| 4-1 | New Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research covering all areas of language science,Univ. of Paris, France
The Paris Graduate School of Linguistics (PGSL) is a newly-formed Paris-area graduate program covering all areas of language science.
It offers a comprehensive Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research, in close connection with PhD programs as well as with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics consortium.
Research plays a central part in the program, and students also take elective courses to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Prior knowledge of French is not required.
For more details, please see https://paris-gsl.org/index.html
New funding opportunity: https://u-paris.fr/en/call-for-applications-international-students-miem-scholarship-program/
Application deadline : February 1st 2021 (program starting September 1st 2021)
PGSL is funded by Smarts-UP (Student-centered iMproved, Active Research-based Training Strategy at Université de Paris) through the ANR SFRI grant « Grandes universités de recherche » (PIA3) 2020-2029.
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| 4-2 | Cambridge's Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence MPhil
Cambridge's Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence MPhil
Are you interested in speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, human-computer interaction, or machine learning? Please consider applying to the University of Cambridge?s Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence (MLMI) MPhil programme.
The MLMI MPhil is an elite 11 month programme with a small cohort of about 30 students each year. Due to its small size there is the opportunity to carry out PhD-like research projects on the course (see here for previous students? dissertations), as well having a number of bespoke taught modules with lots of opportunities to interact with the faculty and other members of the course (see here for a list of modules and here for a list of the teaching staff).
Previous members of the MPhil have gone on to study for PhDs in top research groups (e.g. at Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, and MIT), and have gone into top industry positions (e.g. Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, Open AI, and AstraZeneca).
This year our programme is restructuring around four overlapping tracks: speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. You apply to one of these tracks and this choice shapes your module options and the research project that you will take on. We are especially interested in candidates who are interested in speech and language processing, computer vision & robotics, and human-computer interaction as we have significant capacity to expand in these areas this year.
Details about the application process can be found on our website. The application deadline is 2nd December 2021.
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| 4-3 | Serveur Discord pour jeunes chercheurs.
Nous souhaitons vous faire part aujourd'hui de la création d'un serveur Discord pour les jeunes chercheurs en parole: https://discord.gg/kSgaZp7yg9Cet espace de discussion a pour but de rassembler la communauté des jeunes chercheurs en parole en France (étudiants en master, doctorants, post-doctorants...).
Vous pourrez notamment y partager vos derniers papiers publiés, vos questions ou appels à l'aide pour l'utilisation d'un logiciel (ou autre), ou simplement rentrer en contact avec des personnes qui travaillent dans votre domaine ou des domaines liés au votre. Rien n'est fixe, le serveur est voué à évoluer au cours de son utilisation! Il peut aussi nous servir à nous retrouver lors d'une conférence ou autre. En tant que jeunes chercheurs avec un petit réseau, on connaît tous ce sentiment peu confortable d'être seul(e) à une conférence, malgré les 1500 personnes autour de nous. Alors plutôt que de stresser chacun dans notre coin, autant nous retrouver et partager tout ça ensemble en nous donnant rendez-vous grâce au serveur de discussion!
La création de ce serveur Discord fait suite à l'appel du comité d'organisation des JEP pour l'organisation d'un événement à destination des jeunes chercheurs en parole lors des Journées d'Etudes en Parole qui auront lieu à Noirmoutier du 13 au 17 juin 2022 ( https://jep2022.univ-nantes.fr/). Nous l'avons d'abord créé pour discuter entre jeunes chercheurs sur ce que l'on pourrait imaginer comme événement, puis nous avons pensé qu'il serait intéressant de l'ouvrir à tous pour recueillir vos besoins/envies et voir ce qui pourrait intéresser un maximum de personnes. Il est donc également destiné à essayer de mieux cerner les besoins de formation de chacun. Rassurez-vous, il est partagé en deux: une catégorie pour tous, et une catégorie pour celles et ceux intéressés par l'organisation de journées d'études, ainsi, pas de spam inutile. Si vous souhaitez rejoindre cette deuxième catégorie, il faudra me le notifier dans le canal #général ou me le demander par message privé*. Rendez-vous sur le serveur pour faire vivre notre communauté de jeunes chercheurs!
Merci aux organisateurs des JEP et à l'AFCP pour leur soutien.
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| 4-4 | The new ISLRN Web Portal is now open (ELRA)
Press Release – Immediate
Paris, France, March 23, 2022
The new ISLRN Web Portal is now open.
ELRA is happy to release a new version of ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number) web portal.
