Interspeech 2018
September 2-6, 2018
Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)
Hyderabad, India
http://interspeech2018.org/

Tutorials at Interspeech 2018

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Dear colleague:

Interspeech 2018 will be held in India during September 2-6, 2018, at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad, India. We invite you to submit your research papers as well as Show & Tell proposals. The call is attached below. For more details, please visit: http://www.interspeech2018.org.

We look forward to your active participation inInterspeech 2018.

Sincerely,
Team Interspeech 2018


==
Interspeech 2018
September 2-6, 2018, Hyderabad International Convention Centre
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
http://www.interspeech2018.org


Interspeech 2018: Show & Tell demonstrations

Submission deadline: April 13, 2018

Acceptance notifications sent: June 1, 2018

Camera-ready paper due: June 17, 2018

Interspeech is the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. Show & Tell is a special event organized during the conference. Participants are given the opportunity to demonstrate their most recent progress or developments, and interact with the conference attendees in an informal way, such as a demo, mock-up, or any adapted format of their own choice. These contributions must highlight the innovative side of the concept and may relate to a regular paper.

Each accepted proposal paper will be allocated two pages in the conference proceedings. Show & Tell demonstrations will be presented in a dedicated time slot; each presentation space will include one poster board, one table, as well as wireless internet connection and a power outlet. Demonstrations should be based on innovations and fundamental research in areas of speech production, perception, communication, or speech and language technology and systems. Authors are encouraged to submit proposals related to the theme of the main conference: Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies. Submissions will be peer-reviewed. Reviewers will judge the originality, significance, quality, and clarity of the proposed demonstration. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for and attend the conference, and demonstrate the system during the Show & Tell sessions.

Paper Submission And Preparation Guidelines

Show& Tell papers should be up to 2 pages (including references). The formatshould conform to that defined in the paper preparation guidelines and asdetailed in the INTERSPEECH 2018 Author’s Kit

Submityour papers to Show & Tell using the START V2 system at https://www.softconf.com/i/IS18-ShowAndTell/

Interspeech 2018
September 2-6, 2018, Hyderabad International Convention Centre
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
http://www.interspeech2018.org

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First International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports @ ACM Multimedia, October 22-26, 2018, Seoul, Korea

We'd like to invite you to submit your paper proposals for the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports to be held in Seoul, Korea together with ACM Multimedia 2018. The ambition of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share ideas on current multimedia/multimodal content analysis research in sports. We welcome multimodal-based research contributions as well as best-practice contributions focusing on the following (and similar, but not limited

to) topics:

– annotation and indexing

– athlete and object tracking

– activity recognition, classification and evaluation

– event detection and indexing

– performance assessment

– injury analysis and prevention

– data driven analysis in sports

– graphical augmentation and visualization in sports

– automated training assistance

– camera pose and motion tracking

– brave new ideas / extraordinary multimodal solutions

Please refer to the workshop website for further information:

http://www.multimedia-computing.de/mmsports/

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Due:             July 8, 2018

Acceptance Notification:     August 5, 2018

Camera Ready Submission:     August 12, 2018

Workshop Date:                TBA; either Oct 22 or Oct 26, 2018

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Interspeech 2019 will be held in Graz, Austria.

https://www.tugraz.at/events/interspeech-2019/home/

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Interspeech 2018 

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Satellite Events of INTERSPEECH 2018

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5th CHiME Speech Separation
                and Recognition Challenge

                Deadline: August 3, 2018

         Workshop: Microsoft, Hyderabad, Sep 7, 2018

        http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/
        ----------------------------------------------


Dear colleague,

It gives us great pleasure to announce the official launch of the CHiME-5 Challenge.

CHiME-5 considers the problem of distant-microphone conversational speech recognition in
everyday home environments. Speech material was elicited using a dinner party scenario
with efforts taken to capture data that is representative of natural conversational
speech. Participants may use a single microphone array or multiple distributed arrays.


FORUM

If you are considering participating, please join the CHiME-5 Google group for
discussions and further announcements.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chime5/join


MATERIALS

The Challenge website is now live and contains all the information and data that you will
need for participation:
- a detailed description of the challenge scenario and recording conditions,
- real training and development data,
- full instructions for participation and submission.

Baseline software for array synchronization, speech enhancement, and state-of-the-art
speech recognition will be provided on March 12.

If you have a question that isn't answered by the website and you expect other
participants to have the answer or to be interested by the answer, please post it on the
forum. Otherwise, please email us: chimechallenge@gmail.com.

We look forward to your participation.


