ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development.

The Steering Board of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) invites proposals to host either

1. the 21st Annual Conference, to be held between the end of September and mid-November 2019. Priority will be given for proposals hosted in Asia or Australia continents.
2. the 22nd Annual Conference, to be held between the end of September and mid-November 2020. Priority will be given for proposals hosted in Europe or Africa continents

Strong proposals from other regions are also welcome. ICMI 2016 was in Tokyo, Japan, ICMI 2017 was in Glasgow, UK and ICMI 2018 will be in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Please see the attached document for more details about ICMI bid process.

Important Dates

For ICMI 2019 bids:

• December 18, 2017 - Notify intention to submit proposal
• January 26, 2018 - Draft proposals due
• February 12, 2018 - Feedback to bidders
• March 2, 2018 - Final bids due
• March 20, 2018 - Bid selected

For ICMI 2020 bids:

• January 29, 2018 - Notify intention to submit proposal
• February 15, 2018 - Draft proposals due
• March 5, 2018 - Feedback to bidders
• April 9, 2018 - Final bids due
• April 30, 2018 - Bid selected

ICMI 2016, 2017 and 2018 websites

              https://icmi.acm.org/2016/

              https://icmi.acm.org/2017/

              https://icmi.acm.org/2018/

              All communications, including request for information and bid submission, should be sent to the ICMI Steering Board Chair (Louis-Philippe Morency, morency@cs.cmu.edu).

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Air Traffic Control Speech Recognition Challenge

AIRBUS, in collaboration with IRIT and SAFETY DATA-CFH, is launching a challenge on automatic speech recognition of English Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications to:

• identify top players in the field for future collaboration;
• encourage research community to tackle the specific issues of ATC (accent / noise / code-switching robustness, highly specific vocabulary).

Why is it challenging?

ATC audio is very noisy, made of non-native speech, with code switching, high speech rate and lots of domain-specific vocabulary -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxEfwSNBgNU&t=80s for example. 

What are the tasks?

• Standard audio transcription (evaluated with WER)
• Call sign extraction (evaluation with Precison/Recall/F1)

What is the dataset?

40h of transcribed real-life non-native English ATC data

+ 5h for validation/leader board

+ 5h for final evaluation

(you can use your own additional data)

What is to win?

#1 will be invited to speak at the challenge workshop and to visit Airbus facility and simulators.

5 of the best challengers will be retained for a second internal selection aiming to choose Airbus R&T partner for developing future on-board speech-to-text solutions.

Who can participate?

Anyone: start-ups, medium & big companies, research labs.

You can participate in the challenge even if you are not considering a partnership with AIRBUS or if you are planning to do only one of the tasks.

Important dates

Declaration of intent: Now, write to atc-challenge@airbus.com

Registration open: Mon 5th February, via AIRBUS challenge platform https://airbusaigym.nova.airbusdefenceandspace.com/

Training data available + leader board:  Mon 5th March - Sun 29th April (8 weeks)

Release of evaluation data: Wed 2ndMay

Results submission: Wed 9thMay

Final workshop: between Mon 18th and Fri 22nd June (date to be confirmed)

Special session at international conference for publication: pending approval (submitted)

More questions?

Post to the challenge forum or write to atc-challenge@airbus.com.

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PREPARE YOUR PROPOSAL FOR ICASSP 2023

Deadline Extended to 27 April 2018

IEEE Signal Processing Society is accepting proposals in all regions for the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

ICASSP is the world?s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing applications.  The series is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has been held annually since 1976.  The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 170 lecture and poster sessions.  ICASSP is a cooperative effort of the IEEE Signal Processing Technical Committees:

• Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing
• Bio Imaging and Signal Processing
• Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems
• Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
• Information Forensics and Security
• Machine Learning for Signal Processing
• Multimedia Signal Processing
• Sensor Array and Multichannel
• Signal Processing Education
• Signal Processing for Communications and Networking
• Signal Processing Theory and Methods
• Speech and Language Processing
• Standing Committee on Industry DSP Technology

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please review the proposal guidelines. The next step is to send a notice of intent, containing the proposed dates and location along with your contact information, to the VP-Conferences and SPS Staff at sps-conf-proposals@ieee.org.  

After submitting the notice of intent, you will receive a proposal prescreening form, which must be completed and received by 27 April 2018 to sps-conf-proposals@ieee.org and will be assessed by the Conference Board Executive Subcommittee.  Accepted bidding teams [finalists] will be invited to present at the Conference Board meeting held at ICIP 2018, 7-10 October 2018 in Athens, Greece.