In order to improve the performance of the portal, with an up-to-date technical infrastructure, ISLRN was ported into latest versions of Django and Python frameworks. Consequently, the website design was also adapted to make the navigation and the functionalities clearer and faster for users.
Some of the main design changes currently are:
- The main page now offers an extensive description of ISLRN and a single click button to request for an ISLRN number. Subpages can now be viewed from the top menu at all levels of the portal;
- The search tool that allows for looking for resources “by ISLRN” or “by resource name” has been combined into one single search box with predictive typing function and is also accessible at all levels of the portal;
- Expressive icons allow users to locate the functionalities in a more intuitive way;
- Language Resources description pages are better structured and the ISLRN ID of the resource may be copied directly from the Language Resource description page;
- Functionalities of management pages (both for users and administrators), such as profile pages or user internal submission pages are improved.
About ISLRN
The ISLRN (International Standard Language Resource Number) is a unique persistent identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The establishment of ISLRNs was a major step in the networked and shared world of Human Language Technologies. Unique resources must be identified as they are, and meta-catalogues require a common identification format to manage data correctly. Therefore, Language Resources should carry identical identification schemes regardless their representations, their types and their storage place (hard drives, internet or intranet).
To find out more about ISLRN, please visit the website: http://islrn.org/
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| 4-5 | Le projet European Language Equality
Le projet European Language Equality vise à établir un agenda stratégique concernant la
recherche et l’innovation pour atteindre l’égalité des langues à l’ère numérique en
Europe en 2030. Dans le cadre de ce projet, les partenaires ont produit des rapports
documentant l'état des technologies et ressources pour chaque langue officielle, ainsi
que pour certaines langues non-officielles (D1.4-D1.36). Des états de l'art couvrant
quatre grands domaines ont également été produits (D2.12-D2.16):
- la traduction automatique:
- les technologies vocales
- les technologies pour l'analyse et la compréhension des langues
- les ressources et les bases de connaissance.
Tous ces rapports sont accessibles depuis le site du projet:
https://european-language-equality.eu/deliverables/
Le rapport consacré à l'état des technologies pour la langue française et pour la langue
des signes française a fait l'objet d'une traduction en français. Il est disponible ici:
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03637784
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| 4-6 | NLP4NLP Corpus 5 Years After
Following a survey of the Interspeech conference presented for the 25th anniversary of
ESCA/ISCA at Interspeech 2013, the NLP4NLP corpus was gathered for conducting an analysis
of the main conferences and journals in the field of speech and language processing over
50 years (1965-2015). The results of this analysis was published in 2019 as a series of
two papers in a special issue on 'Mining Scientific Papers: NLP-enhanced Bibliometrics'
of the 'Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics' journal, which attracted a large
audience:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00036/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00037/full
This corpus has now been extended over the recent past 5 years (2016–2020), which show a
strong activity in that field: as many articles have been published in the single year
2020 than over the first 25 years of NLP4NLP for example. This new analysis concludes in
identifying profound changes in research topics as well as in the emergence of a new
generation of authors and the appearance of new publications around artificial
intelligence, neural networks, machine learning, and word embedding. These results have
just been published in a second special issue on 'Knowledge Discovery and Data
Exploitation' of the 'Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics' journal:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2022.863126/full
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| 4-7 | About JSALT
About JSALT
Each summer, CLSP organizes and hosts a few international teams for an intensive 6-week research workshop on speech and language engineering. These very successful workshops have had a widespread impact on the Human Language Technology community. Recently, we are beginning to experiment with broadening their reach to adjacent research communities.
Each workshop team spends 6 weeks together at CLSP (after some advance preparation), working in close proximity on some challenging problem or a promising solution technique that has not yet been well studied. Many teams have had a lasting influence on subsequent research and practice through the publications, software, and data that they produce. For many workshop participants, the biggest benefit is the interaction with other researchers, seeding new and lasting collaborations.
The workshops also contribute to the pool of trained specialists in the fields of speech and natural language processing by providing immersive training to undergraduate and graduate students, allowing researchers from different backgrounds to learn from one another, and educating all workshop participants through guest lectures, participant seminars, and team research updates.
This year, the ESPERANTO team contributes to the development of speech-to-speech translation systems with a special focus on enabling
the adaptation of such models for under-resourced languages.