IMPORTANT DATES

5th March, 2018 ? Training and development set data released
12th March, 2018 ? Baseline recognition system released
10th June, 2018   ?  Workshop registration open
June/July, 2018   ?  Test data released
3rd Aug, 2018   ? Extended abstract and challenge submission deadline
20th Aug, 2018   ?  Author notification
31st August, 2018   ?  Workshop registration deadline
7th Sept, 2018   ?  CHiME-5 Workshop (satellite of Interspeech 2018) and release of
results
8th Oct, 2018   ?  Final paper (2 to 6 pages)


ORGANISERS

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria


SPONSORS

Google
Microsoft Research


SUPPORTED BY

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
ISCA Robust Speech Processing SIG

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                                 CHiME 2018
             5th International Workshop on
Speech Processing in Everyday Environments

          Microsoft, Hyderabad, Sep 7, 2018

           Submission deadline: Aug 3, 2018

   http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_workshop/
          ----------------------------------------------


ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

CHiME 2018 will bring together researchers from the fields of computational hearing, speech enhancement, acoustic modelling and machine learning to discuss the robustness of speech processing in everyday environments.

As a focus for discussion, the workshop will host the CHiME-5 Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. To find out more about the challenge, see http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/.


PAPER SUBMISSION

Relevant research topics include (but are not limited to):
- training schemes: data augmentation, semi-supervised training,
- speaker localization and beamforming,
- single- or multi-microphone enhancement and separation,
- robust features and feature transforms,
- robust acoustic and language modeling,
- robust speech recognition,
- robust speaker and language recognition,
- robust paralinguistics,
- cross-environment or cross-dataset performance analysis,
- environmental background noise modelling.

Papers reporting evaluation results on the CHiME-5 dataset or on other datasets are both welcome.


IMPORTANT DATES

3rd Aug, 2018    Extended abstract submission (2 pages)
20th Aug, 2018  Paper notification
7th Sept, 2018   CHiME-5 Workshop
8th Oct, 2018     Final paper (2 to 6 pages)

ORGANISERS

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe, Johns Hopkins University
Emmanuel Vincent, Inria

LOCAL ORGANISER

Simerpreet Kaur, Microsoft

SPONSORS

Microsoft

SUPPORTED BY

International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
ISCA Robust Speech Processing SIG 

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Speech Processing in Challenging Environments (SPICE), September 08, 2018, IISc Bangalore, India.
  
URL:  https://spiceworkshop2018.wixsite.com/spice2018

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 Blizzard Challenge Workshop 2018, September 08, 2018, Microsoft, Hyderabad, India.

URL: https://www.synsig.org/index.php/Blizzard_Challenge_2018

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2^nd INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON DEEP LEARNING
 
DeepLearn 2018
 
Genova, Italy
 
July 23-27, 2018
 
Organized by:
University of Genova
IRDTA ? Brussels/London
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/DeepLearn2018/
 
***************************************************************
 
--- Regular registration deadline: July 20, 2018 ---

  
***************************************************************
 
SCOPE:
 
DeepLearn 2018 will be a research training event with a global scope aiming at updating participants about the most recent advances in the critical and fast developing area of deep learning. This is a branch of artificial intelligence covering a spectrum of current exciting machine learning research and industrial innovation that provides more efficient algorithms to deal with large-scale data in neurosciences, computer vision, speech recognition, language processing, human-computer interaction, drug discovery, biomedical informatics, healthcare, recommender systems, learning theory, robotics, games, etc. Renowned academics and industry pioneers will lecture and share their views with the audience.
 
Most deep learning subareas will be displayed, and main challenges identified through 2 keynote lectures, 24 six-hour courses, and 1 round table, which will tackle the most active and promising topics. The organizers are convinced that outstanding speakers will attract the brightest and most motivated students. Interaction will be a main component of the event.
 
An open session will give participants the opportunity to present their own work in progress in 5 minutes. Moreover, there will be two special sessions with industrial and recruitment profiles.
 
ADDRESSED TO:
 
Master's students, PhD students, postdocs, and industry practitioners will be typical profiles of participants. However, there are no formal pre-requisites for attendance in terms of academic degrees. Since there will be a variety of levels, specific knowledge background may be assumed for some of the courses. Overall, DeepLearn 2018 is addressed to students, researchers and practitioners who want to keep themselves updated about recent developments and future trends. All will surely find it fruitful to listen and discuss with major researchers, industry leaders and innovators.
 
STRUCTURE:
 
3 courses will run in parallel during the whole event. Participants will be able to freely choose the courses they wish to attend as well as to move from one to another.
 
