The 10th IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing Beijing, China October 24-28, 2010

http://icsp10.bjtu.edu.cn

Important Deadline:
Submission of Papers: June 15, 2010

The International Conference on Signal Processing (ICSP), sponsored by the IEEE Beijing Section, is the premier forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied signal processing. ICSP 2010 will bring together leading engineers and scientists in signal processing from around the world. Research frontiers in fields ranging from traditional signal processing applications to evolving multimedia and video technologies are regularly advanced by results first reported in ICSP technical sessions.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
 A. Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
 B. Spectrum Estimation & Modeling
 C. TF Spectrum Analysis & Wavelet
 D. Higher Order Spectral Analysis
 E. Adaptive Filtering &SP
 F. Array Signal Processing
 G. Hardware Implementation for Signal Processing
 H. Speech and Audio Coding
 I. Speech Synthesis & Recognition
 J. Image Processing & Understanding
 K. PDE for Image Processing
 L. Video compression &Streaming
 M. Computer Vision & VR
 N. Multimedia & Human-computer Interaction
 O. Statistic Learning & Pattern Recognition
 P. AI & Neural Networks
 Q. Communication Signal processing
 R. SP for Internet and Wireless Communications
 S. Biometrics & Authentification
 T. SP for Bio-medical & Cognitive Science
 U. SP for Bio-informatics
 V. Signal Processing for Security
 W. Radar Signal Processing
 X. Sonar Signal Processing and Localization
 Y. SP for Sensor Networks
 Z. Application & Others

 *Attention*
 Under the support of numerous reviewers and authors, ICSP has been holded for 20 years. In this session, as a celebration for ICSP, we will hold celebration events and awards, which include Outstanding Paper Award, Outstanding Student Paper Award, etc. For details, please visit http://icsp10.bjtu.edu.cn .

 *Proceedings*
 The proceedings with Catalog number of IEEE and Library of Congress will be published prior to the conference in both hardcopy and CD-ROM, and distributed to all registered participants at the conference. The proceedings will be indexed by EI.

 *Paper Submission*
 Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page, double-column papers, including figures and references, to the ICSP Technical Committee by June 15, 2010 at http://icsp10.bjtu.edu.cn. For questions about paper submission, please contact the technical program secretaries, Ms. TANG Xiaofang and Dr. AN Gaoyun at bfxxstxf@bjtu.edu.cn and gyan@bjtu.edu.cn .
 For more information, please visit the ICSP 2010 web site at: http://icsp10.bjtu.edu.cn.

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 ACM Multimedia 2010 Workshop on
Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2010)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Workshop held on 29 October 2010, in Firenze, Italy
in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010

Website: http://www.searchingspeech.org/

The SSCS 2010 workshop is devoted to presentation and discussion of recent research results concerning advances and innovation in the area of spoken content retrieval and the area of multimedia search that makes use of automatic speech recognition technology.

Spoken audio is a valuable source of semantic information, and speech analysis techniques, such as speech recognition, hold high potential to improve information retrieval and multimedia search. Nonetheless, speech technology remains underexploited by multimedia systems, in particular, by those providing access to multimedia content containing spoken audio. Early success in the area of broadcast news retrieval has yet to be extended to application scenarios in which the spoken audio is unscripted, unplanned and highly variable with respect to speaker and style characteristics. The SSCS 2010 workshop is concerned with a wide variety of challenging spoken audio domains, including: lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast (e.g., talkshows), podcasts, call center recordings, cultural heritage archives, social video on the Web and spoken natural language queries. As speech steadily moves closer to rivaling text as a medium for access and storage of information, the need for technologies that can effectively make use of spontaneous conversational speech to support search becomes more pressing.

In order to move the use of speech and spoken content in retrieval applications and multimedia systems beyond the current state of the art, sustained collaboration of researchers in the areas of speech recognition, audio processing, multimedia analysis and information retrieval is necessary. Motivated by the aim of providing a forum where these disciplines can engage in productive interaction and exchange, Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS) workshops were held in conjunction with SIGIR 2007, SIGIR 2008 and ACM Multimedia 2009. The SSCS workshop series continues at ACM Multimedia 2010 with a focus on research that strives to move retrieval systems beyond conventional queries and beyond the indexing techniques used in traditional mono-modal settings or text-based applications.

We welcome contributions on a range of trans-disciplinary research issues related to these research challenges, including:

- Information Retrieval techniques in the speech domain (e.g., applied to speech recognition lattices)
- Multimodal search techniques exploiting speech transcripts (audio/speech/video fusion techniques including re-ranking)
- Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, query/document expansion)
- Exploitation of audio analysis (e.g., speaker’s emotional state, speaker characteristics, speaking style)
- Integration of higher level semantics, including topic segmentation and cross-modal concept detection
- Spoken natural language queries
- Large-scale speech indexing approaches (e.g., collection size, search speed)
- Multilingual settings (e.g., multilingual collections, cross-language access)
- Advanced interfaces for results display and playback of multimedia with a speech track
- Exploiting user contributed information, including tags, rating and user community structure
- Affordable, light-weight solutions for small collections, i.e., for the long tail

Contributions for oral presentations (short papers of 4 pages or long papers of 6 pages) and demonstration papers (4 pages) will be accepted. The submission deadline is 10 June 2010. For further information see the website: http://www.searchingspeech.org/

At this time, we area also pre-announcing a special issue of ACM Transactions on Information Systems on the topic of searching spontaneous conversational speech. The special issue is based on the SSCS workshop series, but will involve a separate call for papers. We will especially encourage the authors of the best papers from SSCS 2010 to submit to the special issue call.

SSCS 2010 Organizers
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Roeland Ordelman, Sound & Vision and Uni. of Twente, Netherlands
Florian Metze, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, Netherlands
Wessel Kraaij, TNO and Radboud University, Netherlands

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CALL FOR PAPERS
 
The ACM Workshop on Multimedia in Forensics, Security and Intelligence (MiFor 2010), http://madm.dfki.de/mifor2010/MiFor2010.html
 
in conjunction with the 2010 ACM Multimedia (ACM-MM), http://www.acmmm10.org/
 
Firenze, Italy
October 29, 2010
 
With the proliferation of multimedia data on the web, surveillance cameras in cities, and mobile phones in everyday life we see an enormous growth in multimedia data that needs to be secured to prevent illegal use, to be analyzed by forensic investigators to detect and reconstruct illegal activities, or be used as source of intelligence. The sheer volume of such datasets makes manual inspection of all data impossible. In recent years the multimedia community has developed new exciting solutions for management of large collections of video footage, images, audio and other multimedia content, knowledge extraction and categorization, pattern recognition, indexing and retrieval, searching, browsing and visualization, and modeling and simulation in various domains. Due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of the data appearing in criminal cases applying those techniques are not straightforward. The time is ripe, however, to tailor these results for forensics, security and intelligence.

