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 50^th 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