VENUE:
 
DeepLearn 2018 will take place in Genova, the capital city of Liguria, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List and with one of the most important ports of the Mediterranean. The venue will be:
 
Porto Antico di Genova ? Centro Congressi
Magazzini del Cotone ? Module 10
16128 Genova, Italy
 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
 
tba
 
PROFESSORS AND COURSES: (to be completed)
 
Pierre Baldi (University of California, Irvine), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications to the Natural Sciences
 
Thomas Breuel (NVIDIA Corporation), [intermediate] Design and Implementation of Deep Learning Applications
 
Joachim M. Buhmann (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), [introductory/advanced] Model Selection by Algorithm Validation
 
Li Deng (Citadel), tba
 
Sergei V. Gleyzer (University of Florida), [introductory/intermediate] Feature Extraction, End-end Deep Learning and Applications to Very Large Scientific Data: Rare Signal Extraction, Uncertainty Estimation and Realtime Machine Learning Applications in Software and Hardware
 
Michael Gschwind (IBM Global Chief Data Office), [introductory/intermediate] Deploying Deep Learning at Enterprise Scale
 
Xiaodong He (Microsoft Research), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing and Language-Vision Multimodal Intelligence
 
Namkug Kim (Asan Medical Center), [intermediate] Deep Learning for Computer Aided Detection/Diagnosis in Radiology and Pathology
 
Li Erran Li (Uber ATG), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Reinforcement Learning: Foundations, Recent Advances and Frontiers
 
Dimitris N. Metaxas (Rutgers University), [advanced] Adversarial, Discriminative, Recurrent, and Scalable Deep Learning Methods for Human Motion Analytics, Medical Image Analysis, Scene Understanding and Image Generation
 
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University), [intermediate/advanced] Speech Recognition and Machine Translation: From Statistical Decision Theory to Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks
 
Jose C. Principe (University of Florida), [introductory/advanced] Cognitive Architectures for Object Recognition in Video
 
Björn Schuller (Imperial College London), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning for Signal Analysis
 
Michèle Sebag (French National Center for Scientific Research, Gif-sur-Yvette), [intermediate] Representation Learning, Domain Adaptation and Generative Models with Deep Learning
 
Ponnuthurai N Suganthan (Nanyang Technological University), [introductory/intermediate] Learning Algorithms for Classification, Forecasting and Visual Tracking
 
Johan Suykens (KU Leuven), [introductory/intermediate] Deep Learning and Kernel Machines
 
Kenji Suzuki (Tokyo Institute of Technology), [introductory/advanced] Deep Learning in Medical Image Processing, Analysis and Diagnosis
 
Gökhan Tür (Google Research), [intermediate/advanced] Deep Learning in Conversational AI
 
Eric P. Xing (Carnegie Mellon University), [intermediate/advanced] A Statistical Machine Learning Perspective of Deep Learning: Algorithm, Theory, Scalable Computing
 
Ming-Hsuan Yang (University of California, Merced), [intermediate/advanced] Learning to Track Objects
 
Yudong Zhang (Nanjing Normal University), [introductory/intermediate] Convolutional Neural Network and Its Variants
 
OPEN SESSION:
 
An open session will collect 5-minute voluntary presentations of work in progress by participants. They should submit a half-page abstract containing title, authors, and summary of the research to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 15, 2018.
 
INDUSTRIAL SESSION:
 
A session will be devoted to 10-minute demonstrations of practical applications of deep learning in industry. Companies interested in contributing are welcome to submit a 1-page abstract containing the program of the demonstration and the logistics needed. At least one of the people participating in the demonstration must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 15, 2018.
 
EMPLOYERS SESSION:
 
Firms searching for personnel well skilled in deep learning will have a space reserved for one-to-one contacts. At least one of the people in charge of the search must register for the event. Expressions of interest have to be submitted to david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com by July 15, 2018.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Francesco Masulli (Genova, co-chair)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel J. Parra-Royón (Granada)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
 
REGISTRATION:
 
It has to be done at
 
http://grammars.grlmc.com/DeepLearn2018/registration.php
 
The selection of up to 8 courses requested in the registration template is only tentative and non-binding. For the sake of organization, it will be helpful to have an estimation of the respective demand for each course. During the event, participants will be free to attend the courses they wish.
 
Since the capacity of the venue is limited, registration requests will be processed on a first come first served basis. The registration period will be closed and the on-line registration facility disabled when the capacity of the venue is exhausted. It is highly recommended to register prior to the event.
 
FEES:
 
Fees comprise access to all courses and lunches. There are several early registration deadlines. Fees depend on the registration deadline.
 