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https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/speech-and-language-processing/newsletter/call-proposals-asru-2019

Call for Proposals - ASRU 2019

Jason Williams, Raul Fernandez, Tim Fingscheidt, Kai Yu

Following on the success of the bi-annual ASRU workshop over the past few decades, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee invites proposals to host the 2019 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU-2019). Past ASRU workshops have fostered a collegiate atmosphere through a thoughtful selection of venues, thus offering a unique opportunity for researchers to interact and learn.

The proposal should include the information outlined below.

• Workshop location and practicalities
  • Geographical location
  • Workshop venue (facilities, meeting rooms, network access during the workshop, audio/visual equipment)
  • Accommodation -- hotel availability and pricing
  • Meals
  • Transportation options -- major airports, logistics, visas
  • Climate
• Approximate workshop datesApproximate total cost to participants to attend, including accommodation, meals, and registration fees.
  • Previous workshops have been held in the month of December
  • Status of venue -- whether workshop dates are being held pending IEEE SLTC selection  
• Estimated budget for 200-300+ participants and expected sponsorships, including venue costs, administration, banquet, coffee breaks, publication costs, etc. 
• Committee Personnel
  • General chair(s)
  • Technical chairs
  • Local arrangements chair(s)
  • Other committee members and roles
• Tentative program
  • Dates for paper submission, notification of acceptance, proposals for demonstrations, early registration
  • Reception, talks, posters, demo session, banquet, etc.
  • Substantial program additions/changes vs. past instances of ASRU

The deadline for proposals is Friday, June 1, 2018.  Send proposals and questions to the workshop sub-committee: Jason Williams (jason.williams@microsoft.com), Raul Fernandez (fernanra@us.ibm.com), Tim Fingscheidt (t.fingscheidt@tu-bs.de), and Kai Yu (kai.yu@sjtu.edu.cn).  In June, the IEEE SLTC will review proposals, and selection results are expected by July 1, 2018.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, we encourage you to contact the workshop sub-committee in advance of submitting a proposal.  They can provide an example of a past successful proposal and example budget.  Further, proposers who make contact before Friday 6 April 2018 may be invited to briefly present in-person at the annual IEEE SLTC meeting at ICASSP 2018, 15-20 April 2018, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to obtain feedback from the SLTC (https://2018.ieeeicassp.org/).  Presentations should be reasonably specific but need not be complete.  Note that the SLTC does not have funding available for travel to ICASSP.

The organizers of the ASRU workshop do not have to be SLTC members, and we encourage submissions from all potential organizers.  IEEE SLTC members are welcome to participate on proposals, and the organizing committees of past ASRU events have included many SLTC members.  To maintain fairness of selection, SLTC members who are affiliated with an ASRU 2019 proposal will not participate in the ASRU 2019 selection vote.  Further, the members of the workshops sub-committee may not be affiliated with any ASRU 2019 proposal.  Please feel free to distribute this call for proposals far and wide, and invite members of the speech and language community at large to submit a proposal to organize the next ASRU workshop.

For more information on the most recent workshops, please see:

https://asru2017.org for information about ASRU 2017 in Okinawa, Japan

http://asru2015.org  for information about ASRU 2015 in Scottsdale, Arizona

http://asru2013.org  for information about ASRU 2013 in Olomouc, Czech Republic

And feel free to contact the workshops sub-committee with questions.

Jason Williams (jason.williams@microsoft.com)

Raul Fernandez (fernanra@us.ibm.com)

Tim Fingscheidt (t.fingscheidt@tu-bs.de)

Kai Yu (kai.yu@sjtu.edu.cn)

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Press Release - Immediate
Paris, France, January 24, 2018

ELRA and LDC partner on a joint distribution of Language Resources

ELRA and LDC are pleased to announce the release of
1) three corpora from the 2007 CoNLL Shared Task, consisting of dependency treebanks, used as part of the CoNLL 2007 shared task on multi-lingual dependency parsing and the domain adaptation track. The source data in the treebanks consists for the most part of various texts (e.g., textbooks, news, literature) annotated in dependency format, and
2) one TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text, which includes French translations of a subset of approximately 10,000 Chinese words from LDC?s GALE Phase 1 Chinese Blog Parallel.

