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ISCApad Archive  »  2019  »  ISCApad #248  »  Events  »  Other Events  »  (2019-07-21) The Apollo-11 speech challenge

ISCApad #248

Tuesday, February 12, 2019 by Chris Wellekens

3-3-15 (2019-07-21) The Apollo-11 speech challenge
  

HISTORY: On July 20, 1969 at 20:17 UTC, Earth witnessed one of the most challenging technology accomplishments by mankind to date of NASA Apollo-11 with over 600M people witnessing both the landing and first steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Next July 2019 marks the 50th Anniversary of the historical Apollo-11 lunar landing and first steps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

NSF CRSS-UTDallas Project: With support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF-CISE), CRSS-UTDallas has spent the last six years developing a hardware/software solution to digitize and recover all 30-track analog tapes from Apollo-11 (plus Apollo-13 and other missions), as well as development of speech diarization technologies to advance speech technology for such data. A total of 19,000 hours of data consisting of all NASA air-to-ground, mission control, and backroom support team discussions was released this year (news releases from this NSF sponsored project this year include: NSF, NASA, BBC, AIP (Acoustical Society of America), NPR, many on-line news sites, and involvement in a planned CNN documentary where this data is contributing, etc.). To date, this will be the largest publically available audio corpus of time synchronized, team based (~600 people) naturalistic communications to accomplish a real-world task.

ANNOUNCEMNT: This email is to announce the release of the FEARLESS STEPS CHALLENGE corpus, which is being shared for a proposed Special Session at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019. The attached flyer details the 5 challenge tasks involved:

1. SAD: Speech Activity Detection

2. Speaker Diarization

3. SID: Speaker Identification

4. ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition

5. Sentiment Detection

 

This challenge corpus consists of 100hours from 5 of the 30-track channels spanning three phases of Apollo-11 mission: (i) lift off, (ii) landing, (iii) lunar walk. All data for this challenge will be available soon via a download option for all to participate (this site has sample audio from the NSF funded project: https://app.exploreapollo.org/ ). In addition, any lab/group wishing to have access to the entire 19,000 hours can do so without charge (this is public data, so it will be available via download, or a small fee for a hard-disk and shipping to your lab).   

While diarization efforts in the past have concentrated on single channel broadcast news, interviews, etc. These all represent typically a single speaker, or small group discussing topics of interest. The FEARLESS STEPS CORPUS is all time synchronized (with IRIG Time Channel) across 30 channels, with loops containing anywhere from 3-33 speakers working collaboratively to solve challenging problems. CRSS-UTDallas has produced full diarization output for the entire 19,000hrs of data (SAD, SID, DIAR/ASR) which is available with the corpus.

REQUEST:  We are proposing a Special Session at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019. If you have interest in getting access to the FEARLESS STEPS CORPUS and potentially participating in the CHALLENGE, please reply to this email Hansen, John' <john.hansen@utdallas.edu>(an expression of interest does not obligate you to submit, we are simply trying to collect a list of interested researchers for the data). 

Many thanks for your interest!

CRSS-UTDallas Fearless Steps Team


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