ACCOMMODATION:
 
Suggestions for accommodation will be available in due time.
 
CERTIFICATE:
 
A certificate of successful participation in the event will be delivered indicating the number of hours of lectures.
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david.silva409 (at) yahoo.com
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Università degli studi di Genova
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA) ? Brussels/London

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UEF SUMMER SCHOOL 2018:
Machine Learning Applied to Speech Technology and Autonomous Agents

http://www.uef.fi/en/web/summerschool/machine-learning-applied-to-speech-technology-and-autonomous-agents

JOENSUU campus, Finland
August 13-24, 2018

Registration (deadline: June 15)
https://apply.summerschool.uef.fi/

*************************************************************

COURSE CHAIRS

Associate Prof. Tomi Kinnunen, UEF
Dr. Ville Hautamäki, UEF

LECTURERS

Prof. Ville Kyrki, Aalto Univ. (autonomous agents)
Dr. Ali Ghadirzadeh, Aalto Univ. & KTH Royal Inst. Tech. (autonomous agents)
Dr. Md Sahidullah, INRIA (speech)
Dr. Cemal Hanilci, Bursa Tech. Univ. (speech)
Dr. Dayana Ribas, Univ. of Zaragoza (speech)
Prof. Lauri Mehtätalo, UEF (statistics)
Dr. Akihiro Kato, UEF (speech)
Dr. Rosa Gonzalez Hautamäki, UEF (speech)
Dr. Abraham Woubie, UEF (speech)

COURSE OVERVIEW

University of Eastern Finland (UEF) hosts a number of different summer
courses in August 2018. The course on Machine Learning Applied to
Speech Technology and Autonomous Agents is co-organized by the School
of Computing of the UEF and  Department of Automation and Systems
Technology of Aalto University. Contact teaching takes place from
August 13th to 17th, 2018. Individual optional project work is from
August 20th to 24th, 2018.

The course is intended to be self-contained with limited or no prior
knowledge of machine learning required. It gives a brief overview of
the relevant machine learning concepts and their applications to
speech technology and autonomous agents. Despite the two different
application themes, there are no parallel sessions but the
participants learn about both topics.

The first day includes course introduction, introduction to machine
learning, linear mixed models and basics of deep learning for modeling
sequential data. The next two days focus on audio topics (speaker &
speech recognition, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, audio
steganography), while the last two lecture days focus on reinforcement
learning and autonomous software and physical agents (robots). The
teaching takes place at the Joensuu campus of the UEF.

The speech portion of the course is especially recommended for PhD
students (and MSc students close to graduation) who might be already
familiar with the basics of signal processing and are interested in
obtaining a brief overview of basic principles, state-of-the-art
techniques and selected emerging trends, especially in speaker and
language recognition.

The reinforcement portion of the course gives basics of how autonomous
agents, whether physicsal (robots) or software, can be designed and
trained in end-to-end fashion. Portion of the course is useful for any
PhD or MSc students close to graduation, who is interested to learn
more about the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI).

GENERAL COURSE INFORMATION

Language of the course is English. The primary target group are PhD
and MSc students. The course amounts to either 2 ECTS or 5 ECTS,
depending on the mode:

A. Lectures + learning diary (August 13 - 17), total 2 ECTS
B. + additional individual project (August 20 - 24), total 5 ECTS

The course contains 5 days of lectures, hands on practicals, project
work (1 week) and learning diary. The course will be assessed as
pass/fail. Students who pass the course will receive a course
certificate.

SOCIAL PROGRAM

The course involves social programme organized by the UEF (details
TBA). The activities will mostly be included in your course fee, but
some of them may have a small participation fee.

MORE INFORMATION

Course content related matters:
tkinnu@cs.uef.fi and villeh@cs.uef.fi

General course matters:
summer.school@uef.fi


--

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YFRSW-2018, Hyderabad, India, September 1, 2018

3rd International Workshop for Young Female Researchers in Speech Science & Technology
(YFRSW-2018)
Special event of Interspeech 2018, Hyderabad, India

https://sites.google.com/view/yfrsw2018/home

== Important Dates:
- Abstract submission opens: 16 April 2018
- Abstract submission closes: 24 May 2018
- Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2018
- Registration deadline: 5 July 2018
- Workshop date: 1 September 2018

== Topic:
The aim of this workshop is to bring women undergraduate and masters students, who are
currently working in speech science and technology, together at a special event
co-located with Interspeech 2018, Hyderabad, India. The workshop will take place on 1
September 2018 from 10am to 5pm followed by a dinner with invited senior members of the
Interspeech community. It will feature panel discussions with senior female researchers
in the field, student poster presentations and a mentoring session.
The workshop is the third of its kind, after a successful inaugural event (YFRSW 2016) at
Interspeech 2016 in San Francisco and the second event (YFRSW 2017) in Stockholm, Sweden.
It is designed to foster interest in research in our field in women at the undergraduate
or master level who have not yet committed to getting a PhD in speech science or
technology areas, but who have had some research experience in their college and
universities via individual or group projects.