The workshop topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Forensics

Forgery detection and identification, detection of stenography
Device characterization and identification
Media forensic applications and attack analysis
Crime scene reconstruction and annotation
Forensic investigation of surveillance data, video analytics
Multimodal analysis of surveillance data
Multimodal analysis of biometric traces
Authenticity of multimedia data
 

Security

Digital/encrypted domain watermarking for multimedia
Signal processing in the encrypted domain
Multimedia content protection and violation detection
Digital rights management
Robust hashing and content fingerprinting
Cryptography for content protection
 

Intelligence

Searching for illicit content in multimedia data
Image, video, and text linking
Multimedia near duplicate detection and retrieval
Multimedia interfaces, visual analytics
Identity detection
Scalable multimedia search
 

Important Dates (tentative)

Paper Submission: June 10, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: July 10, 2010
Camera-ready Version: July 20, 2010
Workshop Date: October 29, 2010
 Paper Submissions and Author Guidelines

Papers submissions for MiFor 2010 should follow the submission format and guidelines for regular ACM Multimedia 2010 papers, and be up to 6 pages in length. Guidelines for preparing submissions can be found at: http://www.acmmm10.org/authors/submission/full-and-short-papers/.

Submitted papers will undergo a peer review process by at least two reviewers.

Accepted papers for oral and poster presentations at the workshop will be included in the workshop's proceedings, which will be published together with the proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010. In addition, we plan to realize a special issue or an edited volume by asking the authors of the best papers to submit a substantially extended version of their workshop papers.

Additional information is available at the workshop website:
http://madm.dfki.de/mifor2010/MiFor2010.html
 
 
Workshop Chairs:
Sebastiano Battiato (University of Catania, Italy)
Sabu Emmanuel (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Adrian Ulges (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany)
Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam, The Netherland)

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We invite papers from linguists, as well as from scholars from related
disciplines, who are concerned with phonetic universals.

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/10-PhoneticUniversals/index.html

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Call for Papers: ICMI-MLMI 2010

12th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces

and

7th Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction

Beijing, China, November 8-12, 2010

http://www.acm.org/icmi/2010/

The Twelfth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the

Seventh Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction will be

held jointly in Beijing China during November 8-12, 2010. The primary aim

of ICMI-MLMI 2010 is to further scientific research within the broad

field of multimodal interaction, methods, and systems, focusing on major

trends and challenges, and working towards identifying a roadmap for

future research and commercial success. The conference will continue to

feature a single-track with keynote speakers, technical paper

presentations, poster sessions, a doctoral consortium, and

demonstrations of state of the art multimodal systems and concepts. The

conference will be followed by workshops.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    - Multimodal input and output interfaces

    - Multimodal human behavior analysis

    - Machine learning methods for multimodal processing

    - Fusion techniques and hybrid architectures

    - Processing of language and action patterns

    - Gaze and vision-based interfaces

    - Speech and conversational interfaces

    - Pen-based interfaces

    - Haptic interfaces

    - Brain-computer interfaces

    - Cognitive modeling of users  

    - Multi-biometric interfaces

    - Multimodal-multisensor interfaces

    - Interfaces for attentive and intelligent environments

    - Mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal interfaces

    - Distributed/collaborative multimodal interfaces

    - Tools and system infrastructure issues for designing multimodal interfaces

    - Evaluation of multimodal interfaces

    - AI techniques and adaptive multimodal interfaces

Paper Submission

There are two different submission categories: regular paper and short

paper. The page limit is 8 pages for regular papers and 4 pages for

short papers.

Demo Submission

Proposals for demos shall be submitted to demo chairs electronically. A

two page description with photographs of the demo is required.

Organizing Committee

General Chairs:

Wen Gao, Peking University

Chin-Hui Lee, Georgia Tech

Jie Yang, Carnegie Mellon University

Program Chairs

Xilin Chen, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University

Zhengyou Zhang, Microsoft Research

Important Dates

    Workshop proposals due: April 1, 2010

    Workshop proposal acceptance notification: May 1, 2010

    Paper submission: May 20, 2010

    Author notification: July 20, 2010

    Camera-ready due: August 20, 2010

    Conference: Nov. 8-10, 2010

    Workshops: Nov. 11-12, 2010

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The 3rd Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction WOCCI 2010 (www.wocci.org) will be held in Beijing, China, on November 11-12, 2010. T

he Workshop is a satellite event of the Twelth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), which is held this year jointly with the Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction ICMI-MLMI 2010 (http://www.acm.org/icmi/2010/index.html) that will take place in the same venue on November 8-10, 2010. This 2-day session follows the first two of the WOCCI series which were held in Crete in October 2008 and Boston in November 2009, respectively.

Two page abstract submission: July 1, 2010

Notification of acceptance: July 20, 2010

Final paper (4-8 pages) submission and authors' registration: August 20, 2010

The Workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in all aspects of multimodal child-machine interaction with particular emphasis on, but not limited to, speech interactive interfaces.

Children are special both at the acoustic/linguistic level but also at the interaction level. The Workshop provides a unique opportunity for bringing together different research communities to demonstrate various state-of-the-art components that can make up the next generation of child centred computer interaction. These technological advances are increasingly necessary in a world where education and health pose growing challenges to the core wellbeing of our societies. Noticeable examples are remedial treatments for children with or without disabilities, and first and second language learning. The Workshop should serve for presenting recent advancements in all core technologies for multimodal child-machine interaction as well as experimental systems and prototypes.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Tutorial and Special Session on Forensic Voice Comparison and Forensic Acoustics at 2nd Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics, Cancún, Mexico, 15–19 November 2010.
http://cancun2010.forensic-voice-comparison.net/

The official call for papers for the Pan-Am/Iberian meeting is now out and the deadline for submissions is 1 June 2010.
http://asa.aip.org/meetings.html


In February 2009 the National Research Council (NRC) Report to Congress on Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States found that:

“[S]ome forensic disciplines are supported by little rigorous systematic research to validate the discipline’s basic premises and techniques. There is no evident reason why such research cannot be conducted” (p. 22).

“The development of scientific research, training, technology, and databases associated with DNA analysis have resulted from substantial and steady federal support for both academic research and programs employing techniques for DNA analysis. Similar support must be given to all credible forensic science disciplines if they are to achieve the degrees of reliability needed to serve the goals of justice.” (p. 13)

Over the last decade, a small number of researchers (principally in Australia, Spain, and Switzerland) have been working on developing demonstrably valid and reliable forensic voice comparison with evidence evaluated using the same framework as is applied to the evaluation of DNA evidence.

