LIST)
Patrick Drouin (U. de Montréal/OLST)
Cécile Fabre (U. de Toulouse/CLLE-ERSS)
Cyril Grouin (LIMSI-CNRS)
Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corporation)
Larry Hunter (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College/Dpt of Computer Science)
Juliette Kahn (LNE)
Mark Liberman (UPenn/LDC)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI)
Yann Mathet (U. de Caen/GREYC)
Claude Montacié (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH)
Jean-Philippe Prost (U. de Montpellier/LIRMM)
Rafal Rzepka (Hokkaido University/Language Media Laboratory)
Björn Schuller (University of Passau)
Michel Simard (National Reseach Council Canada)
Mariarosaria Taddeo (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues) is an international journal that has been
published by ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues) for the past
40 years with the support of the CNRS. Over the past few years, it has become an online
journal, with possibility of ordering the paper versions. This does not, in any way,
affect the selection and review process.

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IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Special Issue on Laughter Computing: towards machines able to deal with laughter


TOPIC SUMMARY:
Laughter is a significant feature of human-human communication. It
conveys various meanings and accompanies different emotions, such as
amusement, relief, irony, or embarrassment. It has strong social
dimensions: e.g., it can reduce the sense of threat in a group and
facilitate sociability and cooperation. It also may have positive
effects on learning, creativity, health, and well-being. Because of its
relevance in human-human communication, research on laughter deserves
important attention from the Affective Computing community. Several
recent initiatives, such as the Special Session on Laughter at the 6th
International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent
Interaction (ACII2015) and the series of Interdisciplinary Workshops on
Laughter and other Non-Verbal Vocalizations in Speech, witness the
importance of the topic. Recent research projects focused on laughter by
investigating automatic laughter processing, and by developing proof-of
concepts, experiments, and prototypes exploiting laughter for enhancing
human-computer interaction.
Most research questions, however, are still unanswered. These address,
for example, theoretical issues (e.g., how can laughter be modelled and
analysed as a multimodal phenomenon, including non-verbal full-body
expression? Which is the relation between different expressions of
laughter, their perceived meanings and their social functions?),
analysis (e.g., to what extent is multimodal analysis of laughter in
complex social scenarios feasible and effective?), and synthesis
techniques (e.g., can speech laughter be synthesized effectively?).
Overcoming the lack of HCI/HRI/HHI applications that exploit the
positive (as well as a critical analysis of negative) effects of
laughter is also of high interest. The issue of acceptability of
laughing machines, either virtual agent or robot, needs to be addressed as well.
The goal of this special issue is to gather recent achievements in
laughter computing in order to trigger new research directions in this
field. The interest is on computational models that deal with laughter
in human-computer and human-human interaction. Laughter is characterized
by a complex expressive behaviour that includes major expressive
modalities: auditory, facial expressions, body movements and postural
attitudes, and physiological signals. This special issue aims at taking
into account the multimodal nature of laughter and its variety of
contexts and meanings, and providing an interdisciplinary perspective of
ongoing scientific research and ICT developments.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
? Multimodal laughter detection and synthesis
? Computational models of laughter mimicry and contagion
? Multimodal datasets of different laughter types in both controlled and ecological context
? Laughter analysis in human-human communication
? Individual differences in the expression of laughter
? Modelling of different communicative meanings of laughter
? Laughter-based applications in HCI/HRI/HHI and future user-centric media
? Acceptability of laughter in HCI/HRI applications
? Laughter elicitation mechanisms (e.g., 'computational humour', KANSEI)
? Laughter as an expression of different emotions (e.g., amusement,
embarrassment, relief, and so on)

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for submissions: June 24, 2016
Review results: September 16, 2016
Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts: October 14, 2016
Final reviews: November 11, 2016

GUEST EDITORS:
? M. Mancini, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy), maurizio.mancini@unige.it
? R. Niewiadomski, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy),
radoslaw.niewiadomski@dibris.unige.it
? S. Hashimoto, SHALAB, Dept. of Applied Physics, Waseda University
(Japan), shuji@waseda.jp
? M.E. Foster, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
(Scotland, UK), maryellen.foster@glasgow.ac.uk
? S. Scherer, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of
Southern California (USA), scherer@ict.usc.edu
? G. Volpe, DIBRIS, University of Genoa (Italy), gualtiero.volpe@unige.it

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts
electronically after the ?open for submissions? date, adhering to the
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing guidelines
(http://www.computer.org/web/tac/author). Please submit your papers
through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs)
and be sure to select the special issue or special section name.
Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for
publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for
review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts
should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.