== Call for Participation
Abstracts describing the student?s (planned) research (maximum of 300 words) should be
submitted by email to

yfrs.workshop@gmail.com by May 24, 2018.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the committee and applicants will be notified by June 15,
2018. Emphasis will be on inclusivity although all submissions should be in the core
scientific domains covered by Interspeech.

== Preliminary Program:
The workshop will include the following events:
* A welcome breakfast with introductions (1h)
* A panel of senior women talking about their own research and experiences as women in
the speech community (1h)
* A panel of senior students who work in the speech area to describe how they became
interested in speech research (1h)
* A poster session for the students to present their own research (2h)
* A coaching session between students and senior women mentors (1h)
* A networking lunch for students and senior women (1h)

== Organizing committee:
Amber Afshan (UCLA),
Kay Berkling (Karlsruhe University),
Heidi Christensen (University of Sheffield),
Maxine Eskenazi (CMU),
Milica Gasic (Cambridge University),
Dilek Hakkani-Tür (Google Inc),
Preethi Jyothi (IIT Bombay),
Esther Klabbers (ReadSpeaker),
Lori Lamel (LIMSI CNRS)
Yang Liu (University of Texas Dallas)
Karen Livescu (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago),
Pratibha Moogi (Samsung Electronics),
Emily Mower Provost (University of Michigah),
Catharine Oertel (EPFL)
Bhuvana Ramabhadran (Google Inc),
Odette Scharenborg (M*Modal),
Elizabeth Shriberg (Ellipsis Health Inc),
Isabel Trancoso (INESC-ID / Instituto Superior Técnico)

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EUSIPCO  2018

26th European Signal Processing Conference

Rome, Italy

September 3-7, 2018

http://www.eusipco2018.org

************************************************************

The 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) will be held in Rome, the Eternal City, in Italy from September 3 to September 7, 2018. The flagship conference of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) will offer a comprehensive technical program addressing all the latest developments in research and technology for signal processing and its applications. It will feature world-class speakers, oral and poster sessions, keynotes and plenaries, exhibitions, demonstrations, tutorials, demo and ongoing work sessions and satellite workshops, and is expected to attract many leading researchers and industry  figures from all over the world. 

Technical Scope

We invite the submission of original, unpublished technical papers on topics including but not limited to:

- Audio and acoustic signal processing

- Speech and language processing

- Image and video processing

- Multimedia signal processing

- Signal processing theory and methods

- Sensor array and multichannel signal processing

- Signal processing for communications

- Radar and sonar signal processing

- Signal processing over graphs and networks

- Nonlinear signal processing

- Optimization methods

- Machine learning

- Statistical signal processing

- Compressed sensing and sparse modeling

- Bio-medical image and signal processing

- Signal processing for computer vision and robotics

- Computational imaging/Spectral imaging

- Information forensics and security

- Signal processing for power systems

- Signal processing for education

- Bioinformatics and genomics

- Signal processing for big data

- Signal processing for the internet of things

- Design/implementation of signal processing systems

- Other signal processing areas

Accepted papers will be included in IEEE Xplore®. EURASIP Society enforces a ?no-show? policy. Procedures to submit papers, proposals for special sessions, tutorials and satellite workshops are detailed at the EUSIPCO 2018 website (www.eusipco2018.org). 

Important dates 

Tutorial proposals:                                     18 February 2018

Full paper submissions:                              18 February 2018

Notification of paper acceptance:                18 May 2018

Camera-ready papers:                                18 June 2018

STUDENT PAPER AWARDS: ?EUSIPCO Best Student Paper Awards? will be presented at the conference banquet. Papers will be selected by a committee composed of area and technical chairs.

TUTORIAL AND SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS: Tutorials will be held on September 3, 2018. Brief tutorial proposals should include title, outline, contact information, biography and selected publications for the presenter(s), and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants. Special session proposals should include title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited papers.

3 MINUTE THESIS (3MT):

EUSIPCO 2018 is offering a 3 Minutes Thesis contest, where PhD students have three minutes to present a compelling oration on their thesis and its significance. It is an exercise for students to consolidate their ideas so they can present them concisely to an audience specialized in different signal processing fields.