Meanwhile in the Americas there has been little interest in this field of research.

The NRC report gives a new impetus for conducting forensic voice comparison research and holds out the hope for new funding opportunities in this area.

The 2nd Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics provides an excellent opportunity to bring together researchers from Iberia and other parts of the world with researchers from the Americas to help foster research in this area in the Americas.

It also provides a venue for an exchange of ideas between researchers working on acoustic-phonetic and signal-processing approaches to forensic voice comparison. 

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CALL FOR PAPERS

2010 International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP 2010)
November 29 – December 3, 2010  -  Tainan and Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan
 
http://conf.ncku.edu.tw/iscslp2010/

===========================================================
 
ISCSLP is the flagship conference of ISCA SIG-CSLP (International Speech Communication Association, Special Interest Group on Chinese Spoken Language Processing). ISCSLP2010 will be held during November 29 - December 3, 2010 in Tainan and Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan hosted by National Cheng Kung University.
 
Tainan, located in south-western Taiwan, is the city of cultural origin. There are many historical places and heritage sites. In addition, Tainan is a modern city with various shopping centers, department stores, and night markets. It will be a wonderful opportunity to experience Taiwanese cultures when you visit Tainan. Sun Moon Lake, the largest lake located in central Taiwan, is a beautiful alpine lake, with its eastern part rounded like the sun and the western side shaped like a crescent moon. Its crystalline, emerald green body of water reflects the hills and mountains surrounding on all sides. Its natural beauty is further enhanced by numerous cultural and historical sites.

 
We invite your participation in this premier conference, where the language from ancient civilizations embraces modern computing technology. ISCSLP 2010 will feature world-renowned plenary speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and a number of lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:
Speech Production and Perception
Phonetics and Phonology
Speech Analysis
Speech Coding
Speech Enhancement
Speech Recognition
Speech Synthesis
Language Modeling and Spoken Language Understanding
Spoken Dialog Systems
Spoken Language Translation
Speaker and Language Recognition
Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Indexing, Retrieval and Authoring of Speech Signals
Multi-Modal Interface including Spoken Language Processing
Spoken Language Resources and Technology Evaluation
Applications of Spoken Language Processing Technology
 
Official Language & Publication
The official language of ISCSLP is English.
All papers accepted will be included in IEEE Xplore and indexed by EI Compendex.
 
Paper Submission
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work in English.
Papers should be submitted via http://conf.ncku.edu.tw/iscslp2010/paper.htm
Each submission will be reviewed by two or more reviewers.
At least one author of each paper is required to register.
 
Important Dates
Full paper submission by July 15, 2010
Notification of acceptance by Aug. 30, 2010
Camera ready papers by Sep. 13, 2010
Registration to cover an accepted paper by Oct.13, 2010

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 7th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
                             (IWSLT 2010)

                  Second Call for Participation / Papers

                          December 2-3, 2010
                             Paris, France

                       http://iwslt2010.fbk.eu

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT)
is a yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation
campaign on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers
and system descriptions are presented. The 7th International Workshop
on Spoken Language Translation will take place in Paris, France
on 2-3 December 2010.

=== Scientific Papers: to be submitted at latest on September 10, 2010 (deadline extended)

The IWSLT invites submissions of scientific papers to be published
in the workshop proceedings and presented in dedicated technical sessions
of the workshop, either in oral or poster form. The workshop welcomes high
quality contributions covering theoretical and practical issues in the field
of machine translation (MT), in general, and spoken language translation (SLT),
including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS)
and MT, in particular.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  - Speech and text MT
  - Integration of ASR and MT
  - MT and SLT approaches
  - MT and SLT evaluation
  - Language resources for MT and SLT
  - Open source software for MT and SLT
  - Pivot-language-based MT
  - Adaptation in MT
  - Simultaneous speech translation
  - Efficiency in MT
  - Stream-based algorithms for MT
  - Multilingual ASR and TTS

Submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by three members of the workshop
program committee. Authors of accepted papers are requested to present their
paper at the workshop.

=== Evaluation Campaign

IWSLT evaluations are not organized for the sake of competition, but their goal
is to foster cooperative work and scientific exchange. In this respect, IWSLT
proposes challenging research tasks and an open experimental infrastructure
for the scientific community working on spoken and written language translation.
This year, the IWSLT evaluation campaign offers three tasks:

  - public speeches (TALK) on a variety of topics, from English to French (NEW CHALLENGE),
  - spoken dialogues (DIALOG) in travel situations, between Chinese and English,
  - traveling expressions (BTEC), from Arabic, Turkish, and French to English.

For each task, monolingual and bilingual language resources are provided to
participants in order to train their translation systems, as well as sets of manual
and automatic speech transcripts (with n-best and lattices) and reference translations,
allowing researchers working only on written language translation to also participate.
Moreover, blind test sets will be released and all translation outputs produced
by the participants will be evaluated using several automatic translation quality
metrics. Human assessment will be carried out for the translation of spoken dialogues
and basic travel expressions.

The goal of this year's new challenge (translation of public speeches) is to
establish reference baselines and appropriate evaluation protocols for future
evaluations. As a consequence, although an evaluation server will be set-up to compute
several translation accuracy metrics, there will be no official ranking of participants
published by the organizers for this task.

Each participant in the evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper describing
the MT system, the utilized resources, and results using the provided test data.
Contrastive run submissions using only the bilingual resources provided by IWSLT
as well as investigations of the contribution of each utilized resource are highly
appreciated. Results feedback will be provided by the organizers a few days after
the run submissions. Finally, all participants are requested to present their papers
describing their MT systems at the workshop.

=== Important Dates

Scientific Papers:

  - Paper submission due 10 September 2010 (deadline extended)
  - Notification of acceptance 16 October 2010
  - Camera-ready paper due 10 November 2010

Evaluation Campaign:

  - Training corpus release 28 May 2010
  - Test corpus release 23 August 2010
  - Run submissions due (DIALOG, BTEC) 6 September 2010
  - Run submissions due (TALK) 30 September 2010
  - MT system description due 14 October 2010
  - Notification of acceptance 29 October 2010
  - Camera-ready paper due 10 November 2010

=== Organizers

IWSLT Steering Committee:

  - Alex Waibel (CMU, USA / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany)
  - Marcello Federico (FBK-irst, Italy)
  - Satoshi Nakamura (NICT, Japan)

Chairs:

  * Workshop:

    - Alex Waibel (CMU, USA / KIT, Germany)
    - Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI, France)

  * Evaluation Committee:

    - Michael Paul (NICT, Japan)
    - Marcello Federico (FBK-irst, Italy)

  * Program Committee:

    - Ian Lane (CMU, USA)
    - François Yvon (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11, France)

Local Organizing Committee:

  - Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI, Chair)
  - Lynn Barreteau (IMMI)
  - Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI)
  - Aurélien Max (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11)
  - Guillaume Wisniewski (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11)

Program Committee:

  - Alexandre Allauzen (LIMSI-CNRS/U. Paris Sud 11, France)
  - Laurent Besacier (LIG, France)
  - Arianna Bisazza (FBK-irst, Italy)
  - Francisco Casacuberta (ITI-UPV, Spain)
  - Boxing Chen (NRC, Canada)
  - Mehmet Uğur Doğan (Tubitak-Uekae, Turkey)
  - Matthias Eck (Mobile Technologies, USA)
  - Philipp Koehn (Univ. Edinburgh, UK)
  - Philippe Langlais (Univ. Montreal, Canada)
  - Geunbae Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, Korea)
  - Yves Lepage (Waseda Univ., Japan)
  - Haizhou Li (I2R, Singapore)
  - Qun Liu (ICT, China)
  - José B. Mariño (TALP-UPC, Spain)
  - Coskun Mermer (Tubitak-Uekae, Turkey)
  - Hermann Ney (RWTH, Germany)
  - Hwee Tou Ng (NUS, Singapore)
  - Matthias Paulik (CMU, USA)
  - Holger Schwenk (LIUM, France)
  - Wade Shen (MIT-LL, USA)
  - Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Germany)
  - Eiichiro Sumita (NICT, Japan)
  - Hajime Tsukada (NTT, Japan)
  - Haifeng Wang (Baidu, China)
  - Andy Way (DCU, Ireland)
  - Joy Zhang (CMU, USA)
  - Imed Zitouni (IBM, USA)
  - Chengqing Zong (CASIA, China)

For all information, please visit the IWSLT 2010 Web site: http://iwslt2010.fbk.eu

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Modeling Human Communication Dynamics
NIPS Workshop, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada 
Friday, December 10th, 2010

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/hcd2010/ 
Submission Deadline: October 15th, 2010

Face-to-face communication is a highly interactive process in which the participants mutually exchange and 

interpret verbal and nonverbal messages. Both the interpersonal dynamics and the dynamic interactions among 

an individual's perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes are swift and complex. How people accomplish these 

feats  of coordination is a question of great scientific interest. Models of human communication dynamics also 

have much potential practical value, for applications including the understanding of communications problems 

such as autism and the creation of socially intelligent robots able to recognize, predict, and analyze verbal 

and nonverbal behaviors in real-time interaction with humans.

Modeling human communicative dynamics brings exciting new problems and challenges to the NIPS community.  

The first goal of this workshop is to raise awareness in the machine learning community of these problems, 

including some applications needs, the special properties of these input streams, and the modeling challenges.  

The second goal is to exchange information about methods, techniques, and algorithms suitable for modeling 

human communication dynamics.  After the workshop, depending on interest, we may arrange to publish full-paper 

versions of selected submissions, possibly as a volume in the JMLR Workshop and Conference papers series.

Topics:
--------------

We therefore invite submissions of short high-quality papers describing research on Human Communication 

Dynamics and related topics.  Suitable themes include, but are not limited to:

* modeling methods robust to semi-synchronized streams (gestural, lexical, prosodic, etc.)
* learning methods robust to the highly variable response lags seen in human interaction
* coupled models for the explicit simultaneous modeling of more than one participant
* ways to combine symbolic (lexical) and non-symbolic information
* learning of models that are valuable for both behavior recognition and behavior synthesis

* algorithms robust to training data whose labeling is incomplete or noisy
* feature engineering
* online learning and adaptation
* models of moment-by-moment human interaction that can also work for longer time scales

* specific applications and potential applications
* failures and problems observed when applying existing methods to such tasks
* insights from experimental or other studies of human communication behavior

Invited speakers (partial list):
--------------------------------------------

* Jeff Bilmes (University of Washington)
* Dan Bohus (Microsoft Research)
* Marian Stewart Bartlett (University of California, San Diego)

Submission guidelines:
--------------------------------------------

Submissions should be written as extended abstracts, no longer than 4 pages in the NIPS latex style. NIPS style files 

and formatting instructions can be found at http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/StyleFiles (although we will not enforce 

the double blind rule). Work that was recently published or presented elsewhere is allowed, provided that the 

extended abstract mentions this explicitly; work earlier presented at non-machine-learning venues is especially 

encouraged. Please send your submission by email to hcd2010@ict.usc.edu before October 15th, 2010 

at 11:59pm PDT. 

Important dates:
-------------------------------

Submission deadline: October 15th, 2010, 11:59pm PDT
Notification of acceptance: November 7th, 2010
Workshop: December 10th, 2010

Organizers:
----------------------

Louis-Philippe Morency (University of Southern California)
Daniel Gatica-Perez (IDIAP)
Nigel Ward (UTEP)



Nigel Ward     Associate Professor of Computer Science
University of Texas at El Paso,   500 W. University Ave. 79902 USA
+1 915-747-6827    fax +1 915-747-5030
nigel@utep.edu    http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/ 

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IEEE  Workshop on Spoken Language Technology                               SLT 2010                       December 12-15, 2010                         
Berkeley, CA                        
www.slt2010.org 
********************** CALL FOR PAPERS ********************************
Apologies for multiple postings. 
The Third IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) workshop will be held from December 12 to December 15, 2010 in Berkeley, CA. The goal of this workshop is to allow the spoken language processing community to share and present recent advances in various areas of spoken language technology. 
WORKSHOP TOPICS: 
* Spoken language understanding
* Spoken document summarization
* Machine translation for speech
* Spoken language based systems
* Spoken language generation
* Question answering from speech
* Human/Computer Interaction
* Educational/Healthcare applications
* Speech data mining
* Information extraction
* Spoken document retrieval
* Multimodal processing
* Spoken dialog systems
* Spoken language systems
* Spoken language databases
* Assistive technologies 

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE TECHNICAL PROGRAM: 
The workshop program will consist of tutorials, oral and poster presentations, and panel discussions. Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers to the SLT 2010 website http://www.slt2010.org All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The website will provide you with further details. 

IMPORTANT DATES: 
Paper Submission Deadline: July 16, 2010
Paper acceptance/rejection: September 1, 2010
Workshop dates: December 12-15, 2010 

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE: 

Organizing Chairs: Dilek Hakkani-Tür, ICSI Mari Ostendorf, U. Washington 

Finance Chair: Gokhan Tur, SRI International 

Advisory Board: Mazin Gilbert, AT&T Labs - Research Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs - Research Giuseppe Riccardi, U. Trento  Technical

Chairs: Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID, Portugal Tim Paek, Microsoft Research 

Demo Chairs: Alex Potamianos, Tech. U. of Crete Mikko Kurimo, Helsinki U. of Tech. 