These packages can be found in the ELRA and LDC catalogues under the following references:

2007 CoNLL Shared Task - Basque, Catalan, Czech & Turkish  
ISLRN: 769-620-932-723-2
ELRA ID: ELRA-W0121
LDC ID: LDC2018T06

2007 CoNLL Shared Task - Greek, Hungarian and Italian   
ISLRN: 270-733-242-642-3
ELRA ID: ELRA-W0122
LDC ID: LDC2018T07

2007 CoNLL Shared Task ? Arabic & English
ISLRN: 505-782-255-628-8
ELRA ID: ELRA-W0123
LDC ID: LDC2018T08

TRAD Chinese-French Parallel Text ? Blog
ISLRN: 713-266-631-883-0
ELRA ID: ELRA-W0125
LDC ID: LDC2018T02

***About CoNLL and the 2007 shared task***
The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) is accompanied every year by a shared task intended to promote NLP applications and evaluate them in a standard setting. In 2007, the shared task was devoted to the parsing of syntactic dependencies using corpora from up to thirteen languages. The task aimed to define and extend the then-current state of the art in dependency parsing, a technology that complemented previous tasks by producing a different kind of syntactic description of input text. The 2007 shared task also included a domain adaptation track for English.
http://www.signll.org/conll/ and http://www.conll.org/previous-tasks/.

***About PEA TRAD project ***
PEA-TRAD (Translation as a Support for Document Analysis) is a project supported by the French Ministry of Defense (DGA) whose purpose was to develop speech-to-speech translation technology for multiple languages (e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Pashto) from a variety of domains.
More on the PEA TRAD project: http://www.elra.info/en/projects/archived-projects/pea-trad/.

*** About ELRA ***
The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT).
To find out more about ELRA and its respective catalogue, please visit: http://www.elra.info and http://catalogue.elra.info

*** About LDC ***
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) is an open consortium of universities, libraries, corporations and research laboratories that creates and distributes linguistic resources for language-related education, research and technology development.
To find out more about LDC and its respective catalogue, please visit: https://www.ldc.upenn.edu and https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu     

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2018 MICROSOFT AI RESIDENCY PROGRAM

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/microsoft-ai-residency-program/

The Microsoft AI Residency program invites applications for its 2018 program.  Microsoft AI Residents will develop AI expertise by working alongside prominent researchers and engineers in either Redmond, WA, or Cambridge, UK.  Residents will gain skills and hands-on experience working on practical AI and machine learning problems that help tackle some of society’s toughest challenges. The ideal candidate will have a passion for leveraging their expertise from computer science work and/or other technical fields to solve real-world challenges by applying AI and machine learning.  Applicants are not expected to be AI experts.

In this year-long program, selected residents will:

• Gain real-world, hands-on industry experience while working with Microsoft researchers, engineers, and product teams.
• Learn about deploying machine learning solutions at scale across a range of areas such as healthcare, entertainment, and productivity.
• Benefit from a rich program of training and mentorship.
• Be part of a vibrant AI and machine learning community in Cambridge, UK, and Redmond, WA.
• Receive competitive compensation and be encouraged to apply for a regular position at Microsoft at the end the residency program.

Eligibility criteria

• BSc, MSc, and PhD graduates with substantial coursework in, but not limited to: computer science, electrical engineering, data science, mathematics, physics, economics, human-computer interaction, and computational biology.
• Experience developing in at least one high-level language such as Python or C/C++/C#.
• Experience with machine learning techniques or deep learning frameworks is desirable.
• Enthusiasm to move into the field is essential.
• Ability to work in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary environment.
• Strong communication skills.

Important dates:

• February 28, 2018: Candidate selection begins; recommended deadline for submitting an application.
• March 30, 2018: Application submission closes.
• April – May, 2018: Notification of admission.
• September 2018 – August 2019: Residency program.

We welcome applications from graduating students, as well as from people working now or with other experiences.  Where required, Microsoft will support the immigration process for eligible applicants.

For more information, or to apply, see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/microsoft-ai-residency-program/

For questions, contact AIResidency@microsoft.com

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Modeling Virtual Coaches

The European Horizon-2020 project Council of Coaches aims to develop a tool in which virtual embodied coaches form a team of experts that can discuss amongst themselves and with the user how the user could improve his healthy lifestyle behaviors. The project combines state of the art 3D Virtual Avatars with language and reasoning technology and applies this to the area of lifestyle and behavior change coaching.