SATELLIT? WORKSHOP PROPOSALS:

The 2018 edition of EUSIPCO is proud to organize a half day of thematic workshops on Friday, September 7, 2018, after the end of the main conference, which will provide a forum to participate in specific scientific events and present research focused on current innovative topics in signal processing technology and its extension to other fields.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: 

GENERAL CHAIR

Patrizio Campisi, Roma Tre University, Italy

GENERAL CO-CHAIR

Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK

TECHNICAL CO-CHAIRS

Sergio Barbarossa, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Moncef Gabbouj, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

Augusto Sarti, Polythecnic University of Milan, Italy

PLENARY TALKS

Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK

Enrico Magli, Polythecnic University of Turin, Italy

SPECIAL SESSIONS

Paulo Lobato Correia, IST Lisbon, Portugal

Andreas Uhl, Salzburg University, Austria

TUTORIALS AND DEMO

Bulent Sankur, Bogazici University, Turkey

Marco Carli, Roma Tre University, Italy

STUDENT ACTIVITIES CHAIR

Juan Ramon Troncoso-Pastoriza, EPFL, Switzerland 

PUBLICATIONS CHAIR

Emanuele Maiorana, Roma Tre University, Italy

FINANCE CHAIR

Francesco De Natale, University of Trento, Italy

PUBLICITY CHAIRS

Carmen Garcia Mateo, University of Vigo, Spain

Stefania Colonnese, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

INTERNATIONAL LIAISON

Ajay Kumar, PolyU, Hong Kong

Shantanu Rane, PARC, USA 

Anderson Rocha, University of Campinas, Brazil

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Call for papers: Special Session on Indexing, Retrieval, Annotation and Mining in Earth
Observation (IR4EO)
CBMI 2018 - La Rochelle, France 4-6 Sept 2018
http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/special-session-on-indexing-retrieval-annotation-and-mining-in-earth-observation-ir4eo/
--------------------------------------------------------------------

* Important dates:
Paper submission:              May 18, 2018
Notification of acceptance:    June 29, 2018
Camera-ready papers due:       July 13, 2018

* Organizers:
Sébastien Lefèvre, Université de Bretagne Sud, IRISA (sebastien.lefevre@irisa.fr)
Josiane Mothe, Université de Toulouse, IRIT CNRS (Josiane.Mothe@irit.fr)

* Call for papers:
The proliferation of Earth Observation satellites, together with their
continuously increasing performances, provides today a massive amount of
geospatial data. Analysis and exploration of such data leads to various
applications, from agricultural monitoring to crisis management and
global security. However, they also raise very challenging problems,
e.g. dealing with extremely large and real time geospatial data,
user-friendly querying and retrieval satellite images or mosaics,
semantic indexing and annotation. The purpose of this special session is
to address these challenges, and to allow researchers from multimedia
retrieval and remote sensing to meet and share their experiences in
order to build the remote sensing retrieval systems of tomorrow. This
special session aims to establish connections between researchers from
multimedia retrieval and issues raised in remote sensing, and to provide
interesting problems to the former while providing solutions for the
latter. On the one hand, geospatial data requires specific models of
description, with characteristics very different from other domains. To
name a few, remotely sensed images are not necessarily defined in usual
color spaces, they compose large-scale mosaics enabling a continuous
global cover of the earth, they can be analysed and understood at
various scales, etc. On the other hand, the multimedia retrieval
community propose many scalable algorithms for learning, searching, or
classifying data in a more generalist way. This special session will be
a very interesting opportunity for multimedia researchers to propose
adaptations to geospatial data, and for remote sensing researchers to
create new models compatible with retrieval algorithms, while offering a
context where people from these two domains can meet and share their
experiences. Earth Observation is one of the major resource of visual
data that still greatly lacks of efficient and effective methods for
indexing and retrieval. Major challenges are faced since the geospatial
data available worldwide is at the order of magnitude of ZettaBytes.
Besides, thanks to the efforts of NASA in the USA and Copernicus program
in Europe, satellite images provided free of charge to end-users
represent several new TB every day. To ease the design of new solutions,
the scientific community benefits from the availability of an increasing
number of public benchmarks, such as: UC Merced Land Use Dataset,
Brazilian Coffee Scenes Dataset, SAT-4 and SAT-6 airborne datasets,
Sentinel-2 EuroSAT dataset, ISPRS 2D and 3D Semantic Labeling benchmark,
ImageClef 2017 Remote Pilot task, IEEE Data Fusion Contest, Kaggle
contests, etc. This is expected to ensure fair comparison of methods and
to support the evolution of the state-of-the-art.

* Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
-        Content- and context-based indexing, search and retrieval of EO data
-        Semantic annotation
-        Deep Learning and CBIR of EO data
-        Search and browsing on EO repositories
-        Change detection and its applications,
-        Near real time monitoring,
-        Multimodal / multi-observations (sensors, dates, resolutions) analysis of EO data
-        HCI issues in EO retrieval and browsing
-        Evaluation of EO retrieval systems, benchmarks for EO indexing and retrieval tasks
-        High-performance, large-scale indexing algorithms for EO data
-        Data fusion
-        Summarization and visualization of very large satellite image datasets
-        Applications: deforestation detection, air pollution detection and
prediction, climate change, monitoring of resources, from land cover to
phenology, photosynthetic activity, etc. Submissions should be sent via
easychair and follow the IEEE format (see CBMI call). Each submission
will be peer reviewed by at least 3 PC members (general PC and special
session PC). The title of the submission should include ?(SS on
IR4EO)? to avoid misclassification.

Since the Remote Sensing journal as an open call for a special issue on
these topics
(http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/ir2s) with a
deadline of 30th of September, the best papers from the special session
will be encouraged to submit an extended journal version to this special
issue. The selection of the papers will be eased by the fact that one
of the special session organizers is also the leading guest editor of
the special issue.

* Invited speaker:
Begüm Demir is associate professor at the University of Trento (Italy).
In 2017, she got an (ERC) Starting Grant with the project « BigEarth -
Accurate and Scalable Processing of Big Data in Earth Observation ».

* Session programme committee members:
Erchan Aptoula, Gebze Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey (eaptoula@gtu.edu.tr) -
http://bte.gtu.edu.tr/~eaptoula/
Alexandre Benoit, Université Savoie Mont Blanc (alexandre.benoit@univ-smb.fr) -
https://sites.google.com/site/benoitalexandrevision/
Piero Boccardo, DIST, Politecnico di Torino, Ithaca (piero.boccardo@polito.it) -
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Piero_Boccardo2
Mihai Datcu, DLR, Germany (mihai.datcu@dlr.de) -
https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=nKMSFeIAAAAJ
Fabio Del Frate, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy (Fabio.Del.Frate@uniroma2.it)
Fabio Dell'Acqua, Department of Electrical, Computer, Biomedical EngineeringUniversity of
Pavia, Italy (fabio.dellacqua@unipv.it) - http://unipv.academia.edu/FabioDellAcqua
Begüm Demir, University of Trento, Italie (begum.demir@unitn.it) - http://begumdemir.com
Jefferson Dos Santos, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
(jefersson@dcc.ufmg.br) - http://www.dcc.ufmg.br/~jefersson
Mathieu Roche, Research Scientist (PhD, HDR), CIRAD - Environments and Societies
Department UMR TETIS, (mathieu.roche@cirad.fr)
Sergi Trilles Oliver, Universitat Jaume I, Spain (strilles@uji.es) -
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sergi_Trilles_Oliver

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EUSIPCO  2018

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 The International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing 2018 (CBMI 2018) at the
Espace ENCAN, La Rochelle, France

   http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/

is now open for registration at: http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/conference-registration/

Early registration is by July 20. Places are limited and registration is done on a
first-come-first-serve basis.

Keynotes speakers are:
  Jean-Marc ODOBEZ (EPFL, Switzerland)
  Hervé GLOTIN (Univ. Toulon, France)
  Dominique CARDON  (Sciences Po Paris/Médialab, France)

Programm:
http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/conference-program/

Accommodation booking:
http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/accommodation/

Visa invitation letters and travel:
http://cbmi2018.univ-lr.fr/travel-2/

Contact: Renaud Péteri

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CALL FOR PAPERS

2018 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems
(FedCSIS)

Poznan, Poland, 9 - 12 September, 2018

www.fedcsis.org

Strict submission deadline: May 15, 2018, 23:59:59 pm HST (no extensions)

www.fedcsis.org

(FedCSIS on www.ieee.org: https://tinyurl.com/FedCSIS2018onIEEE)

FedCSIS an annual international multi-conference, this year organized
jointly by the Polish Information Processing Society (PTI), Poland Section
Computer Society Chapter, Systems Research Institute Polish Academy of
Sciences, Wroclaw University of Economics, Warsaw University of Technology
and Adam Mickiewicz University, in technical cooperation with: IEEE Region
8, IEEE Poland Section, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on
Intelligent Informatics, IEEE Czechoslovakia Section Computer Society
Chapter, IEEE Poland Section (Gdansk) Computer Society Chapter, IEEE SMC
Technical Committee on Computational Collective Intelligence, IEEE Poland
Section SMC Society Chapter, IEEE Poland Section Control System Society
Chapter, IEEE Poland Section Computational Intelligence Society Chapter,
ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing, International Federation
for Information Processing, Committee of Computer Science of Polish Academy
of Sciences, Polish Operational and Systems Research Society, Eastern
Cluster ICT Poland, Mazovia Cluster ICT.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to your colleagues and
associates who could be interested in it.

