We are pleased to extend an invitation to you to participate in the upcoming Fearless Steps APOLLO Workshop. Our workshop delves into exploring speech communication, technology, and the extensive audio of the historic NASA Apollo program.

The Fearless Steps APOLLO Community Resource, supported by NSF, is a unique and massive naturalistic communications resource. This resource, derived from the Apollo missions, offers a rare glimpse into team-based problem-solving in high-stakes environments, with a rich variety of speech and language data providing invaluable data for researchers, scientists, historians, and technologists.

The Fearless Steps APOLLO corpus contains 30 time-synchronized channels, which capture all NASA Apollo team communications. The PAO (Public Affairs Officer) channel reflects all live public broadcast TV/radio contexts streamed by NASA during the missions. This channel is similar to all Broadcast news corpora.

Our workshop aims to showcase featured speakers, panel discussions, and present the latest findings in speech and language processing. We will explore facets of the Fearless Steps APOLLO corpus, the largest publicly available naturalistic team-based historical audio and meta-data resource.

Topics Covered:

We will be exploring several key areas, including:

1. Big Data Recovery and Deployment in the Fearless Steps APOLLO initiative.

2. Applications in Education, History, and Archival efforts.

3. Insights into Communication Science and Psychology, particularly in Group Dynamics and Team Cohesion.

4. Speech and Language Technology (SLT) development, including ASR, SAD, speaker recognition, and conversational topic detection. 

Workshop Structure:

1. Discuss advancements in digitizing Apollo audio and machine learning solutions for audio diarization.

2. Explore team communication dynamics through speech processing.

3. Explore the utility of Fearless Steps APOLLO resource for: SpchTech (Speech & Language Technology), CommSciPsychTeam (Communication Sciences & Team-based Psychology), & EducArchHist (Education, History, & Archival) communities.

4. The FEARLESS STEPS Challenge, a community engagement and data generation initiative.

The workshop will feature oral talks, including an overview of Fearless Steps APOLLO resource, including Team presentations on systems evaluated for the Fearless Steps Challenge dataset.

Instructions for Authors:

We invite authors to submit a short 1-page research overview that involves the Fearless Steps APOLLO resource. Please submit your Abstracts through our dedicated portal.

The workshop format will include oral presentations for accepted abstracts, which will be announced after the paper submission. Submissions in the form of 1-page abstracts ( and an optional additional page for references, figures, or preliminary results) are encouraged. Detailed formatting instructions and sample PDFs are available on our website. The Complete Fearless Steps Challenge (Phase-1 to Phase-4) Corpora & Naturalistic (Apollo-11 & Apollo-13) corpora can be accessed by filling out a short survey form here: FS-APOLLO Corpora Download Access

The deadline for workshop Abstract submission is set for March 1, 2024. We will announce the acceptance of the Abstracts on March 15, 2024. Both in-person and remote participation options will be available, with a focus on fostering a collaborative environment. Papers accepted to ICASSP 2024 are welcome as Abstract submissions, as well as original research following our format guidelines.

We believe this workshop will be a pivotal step in advancing speech technology and research. We look forward to your participation in enriching the potential of the Apollo Resource and inspiring new approaches in collaborative problem-solving.

For more details, please visit our workshop website.