Publicity Chair: Bhuvana Ramabhadran, IBM Research Benoit Favre, Univ. Le Mans 

Panel Chairs: Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Inst. Of Tech. Eric Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State U. 

Publication Chair: Yang Liu, U. Texas, Dallas 

Local Organizers: Dimitra Vergryi, SRI International Murat Akbacak, SRI International Sibel Yaman, ICSI Arindam Mandal, SRI International  Europe Liaisons: Frederic Bechet, U. Avignon Philipp Koehn, U. Edinburgh  Asia Liaisons: Helen Meng, C. U. Hong Kong Gary Geunbae Lee, POSTECH
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------         

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The Second IEEE International Workshop on Content-Based Audio/Video Analysis for Novel TV Services.  13/12/2010 - // DeadLine: 20100712 Taichung  Taiwan

http://cbtv2010.inria.fr/

 Following the success of the first edition of the workshop on Content-Based Audio/Video Analysis for Novel TV Services (CBTV), we are pleased to announce the second one in this series.  

The objective of the workshop is twofold. First, it aims at highlighting the need for powerful and automatic audio and video content-based techniques in building novel TV services. The second objective is to bring in professionals and researchers, and to present the recent advances in the field.  The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International IEEE Symposium on Multimedia 2010.

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SST2010: Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology
Melbourne, Australia, 14-16 December 2010
http://www.assta.org/sst/2010/

Second Call for Papers
Call Deadline: 18 June 2010

ASSTA and La Trobe University are pleased to announce the Thirteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2010). The conference will be held at the La Trobe University City Campus, Melbourne.

*Paper submission guidelines and templates are now available from http://www.assta.org/sst/2010/

Conference Themes
Submissions are invited for oral presentations. Submissions should describe original contributions to spoken language, speech science and/or technology that will be of interest to an audience including scientists, engineers, linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, audiologists and other professionals.

Submissions are invited in all areas of speech science and technology, but particularly in the following areas:
•       Speech production
•       Acoustic phonetics
•       Acoustics of accent change
•       Phonetics and phonology of Australasian languages (OzPhon)
•       Phonetics and Phonology of Australian and New Zealand English (PANZE)
•       Speech prosody, emotional speech, voice
•       Music and speech processing
•       Applications of speech science and technology
•       Speech processing for forensic applications
•       Speech recognition and understanding
•       Speaker recognition and classification
•       Speech enhancement and noise cancellation
•       Pedagogical technologies for speech and singing
•       Corpus management and speech tools
•       Contributions of speech science and technology to audiology and speech language therapy

Plenary Speakers:

Professor  D.R. Ladd
Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

Professor Hugh McDermott
Bionic Ear Institute and University of Melbourne

Professor Michael Robb        
Department of Communication Disorders, University of Canterbury

Key dates:

Paper submissions due           Friday 18 June 2010
Notification of acceptance      Friday 27 August 2010
Early-bird registration due     Friday 1 October 2010 

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*ACM DEV 2010: First ACM Annual Symposium on Computing for Development*

The First ACM Annual Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV 2010)  will be co-located with ICTD 2010 and the focus of the symposium will be  on new computing innovations for development. The scope of DEV 2010 is  broad covering a wide range of research areas within computer science  with a direct focus on development. ACM DEV 2010 aims to bring together  all CS researchers with an interest in computing for development.

The  deadline for paper submissions is July 10th, 2010.

We strongly encourage  you to submit your best works here.  The conference website is: http://dev2010.news.cs.nyu.edu  

*Call for Papers*

DEV 2010 provides an international forum for research in the design and  implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for  social and economic development. In particular, we focus on emerging  contexts where conventional computing solutions are often inappropriate  due to various contextual factors - including, but not limited to, cost,  language, literacy, and the availability of power and bandwidth.  Focusing on innovative technical solutions to these unique application,  infrastructure and user challenges, DEV fosters exchange between  computer scientists, engineers, and other scholars and practitioners  interested in the use of ICTs for development.  DEV provides a high-quality, single-track forum for presenting results  and discussing new ideas. We expect paper contributions from different  existing sub-areas of Computer Science and Engineering with a direct  relevance to development.  Papers should describe original and previously unpublished research.  Three metrics will be applied to judge papers: (a) Relevance of the  problem for development; (b) Novelty of the technical solution; (c)  Evaluation of the solution, making a case for development-focused  impact. All ACM DEV paper submissions should either provide or directly  motivate a novel technical solution that has direct implications for  development.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  Networks/Systems/Security/Architecture
    * Low-cost wireless connectivity
   * Intermittent networks and systems
   * Power-efficient systems
   * Low-cost computing devices
   * Mobile systems and applications
   * Security challenges in developing regions
   HCI/Applications
    * User interfaces for low-literacy populations
   * Multi-lingual computing
   * User-interfaces for low-cost devices
   * Participatory methods and user-centered design
   * Accessibility to disabled populations in developing regions
   * Design and evaluation of applications for health, microfinance,
     education, agriculture, entertainment
   AI/NLP/Data Mining/Speech/Vision
    * Machine learning techniques for large-scale data analysis in
     development contexts
   * Adapting content and applications to local languages and education
     levels
   * Understanding social relationships and information flows in
     disadvantaged societies
   * Speech interfaces and speech recognition for low-resource languages
   * Development of new AI-centric tools/solutions for development
   * Computer vision challenges in development  We also welcome papers outside of these topics that address the DEV  focus on computing innovations supporting social and economic development. 

*Important Dates *
Registration Deadline     July 3, 2010
Submission Deadline     July 10, 2010
Paper Acceptance     September 5, 2010
Final Version     October 5, 2010
Conference     December 17-18, 2010

  General Chair   

Andrew Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University  PC Chairs   Tapan Parikh, UC Berkeley Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, NYU 

*Steering Committee *

Saman Amarasinghe, MIT
Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington
Eric Brewer, UC Berkeley
Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Margaret Martonosi, Princeton
Roni Rosenfeld, CMU
Kentaro Toyama, UC Berkeley 