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Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la parution en ligne du premier numéro de la revue Études Créoles-Nouvelle série.

Études Créoles est une revue qui existe depuis 1978 et qui a connu une parution papier régulière (1 à 2 numéros annuels). Il s'agit de la première revue du domaine disciplinaire de la créolistique qui a toujours eu une orientation pluridisciplinaire accueillant des articles sur les langues et la linguistique, les littératures, l'anthropologie et l'éducation dans les mondes créoles. 

Suite au 14e Colloque des Études Créoles qui s'est tenu à Aix-en-Provence en octobre 2014 avec le soutien du Laboratoire Parole et Langage, le Comité International des Études Créoles a confié la relance de la revue à une nouvelle équipe éditoriale.

Elle est désormais sous format électronique et en libre accès :
Études Créoles-Nouvelle série : Numéro 2015 l 1 : http://www.lpl-aix.fr/index.php?id=974?

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 Call for Papers
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Special Issue on
Spoofing and Countermeasures for Automatic Speaker Verification

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) offers a low-cost and flexible biometric solution to
person authentication. While the reliability of ASV systems is now considered sufficient
to support mass-market adoption, there are concerns that the technology is vulnerable to
spoofing, also referred to as presentation attacks. Replayed, synthesized and converted
speech spoofing attacks can all project convincing, high-quality speech signals that are
representative of other, specific speakers and thus present a genuine threat to the
reliability of ASV systems.

Recent years have witnessed a movement in the community to develop spoofing
countermeasures, or presentation attack detection (PAD) technology to help protect ASV
systems from fraud. These efforts culminated in the first standard evaluation platform
for the assessment of spoofing and countermeasures of automatic speaker verification ?
the Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing and Countermeasures Challenge (ASVspoof) ?
which was held as a special session at Interspeech 2015.

This special issue is expected to present original papers describing the very latest
developments in spoofing and countermeasures for ASV. The focus of the special issue
includes, but is not limited to the following topics related to spoofing and
countermeasures for ASV:

- vulnerability analysis of previously unconsidered spoofing methods;
- advanced methods for standalone countermeasures;
- advanced methods for joint ASV and countermeasure modelling;
- information theoretic approaches for the assessment of spoofing and countermeasures;
- spoofing and countermeasures in adverse acoustic and channel conditions;
- generalized and speaker-dependent countermeasures;
- speaker obfuscation, impersonation, de-identification, disguise, evasion and adapted
countermeasures;
- analysis and comparison of human performance in the face of spoofing;
- new evaluation protocols, datasets, and performance metrics for the assessment of
spoofing and countermeasures for ASV;
- countermeasure methods using other modality or multimodality that are applicable to
speaker verification

Also invited are submissions of exceptional quality with a tutorial or overview nature.
Creative papers outside the areas listed above but related to the overall scope of the
special issue are also welcome. Prospective authors can contact the Guest Editors to
ascertain interest on such topics.

Prospective authors should visit
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/publications/periodicals/jstsp/ for submission
information. Manuscripts should be submitted at
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jstsp-ieee and will be peer reviewed according to
standard IEEE processes.

Important Dates:
- Manuscript submission due: August 15, 2016 (extended)
- First review completed: October 15, 2016
- Revised manuscript due: December 1, 2016
- Second review completed: February 1, 2017
- Final manuscript due: March 1, 2017
- Publication date: June, 2017

Guest Editors:
Junichi Yamagishi, National Institute of Informatics, Japan, email: jyamagis@nii.ac.jp
Nicholas Evans, EURECOM, France, email: evans@eurecom.fr
Tomi Kinnunen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland, email: tomi.kinnunen@uef.fi
Phillip L. De Leon, New Mexico State University & VoiceCipher, USA, email:
pdeleon@nmsu.edu
Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID, Portugal, email: Isabel.Trancoso@inesc-id.pt

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    Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on 
  Recent advances in speaker and language recognition and characterization

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