Find more about the ESPERANTO project:
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| 4-8 | LREC 2022 Proceedings
The LREC 2022 Proceedings (Main conference and Workshops) are now available in the ACL Anthology at https://aclanthology.org/events/lrec-2022/
www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2022
Twitter @LREC2022
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| 4-9 | Speech Enhancement for Augmented Reality ( SPEAR) Challenge
Augmented reality devices of the future will likely fuse sensor data from several modalities, allowing multichannel speech enhancement algorithms to exploit, for example, head orientation and accurately estimated source directions. Augmented hearing therefore offers the potential for easier communication in noisy environments, such as restaurants and bars.
The SPEAR challenge offers the opportunity for researchers to benchmark existing speech enhancement algorithms and try out new ideas in the context of head-worn microphone arrays where positional information is available to the algorithm. Using recorded and simulated data, participants will obtain their best estimate of a binaural target signal from a given microphone array where real time information of the wearer head rotation and of the target direction of arrival is available. Enhanced signals will be evaluated through metric calculation and crowdsourced listening tests. To help get started a baseline algorithm is provided.
The challenge is being run by the Speech and Audio Processing lab at Imperial College London in partnership with Reality Labs Research (Meta).
More information can be found on the website along with all the freely available data and tools.
We encourage people to register for the latest information and to follow the SPEAR challenge on Twitter.
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Important Dates
- September 2022:
- Start of the challenge.
- Release of Train and Dev datasets.
- Release of baseline and tools.
- 4 January 2023:
- Evaluation data released.
- 25 January 2023:
- Submission of Evaluation data.
- February 2023:
- Analysis of submitted enhanced audio using metrics calculation and crowdsourced listening tests.
- March 2023:
- Workshop presenting results and findings.
For more information, contact spear.challenge@gmail.com. |
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| 4-10 | CfProposals for SLT 2024
Following on the success of the bi-annual SLT workshop over the past decade, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee invites proposals to host the 2024 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2024). Past SLT 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
- Information on how the organizers would respond in facing the COVID-19 situation.
- Approximate workshop dates
- Previous workshops have been held in the month of December
- Approximate total cost for participants to attend, including accommodation, meals, and registration fees.
- Estimated budget for 300-400+ 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 SLT
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The deadline for proposals is 15 June 2023
Please send proposals and questions to the workshop sub-committee:
In July, the IEEE SLTC will review proposals, and selection results are expected by August 15, 2023.
If you are interested in submitting a proposal, we encourage you to contact the workshops 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 May 31, 2023 may be invited to briefly present in-person or virtually at the annual IEEE SLTC meeting at ICASSP 2023 (https://2023.ieeeicassp.org/) to obtain feedback from the SLTC. 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 SLT workshop do not have to be SLTC members, and we encourage submissions from all potential organizers. IEEE SLTC members are welcome to participate in proposals, and the organizing committees of past SLT events have included many SLTC members. To maintain fairness of selection, SLTC members who are affiliated with any SLT 2024 proposals will not participate in the proposal selection vote. Further, the members of the workshops sub-committee may not be affiliated with any SLT 2024 proposals. 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 SLT workshop.For more information on the most recent workshops, please see:
And feel free to contact the workshops sub-committee with questions.
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| 4-11 | Reprise des rencontres des jeunes chercheurs en parole.
Le groupe des jeunes chercheurs en parole (JCeP) souhaite relancer les Rencontres des Jeunes Chercheurs en Parole qui se sont arrêtées en 2011. Afin de pouvoir préparer cet événement au mieux, nous vous invitons à remplir le formulaire suivant: https://forms.gle/5YwYry1zqXS77dNT6 . La deadline est fixée au 28 février 2023.
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| 4-12 | Call for bids for ICMI 2025
The Steering Board of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal
Interaction (ICMI) invites proposals to host 27th Annual Conference,
to be held between the end of September and mid-November 2025.
Priority will be given for proposals hosted in Asia and Australia
continents.
Strong proposals from other regions are also welcome. ICMI 2020 was
held as a virtual conference (originally planned to be in Utrecht, the
Netherlands), ICMI 2021 was in Montreal, Canada, and ICMI 2022 was
recently held in Bengaluru, India. ICMI 2023 is planned to be held in
France, and ICMI 2024 in Costa Rica. The bidding process is done in
two stages. During the first stage, the initial proposals will be
reviewed by the steering committee to identify promising bids and
request additional information if necessary. During the second stage,
the revised proposals will be reviewed and the final selection is
done.