*Program Committee *

Muneeb Ali, Princeton, USA
 Saman Amarasinghe, MIT, USA
 Richard Anderson, Univ of Washington, USA
 Ravin Balakrishnan, Univ of Toronto, Canada
 Simone Barbosa, PUC - Rio, Brazil
 Etienne Barnard, Meraka Institute, South Africa
 Michael Best, Georgia Tech, USA
 Gaetano Borriello, Univ of Washington, USA
 Eric Brewer, UC Berkeley, USA
 John Canny, UC Berkeley, USA
 Ed Cutrell, MSR India, India
 James Davis, UC Santa Cruz, USA
 Andrew Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
 Nathan Eagle, MIT & Santa Fe Institute, USA
 Deborah Estrin, UCLA, USA
 Neil Ferguson, Imperial College, UK
 Beki Grinter, Georgia Tech, USA
 Eric Horovitz, MSR Redmond, USA
 Ravi Jain, Google, USA
 Matt Jones, Swansea, UK
 Matthew Kam, CMU, USA
 Srinivasan Keshav, University of Waterloo, Canada
 Zhengjie Liu, Dalian Maritime University, China
 Gary Marsden, Univ of Cape Town, South Africa
 Vanessa Frias Martinez, Telefonica Research, Spain
 Margaret Martonosi, Princeton, USA
 Srini Narayanan, UC Berkeley, USA
 Bonnie Nardi, UC Irvine, USA
 Tapan Parikh, UC Berkeley, USA
 Balaji Prabhakar, Stanford, USA
 John Quinn, Makerere University, Uganda
 Nitendra Rajput, IBM Research India, India
 Bhaskaran Raman, IIT-Bombay, India
 Roni Rosenfeld, CMU, USA
 Umar Saif, LUMS, Pakistan
 Lakshmi Subramanian, NYU, USA
 Bill Thies, MSR India, India
 Kentaro Toyama, UC Berkeley, USA
 Terry Winograd, Stanford, USA

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CALL FOR PAPERS
JéTou 2011  - Comparative Methods and Analysis in the Language Sciences -
April 7th-8th, 2011, Toulouse, France
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
The doctoral students and young researchers of the language science laboratories in Toulouse, France:
 
- CLLE-ERSS (équipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique)
- Laboratoire Octogone-Lordat (Centre Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Langage et de la Cognition)
 
as well as the computer science laboratory :
 
- IRIT (Institut de Recherches en Informatique de Toulouse)
 
are organizing the third edition of JéTou, a conference aimed at doctoral students and young researchers (who have defended their dissertation within the past three years) in the language sciences.
 
The conference will focus on comparative methods and analysis in the language sciences.
 
The need to explore comparative methods is characteristic of the social sciences. Even more so than researchers in the “hard” sciences, researchers in the social sciences are often confronted with certain limitations with respect to their object of study, and therefore must expand their research beyond their own points of reference.
 
When approaching the topic of comparative methods and analysis in linguistics, one might first consider cross-linguistic comparison, which has given rise to several diverse areas of research, such as comparative linguistics, contrastive linguistics, and linguistic typology.  Cross-linguistic comparison has informed certain principles that would not have been brought to light without looking to other languages.  This is the case at all levels of linguistic description (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics).
 
However, comparative or contrastive approaches also come into play in several other fields of study in the language sciences:
 
- While comparative studies between pathological subjects (aphasia, dyslexia, degenerative diseases, etc.) and non-pathological subjects are useful for clinical aims and objectives (diagnosis, description, and treatment of language pathologies), they also provide us with a better understanding of the cognitive aspects related to the development and use of language by healthy subjects.
- Comparing speakers with respect to their first language, their social identity, or even the way that they speak one or several language(s), allows us to determine universals in the acquisition of language, and inversely, to identify determining factors in attrition phenomena.
- Studies in language pedagogy have relied on contrastive analysis (between one’s first language and a second language) since the mid-20th century.  This is due to the fact that learning a first language involves the development of strategies and specific language patterns.  Also, such studies allow us to observe certain language traits, positive or negative, that “cross over” from the first language into the second language.  The question of multilingualism and plurilinguistic learning also falls into this set of issues.
- The notion of norm is ubiquitous in the language sciences, as language is governed by normalisation rules.  However, these rules, whether implicit or not, do not impede the creativity of speakers.  The multitude of different usages that have been brought to light by using comparative approaches is the proof of this individuality.
- In natural language processing, comparative approaches can be used in different areas of research: comparison of annotations to assess the difficulty of a task, comparison of reference annotation during evaluation, etc.  Some applications, such as the detection of plagiarism, are directly based on the notion of comparison.
- Corpus linguistics offers the necessary tools for wide-scale comparison between different corpora (aligned corpora of different languages, reference corpora vs. specialized corpora, etc.)
- Comparison can also be used as an analytical tool at different levels of linguistic description, such as morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.
 
The purpose of JéTou 2011 is to bring together young researchers working in different disciplines within the language sciences around the common theme of comparative approaches.  This topic, inherently cross-disciplinary, invites reflection on the question of method, which, while central to all research, is often neglected in scientific proceedings.
 
Possible contributions could focus on issues related to the following fields:
 
- descriptive linguistics
- sociolinguistics
- psycholinguistics
- neurolinguistics
- terminology
- language acquisition and pedagogy
- translation
- corpus linguistics
- natural language processing
 
--------------------------------------------
Types of presentations
--------------------------------------------
 
Two types of submissions will be accepted: long articles (8 to 10 pages) and short articles (4 to 5 pages).  Long articles will be presented as oral presentations or as posters, while short articles will be presented as posters.  
 
The proceedings of the conference will be published in book form and will also be available on the conference website.
 
--------------------------------------------
Criteria for selection
--------------------------------------------
 
Each submission will be evaluated by at least two specialists in the chosen field of study.  Submissions will be considered based on the following criteria:
 
1. The importance and originality of the contribution
2. The accuracy of the scientific and technical content
3. The critical discussion of results, particularly with respect to other work in the field
4. The organisation and clarity of the writing
5. Conformity to the theme of the conference
 
--------------------------------------------
Submission Guidelines
--------------------------------------------
 
Articles must be written in French or in English.
Submissions must not exceed 10 pages for a long article or 5 pages for a short article (including figures and examples, but not references).  The text must be written in Times 12, single spaced, in A4 format.  LaTeX and Word style sheets are available on the conference website.
The deadline for submissions is October 15th, 2010.  Submissions must be made using the Easychair conference management system.  Further information regarding the submission process can be found on the JéTou 2011 website: http://jetou2011.free.fr

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ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR)
http://www.icmr2011.org
17-20 April, Trento, Italy

The First ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), puts together the long-lasting experience of former ACM CIVR and ACM MIR. It is the ideal forum to present and encounter the most recent developments and applications in the area of multimedia content retrieval. Originally set up to illuminate the state-of-the-art in image and video retrieval, ICMR aims at becoming the world reference event in this exciting field of research, where researchers and practitioners can exchange knowledge and ideas.