The goal of research is to design, implement and evaluate user interaction with the team of virtual agents, the council of coaches (Home Interface) and one-on-one interaction with a single coach (Mobile Interface). In particular it focuses on

1. Modelling coaches with their own specific agenda and behaviour style aiming at creating unique social relationships with users.
2. Adapting virtual coaches? behavior to ensure that user maintains his involvement in the relationship with the coaches.

Specific attention will be given to the development of virtual coaches with a wide variety of behavioural characteristics and personality traits. Several studies have shown how low level features such as behaviour expressivity and high level characteristic (e.g. personality traits ) affect user?s involvement in their interaction with the virtual characters and impact his performances (McRorie et al., 2011) (Paiva et al., 2017)).

The work in this research will make use of and build upon the GRETA/VIB platform developed at UPMC (Pecune et al., 2014) for multimodal behaviour generation and for visualizing virtual coaches.

To apply, send a CV and names of reference to    catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr

H2020 Council of Coaches

Context:

The GRETA/VIB platform is developed at CNRS-ISIR (Pécune et al, 2014). It simulates virtual characters able to communicate with humans in real-time. It is endowed with socio-emotional capabilities. The control of the character is done through two specific languages at the communicative intention level and at the multimodal behavior one. The platform includes several tools to create multimodal behaviors.

The GRETA/VIB platform is used within the European Horizon-2020 project Council of Coaches which aims to develop a tool in which virtual embodied coaches form a team of experts that can discuss amongst themselves and with the user how the user could improve his healthy lifestyle behaviors. The project combines state of the art 3D Virtual characters with language and reasoning technology and applies this to the area of lifestyle and behavior change coaching.

Job Description:

We are looking for an engineer knowledgeable in 3D virtual environment. S/he will participate to Council of Coaches project. Her/his role will be:

-          Port the Greta/VIB platform onto Android mobile and VR headset.

-          Participate to development of computational model of agent?s multimodal behaviors

-          Integrate software modules within the VIB/Greta platform and/or within a bigger software system developed within the H2020 project Coach Council.

-          Participate to developers meetings (online and on site) of the H2020 project Coach Council

Profile: Engineer in computer science, Master, PhD

skills:

• Programming languages and standards: Java, C#, C++, XML, Ogre 3D

Mastered skills:

• The ideal candidate will have solid software development, testing and integration skills
• English (written and oral)

Project Length: 1 year position renewable

Place: ISIR - UPMC

Stipend: depends on applicant qualification

Contact: Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS-ISIR; catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr

To apply, send a CV, names of reference, master grades (for Master applicants) to    catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr

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APPEL à CANDIDATURE : organisation conjointe JEP-TALN 2020
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L'ATALA et l'AFCP sollicitent des candidatures pour l'organisation conjointe des Journées d'Études sur la Parole (JEP) et de la conférence Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN) en 2020.

Cet événement s'inscrit dans la continuité des éditions précédentes (Nancy en 2002, Fès en 2004, Avignon en 2008, Grenoble en 2012,  Paris en 2016). Chacune de ces éditions a regroupé sur une semaine entre 300 et 350 participants pour environ 300 communications.

Le dossier de candidature (3 pages maximum) devra comporter les éléments suivants :

1. description générale du projet et des thèmes mis en avant
2. calendrier prévu
3. organisateurs (noms et affiliations) : merci de bien préciser les rôles clés, d'identifier les correspondants JEP et TALN et l'organisateur RECITAL.
4. logistique, lieu, locaux, hébergement : merci de préciser où se tiendra la conférence, les facilités qu'offre ce lieu, quels sont les hébergements possibles (y compris pour les étudiants), les accès (train, avion), etc.
5. financement, sponsor : merci de préciser les soutiens financiers sur lesquels vous comptez (organismes et éventuellement montants que vous pensez solliciter, ...)
6. points forts de votre candidature, motivations

Les dossiers de candidatures sont à envoyer conjointement au Président du Comité permanent TALN (Emmanuel.Morin@univ-nantes.fr) et à la Présidente du Conseil d'administration de l'AFCP (veronique.delvaux@umons.ac.be).

Date limite de dépôt des candidatures : 31 mai 2018

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AIRBUS, in collaboration with IRIT, ENAC and SAFETY DATA-CFH, is launching a challenge on automatic speech recognition of English Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications.

For more information: https://aigym.airbus.com/challenges/59bbf004dce682131435fe9c/

Registration is open, please the email see below.

Regards

The challenge team

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