Evaluation
Proposals will be evaluated according to the following criteria (unordered):
· Experience and reputation of General Chairs and Program Chairs
· Local multimodal interaction community support
· (Local) government and industry support
· Support and opportunities for students
· Accessibility and attractiveness of proposed site
· Suitability of proposed dates (with list of specific conflicts to avoid)
· Adequacy of conference facilities for the anticipated number
of attendees
· Adequacy of accommodations and food services in a range of
price categories and close to the conference facilities
· Overall balance of budget projections
· Geographical balance with regard to previous ICMI meetings
All communications, including request for information and bid
submission, should be sent to the ICMI Steering Board Chair (Albert
Ali Salah, a.a.salah@uu.nl).
Important Dates
For ICMI 2025 bids:
· March 10, 2023 - Notify intention to submit proposal via email
· April 10, 2023 - Draft proposals due
· May 3, 2023 - Feedback to bidders
· June 2, 2023 - Final bids due
· June 20, 2023 - Bid selected
Bid Content
After the notification of intent, the steering board chair will share
with you more details, including successful bids from previous years.
The following questions have to be answered for the official bid (both
draft and final proposals). Text in square brackets [] contains
considerations to be taken into account.
1. Describe briefly the conference, including side events
2. Describe briefly the conference site.
3. What date do you consider?
4. What is the nearest (international) airport?
5. Please give price quotes for the cheapest roundtrip to the
conference location from Frankfurt, London, New York, San Francisco,
Beijing and Tokyo (assume one week of travel with a Saturday overnight
stay)
6. What transportation should participants use from the airport to
the conference site?
7. Are there any visa-related issues we should know about (in
particular, are there any countries for which the visa requirements
are different, and conference attendance will be more difficult for
some reason? )
8. Does the conference site both have a large room for a maximum
of 300 people and about 5 smaller rooms for a maximum of 30-70 people?
Is there wireless connection available for attendees? What about
audio-visual facilities?
9. What is the approximate room rate (single and double
occupancy)? Is breakfast included? [Often all the attendees of ICMI
stay at the same hotel. If this is your case, the conference chair
should find a hotel that allows accommodation for the expected number
of people. Booking rooms and meals in the same hotel as the conference
rooms often helps reducing the overall costs.]
10. Catering, including breaks, receptions, banquet and
entertainment. We encourage organizers to provide coffee breaks and
lunches in order to promote community building and discussion.
11. Which support can your department give for the organization of
the conference (e.g., free secretarial assistance, facilities for
on-line payment?
12. Which support can your department give during the conference
(e.g., free secretarial assistance, PCs / Macs at the conference
site)?
13. What are your plans for sponsorship? To which associations /
companies / institutions do you plan to apply for financial
assistance? What do you realistically expect to receive from them?
What are your plans concerning student travel stipend program [A
minimum of $5,000 should be reserved from each year's conference
budget to support student travel from each of the three major
geographic regions (Americas, Europe-Africa, Asia-Pacific), or $15,000
total. For example, if a grant for $15,000 is obtained from NSF to
support U.S. student travel but there is no external funding for
students from other continents, then an additional $10,000 of you
budget should be set aside for students from the other two continents]
14. What actions will you take to make the conference cheaper for
students? (e.g., seek financial support from other organizations,
provide cheaper rooms)? What reduction do you realistically expect?
15. Provide the names of people who are foreseen or confirmed for the
major Conference Committees: General Chairs, Program Chairs,
Sponsorship Chair; volunteer labor, registration handling. One of the
General Chairs and one of the Program Chairs should be identified as
the lead, who will be the main point of contact for the ICMI steering
committee. Describe any experience the team has had in organizing
previous conferences and the number of participants at those
conferences.
16. Local Multimodal Interaction community
17. How do you propose to run the paper reviewing process? Do you see
any possible improvements?
18. How will you organize the content of the conference to ensure a
high-quality and energetic exchange of information that includes
timely topics and stimulating external speakers? Please be specific in
your suggestions for how you would organize the main program and
workshops/tutorials
19. Any other aspects that you may find relevant for the evaluation
of your proposal
Preparing a budget proposal
Based on estimates from previous attendance, one might expect 250
participants to ICMI. Please, provide three budgets, one for 150
participants, a second for 200 participants and the last one for 250,
considering reasonable physical/virtual attendance division. Costs
that will have to be covered include:
· Rental of conference space and meeting rooms
· AV equipment
· Coffee breaks and possibly lunch
· Registration desk/technical helpers (e.g., student volunteers)
· Tutorials
· Producing and printing the proceedings (in 2022, this was
around 9K-10K euros for main + adjunct proceedings)
· 10% ACM fee
· 15% contingency fund
· Conference poster and advertising
· Social banquet
· Welcome reception
· Lunch for ICMI steering board meeting
See https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/volunteer-resources/conference-planning/section-1-establishing-an-acm-event
for more information about preparing a budget for ACM conferences.