Important dates:
   October 15, 2010 : Special Session and Tutorials Proposal
   November 5, 2010 : Special Session and Tutorials Selection
   December 3, 2010 : Paper Submission
   February 11, 2011 : Notification of acceptance
   March 4, 2011 : Submission of camera-ready papers


ICMR 2011 is seeking original high quality submissions addressing innovative research in the broad field of multimedia retrieval. We wish to highlight significant contributions addressing the main problem of search and retrieval but also the related and equally important issues of multimedia content management, user interaction, and community-based management. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

   * Content- and context-based indexing, search and retrieval of images and video
   * Multimedia content search and browsing on the Web
   * Advanced descriptors and similarity metrics for audio, image, video and 3D data
   * Multimedia content analysis and understanding
   * Semantic retrieval of visual contents
   * Learning and relevance feedback in media retrieval
   * Query models, paradigms, and languages for multimedia retrieval
   * Multimodal media search
   * Human perception based multimedia retrieval
   * Studies of information-seeking behaviour among image/video users
   * Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for image/video retrieval
   * HCI issues in multimedia retrieval
   * Evaluation of multimedia retrieval systems
   * High performance multimedia indexing algorithms
   * Database architectures for multimedia retrieval
   * Novel multimedia data management systems and applications
   * Community-based multimedia content management
   * Retrieval from multimodal lifelogs
   * Interaction with medical image databases
   * Satellite imagery analysis/retrieval
   * Image/video summarization and visualization


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Honorary Chair: Ramesh Jain (UC Irvine)

General Co-Chairs:
Francesco G.B. De Natale (Univ. Trento)
Alberto Del Bimbo (Univ. Florence)

Technical Program Co-Chairs:
B.S Manjunath (UC Santa Barbara)
Alan Hanjalic (TU Delft)
Shin'ichi Satoh (National Inst. of Informatics, Tokyo)

Local Chair:
Nicola Conci (Univ. Trento)
Giulia Boato (Univ. Trento)

Special Session Chair:
Riccardo Leonardi (Univ. of Brescia)

Panel Chair:
Wolfgang Nejdl (Univ. Hannover)

Practitioner Co-Chairs:
Andrea de Polo (Alinari)
Vanessa Murdock (Yahoo!)

Videolympics Chairs:
Cees Snoek (Univ. Amsterdam)
Alan Smeaton (Dublin City Univ.)

Publication Chair:
Marco Carli (Univ. of Roma Tre)

Publicity Chair:
Ioannis Patras (Queen Mary Univ. London)

Web Chair:
Andrea Rosani (Univ. Trento)
____________________________________

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jpc4

quatrièmes journees de phonetique clinique

19-21 mai 2011, strasbourg, France 

colloque international 

universite de strasbourg (uds)

instutut de phonetique de strasbourg (ips)

U.R. 1339 linguistique, langue et parole  (lilpa) – E.R. parole et cognition

programme de la maison interuniversitaire des sciences de l’homme alsace

  USR 3227 (misha)

Les modalités de Soumission vont suivre bientôt….

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ICASSP 2011

Prague hosts IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and

Signal Processing, ICASSP 2011. Prague Congress Centre, May 22-27, 2011.

ICASSP is one of the world's major conferences for signal processing,

bringing together over 2000 participants and experts from industry and

universities.

The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits,

demos, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:

Signal Processing Theory and Methods, Machine Learning for Signal

Processing, Sensor Array and Multichannel Systems, Audio and Acoustic

Signal Processing, Speech and Language Processing, Signal Processing for

Communications and Networking, Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal

Processing, Biomedical  Imaging, Information Forensics and Security, and

Signal Processing Education.

Important deadlines

Special Session & Tutorial Proposals

Due

September 1, 2010

Notification of Special Session &

Tutorial Acceptance

October 6, 2010

Submission of Camera Ready Papers

October 20, 2010

Notification of Paper Acceptance

January 17, 2011

Revised Paper Upload Deadline

February 20, 2011

Registration Deadline for Authors

March 13, 2011

More information can be found at http://www.icassp2011.com/

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9th International Workshop on Comtent-Based Multimedia Indexing

                      13-15 June 2011, Madrid, Spain
                   
                      http://www-vpu.eps.uam.es/cbmi2011/
******************************************************************************

Following the eight successful previous events of CBMI (Toulouse 1999, Brescia 2001, Rennes 2003, Riga 2005, Bordeaux 2007, London 2008, Chania 2009 and Grenoble 2010), the Video Processing and Understanding Lab (VPULab) and the Information Retrieval Group (IRG) at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid will organize the next CBMI event.

CBMI 2011 aims at bringing together the various communities involved in the different aspects of content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, browsing and presentation. The scientific program of CBMI 2011 will include invited keynote talks and regular and special sessions with contributed research papers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Multimedia indexing and retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
- Matching and similarity search
- Construction of high level indices
- Multimedia index extraction
- Identification and tracking of semantic regions in scenes
- Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
- Content-based search
- Multimedia data mining
- Metadata generation, coding and transformation
- Large scale multimedia database management
- Summarization, browsing and organization of multimedia content
- Presentation and visualization tools   
- User interaction and relevance feedback
- Personalization and content adaptation
- Evaluation and metrics

Important Dates
---------------
        Submission of full paper (to be received by): January 14, 2011
        Notification of acceptance: February 25, 2011
        Submission of camera-ready papers: March 11, 2011

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CALL FOR PAPERS / APPEL À PROPOSITIONS: 9th International Seminar
in Speech Production, Montreal, June 20-23, 2011
<http://www.risc.cnrs.fr/detail_lesechos.php?ID=13623>
De : issp2011 [ à ] uqam.ca

Dear speech researcher,

We are pleased to announce that the the ninth International Seminar on
Speech Production (ISSP'11) will be held in Montreal, Canada from June
20th to 23rd,
2011. ISSP’11 is the continuation of a series of seminars dating back to
Grenoble (1988), Leeds (1990), Old Saybrook (1993), Autrans (1996),
Kloster Seeon (2000), Sydney (2003), Ubatuba (2006), and Strasbourg (2008).
Several aspects of speech production will be covered, such as phonology,
phonetics, linguistics, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control,
neurosciences and
computer science.

For this edition, a special session will be organized in honor of Dr.
Joseph Perkell, for his contribution to the field.

THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS NOVEMBER 15th, 2010.
Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website
(www.issp2011.uqam.ca).

Looking forward to your venue in Montreal in 2011!

The organizing committee/ Le comité organisateur,
Lucie Ménard (UQAM)
Shari R. Baum (McGill)
Vincent Gracco (McGill)
David Ostry (McGill)

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JHU Summer Workshops
CALL FOR TEAM RESEARCH PROPOSALS (revised)
Deadline: Tuesday, November 9, 2010.

http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/ws11/CFP

The Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins
University invites one-page research proposals for a
Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, to be held
in Baltimore, MD, USA, July 11 to August 19, 2011.

An interactive peer-review meeting will refine and select proposals
to be funded for a six-week residential team exploration. Proposals
should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various
fields of Human Language Technology (HLT).  This year, proposals in
related areas of Machine Intelligence that share techniques with
HLT, such as Computer Vision (CV), are also strongly solicited.

Proposals are welcome on any topic of interest to HLT, CV and
technically related areas.  For example, proposals may address
novel topics or long-standing problems in one of the following
areas.

* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY:  Proposals are welcomed that address any
  aspect of information extraction from speech signal (message,
  speaker identity, language,...). Of particular interest are
  proposals for techniques whose performance would be minimally
  degraded by input signal variations, or which require minimal
  amounts of training data.

* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Proposals for knowledge discovery
  from text are encouraged, as are proposals in traditional
  fields such as parsing, machine translation, information
  extraction, sentiment analysis, summarization, and question
  answering.  Proposals may aim to improve the accuracy or enrich
  the output of such systems, or extend their reach by improving
  their speed, scalability, and coverage of languages and genres.

* VISUAL SCENE INTERPRETATION: New strategies are needed to
  parse visual scenes or generic (novel) objects, analyzing an
  image as a set of spatially related components.  Such strategies
  may integrate global top-down knowledge of scene structure (e.g.,
  generative models) with the kind of rich bottom-up, learned
  image features that have recently become popular for object
  detection.  They will support both learning and efficient search
  for the best analysis.

* UNSUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED LEARNING: Novel techniques
  that do not require extensive quantities of human annotated data
  to address any of the challenges above could potentially make
  large strides in machine performance as well as lead to greater
  robustness to changes in input conditions.  Semi-supervised and
  unsupervised learning techniques with applications to HLT and CV
  are therefore of considerable interest.

Research topics selected for investigation by teams in
past workshops may serve as good examples for your proposal
(http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops).

An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals
for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated
no later than November 12, 2010. Authors passing this initial
screening will be invited to Baltimore to present their ideas
to a peer-review panel on December 3-5, 2010.  It is expected
that the proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any
outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and
the teams to tackle them will be selected for the 2011 workshop.

We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop
to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks.
Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders.
Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and
students.  The senior participants come from academia, industry
and government.  Graduate student participants familiar with
the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated
performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a
national search, are rising seniors: new to the field and showing
outstanding academic promise.

If you are interested in participating in the 2011 Summer
Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for
consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed.  If your
proposal passes the initial screening, we will invite you to join
us for the December 3-5 meeting in Baltimore (as our guest) for
further discussions aimed at consensus.  If a topic in your area
of interest is chosen as one of the two or three to be pursued
next summer, we expect you to be available for participation
in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad
commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding
that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will
actively pursue it.  We in turn will make a good faith effort to
accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week
participation possible.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to clsp@jhu.edu by
4PM EST on Tue, November 9, 2010.

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17th International Congress ofPhonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVII) 

 in Hong Kong, August 17-21, 2011 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. I

CPhS  XVII is jointly organized by the City University of Hong Kong, the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, and the Academia Sinica,
Taipei, under the auspices of the Permanent Council for the
Organization of the International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences and
the International Phonetic Association. We have the pleasure to invite
you to take part in this world event in Hong Kong 2011. For further
information about ICPhS XVII, please visit the congress website
http://www.icphs2011.hk or contact us at icphs2011@cityu.edu.hk.




The Organizers of ICPhS XVII 2011



Congress website: http://www.icphs2011.hk

Email: icphs2011@cityu.edu.hk

Tel.: (852) 3442-7594

Fax: (852) 3442-0356

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Conference  IDP 2011

 The Prosody-Discourse Interface (including research training workshop on prosody and special workshop on expressives and affective prosody)

 University of Salford, Greater Manchester  12 September 2011 –  14 September (incl)

 (just after the LAGB  7 – 10 September 2011, at the University of Manchester) http://www.lagb.org.uk/?page_id=128

Invited speakers:

Nicole Dehe, University of Konstanz

John Local, University of York

Chris Potts, University of Stanford

Marc Schroeder, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

This conference is the fourth in a series which provides a forum for those working on the relationship between prosody and discourse.  As the previous conferences have shown, there is a range of phenomena which illustrate how research in prosody feeds into research in discourse and vice versa – for example, the communication of attitudes and emotions, constraints on implicit meaning, focus and information structure, the communication of irony, interaction and interactive meaning, humour in discourse, parentheticals, the interpretation of anaphora, the identification of processing units, and the identification of genre. The relationship between prosody and discourse has been viewed from the perspective of phonology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, language acquisition, language processing, language pathology, stylistics, language evolution, and speech synthesis. Moreover, research has been carried out in a wide range of theoretical paradigms. We now aim to build on this research, and in this way develop a greater understanding of phenomena at the prosody-discourse interface.

The conference will consist of four parts:

 1.     Research Training Workshop (for research students and academics who wish to develop an understanding of the issues involved in transcribing prosodic structure).

2.     Oral presentations on any area of the prosody-discourse interface

3.     P5oster sessions on any area of the prosody-discourse interface

4.     Special workshop on expressive and affective prosody (speakers: Diane Blakemore, Chris Potts, Marc Schroeder)

 We now invite researchers in prosody and discourse to submit abstract for inclusion in themed sessions on any area of the prosody-discourse interface (including the topic of the special workshop). We expect abstracts to address the following questions from a range of theoretical paradigms:

• What are the different prosodic subsystems; how do they interact; and how do they contribute to the interpretation of discourse?
• How should we describe and analyze prosodic facts?
• What are the relevant units for the analysis of discourse; and what are their prosodic properties?
• How is discourse processed; and how does prosody affect discourse processing?
• How do context and prosody interact in the interpretation of discourse?
• What is ‘tone of voice’ and how does it affect interpretation?
• How do L1 and L2 speakers acquire an understanding of the relationship between prosody and context?
• What are the best methodological tools for the description and transcription of the prosodic properties of discourse?

 Please note

• the conference will be held in English and French. 
• abstracts must be no more than 1 A4 page and written in Times 12 Font (plus an extra page for references and figures)
• two copies of the abstract must be submitted – one anonymous and the other marked with the name of the author(s), affiliation(s) and email address of the main author
• abstracts must be sent to the following address: d.blakemore@salford.ac.uk
• abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the scientific committee for the conference.
• abstracts should indicate if they are for an oral presentation, a poster, or both. Please note that we will not be able to accommodate everybody in the oral sessions.

 Deadlines

Submission of abstracts: 15 April 2011

Notification of acceptance: 6 June 2011

Conference: 12 – 14 September 2011

 Enquiries: 

Diane Blakemore  (local organizer) d.blakemore@salford.ac.uk

Debbie Hughes (conference support) d.hughes1@salford.ac.uk

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