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| 4-13 | Volunteers for a perceptive evaluation of speech synthesis systems
We are looking for volunteers for a perceptive evaluation of speech synthesis systems. Audios to evaluate are in English, the whole test is made of 20 steps and is about 30 minutes long. We recommend use of headphones or headset.
The test is available here : http://lium-flex.univ-lemans.fr:8080
Thank you for your participation !
Thibault Gaudier, PhD student, LIUM/LIA
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| 4-14 | Call for participation in “Speaker Verification” Challenge CryCeleb2023
Call for participation in “Speaker Verification” Challenge CryCeleb2023
Infant verification using cry signals
https://huggingface.co/spaces/competitions/CryCeleb2023
Dates
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May 1 - competition launch! Data and baselines released.
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Jun 30 - private leaderboard results announced. End of evaluation.
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July 15 - deadline for publishing system description.
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Dear colleagues,
Ubenwa Health in collaboration with the SpeechBrain project is launching a public competition aiming to promote research in infant cry analysis.
The task should be familiar/interesting for people working on speaker verification but using the cries of newborn infants instead of adult speech.
Training data and the accompanied baseline (paper & code) will be released on May 1, which is the starting date of the competition.
The challenge is not attached to a particular conference but we encourage participants to write a technical report and offer prizes for top-3 performing systems
Challenge website: https://huggingface.co/spaces/competitions/CryCeleb2023
Registration form (optional - to get updates on launch/data/etc): https://bit.ly/crychallenge
Arsenii Gorin
Lead Research Scientist
Ubenwa Health, 6666 St Urbain St, Montreal, QC
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| 4-15 | The new ELRA Board
Paris, France, April 25, 2023
Further to the Board 2023-2025 elections that took place early this year, the ELRA Board has been largely renewed.
Khalid Choukri, ELRA Secretary General, is pleased to introduce the new ELRA Board and would like to congratulate all the newly elected Officers and Members.
Board Officers
Simon Krek, Jožef Stefan Institute, President (new)
Teresa Lynn, MBZUAI, Vice-President (new)
Francesca Frontini, ILC-CNR, Secretary (new)
Aline Villacencio, Sheffield University, Treasurer (new)
Board Members
Nancy Ide, Vassar College (new)
Petya Osenova, IICT-BAS
Patrick Paroubek, LISN (new)
German Rigau, HITZ, Representative of the individual members
Sakriani Sakti, JAIST (new)
Honorary Presidents and Secretary General
António Branco, FCUL, Honorary President (new)
Nicoletta Calzolari, ILC-CNR, Honorary President
Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, Honorary President
Khalid Choukri, ELDA CEO, ELRA Secretary General
Thank you to the outgoing Board Members and Officers for their continuous involvement over the years:
Simonetta Montemagni (former ELRA Vice-President)
Gilles Adda
Nuria Bel
Tatjana Gornostaja
Piek Vossen
For more details on the Board, please visit the ELRA Board page @ https://bit.ly/2CH9hYU
**********
About ELRA
The ELRA Language Resources Association is a non-profit-making organization founded by the European Commission in 1995,
with the mission of providing a clearing house for Language Resources and promoting Human Language Technologies.
Language Resources covering various fields of HLT (including Multimodal, Speech, Written, Terminology) and a great number of languages
are available from the ELRA catalogue.
ELRA's strong involvement in the fields of Language Resources and Language Technologies is also emphasized at the LREC conference,
organized every other year since 1998.
To find out more about ELRA, please visit the website: http://www.elra.info
Contact: info@elda.org
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| 4-16 | CNRS Cristal Medal
We are please to advertise that our colleague from LPL, Thierry Legou, was awarded of a CNRS Cristal Medal :
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/talents/cnrs?medal=42
https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/personne/thierry-legou
The crystal medal is handed out to engineers, technicians, and administrative staff whose creativity, expertise, and sense of innovation have contributed, alongside researchers, to the advancement of knowledge and the excellence of French research.
Best regards,
Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni
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| 4-17 | Cf Participation on a Survey on role of phonetics in different disciplines
Dear colleagues
We are conducting a research study on the role of phonetics in different disciplines and would greatly appreciate your participation in a short survey.
Your unique perspective is crucial in understanding how phonetics is perceived and utilized across different fields of study. By taking just a few minutes to complete the survey, you will contribute to a broader understanding of the importance and applications of phonetics in scientific research.
Susanne Fuchs
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