The mission of the FedCSIS Conference Series is to provide a highly
acclaimed multi-conference forum in computer science and information
systems. The forum invites researchers from around the world to contribute
their research results and participate in Events focused on their
scientific and professional interests in computer science and information
systems.

Since 2012, Proceedings of the FedCSIS conference are indexed in the Web of
Science, SCOPUS and other indexing services. This includes already
Proceedings of FedCSIS 2017.


FedCSIS EVENTS

The FedCSIS 2018 consists of the following Events, grouped into five
conference areas.


* AAIA'18 - 13th International Symposium Advances in Artificial
Intelligence and Applications
--- AIMaViG'18 - 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in
Machine Vision and Graphics
--- AIMA'18 - 8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in
Medical Applications
--- AIRIM'18 - 3rd International Workshop on AI aspects of Reasoning,
Information, and Memory
--- ASIR'18 - 8th International Workshop on Advances in Semantic
Information Retrieval
--- DMGATE'18 - 1st International Workshop on AI Methods in Data Mining
Challenges
--- SEN-MAS'18 - 6th International Workshop on Smart Energy Networks &
Multi-Agent Systems
--- WCO'18 - 11th International Workshop on Computational Optimization
* CSS - Computer Science & Systems
--- 4A'18 - 1st Workshop on Actors, Agents, Assistants, Avatars
--- AIPC'18 - 2nd International Workshop on Advances in Image Processing
and Colorization
--- BEDA'18 - 1st International Workshop on Biomedical & Health Engineering
and Data Analysis
--- BigDAISy'18 - 1st Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Information
Security
--- CANA'18 - 11th Workshop on Computer Aspects of Numerical Algorithms
--- C&SS'18 - 5th  International Conference on Cryptography and Security
Systems
--- CPORA'18 - 3rd Workshop on Constraint Programming and Operation
Research Applications
--- DaSCA'18 - 1st International Symposium on Big Data in Cloud and
Services Computing Applications
--- LTA'18 - 3rd International Workshop on Language Technologies and
Applications
--- MMAP'18 - 11th International Symposium on Multimedia Applications and
Processing
--- WSC'18 - 10th Workshop on Scalable Computing
* iNetSApp - International Conference on Innovative Network Systems and
Applications
--- CAP-NGNCS'18 - 1st International Workshop on Communications
Architectures and Protocols for the New Generation of Networks and
Computing Systems
--- INSERT'18 - 2nd International Conference on Security, Privacy, and
Trust
--- IoT-ECAW'18 - 2nd Workshop on Internet of Things - Enablers, Challenges
and Applications
--- WSN'18 - 7th International Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks
* IT4MBS - Information Technology for Management, Business & Society
--- AITM'18 - 15th Conference on Advanced Information Technologies for
Management
--- AITSD'18 - 1st International Workshop on Applied Information
Technologies for Sustainable Development
--- ISM'18 -  13th Conference on Information Systems Management
--- IT4L'18 - 6th Workshop on Information Technologies for Logistics
--- KAM'18 - 24rd Conference on Knowledge Acquisition and Management
--- TEMHE'18 - 1st Workshop on Technology Enhanced Medical and Healthcare
Education
* SSD&A - Software Systems Development & Applications
--- MDASD'18 - 5th Workshop on Model Driven Approaches in System
Development
--- MIDI'18- 6th Conference on Multimedia, Interaction, Design and
Innovation
--- LASD'18 - 2nd International Conference on Lean and Agile Software
Development
--- SEW-38 & IWCPS-5 - Joint 38th IEEE Software Engineering Workshop
(SEW-38) and 5th International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (IWCPS-5)
* DS-RAIT'18 - 5th Doctoral Symposium on Recent Advances in Information
Technology



KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

- Mehmet Aksit, Chair Software Engineering, Formal Methods and Tools Group,
Department of Computer Science, University of Twente
- Jan Bosch, Director of the Software Center, Professor at Chalmers
University Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden
- W?odzis?aw Duch, Professor at Department of Informatics, and
NeuroCognitive Laboratory, Center for Modern Interdisciplinary
Technologies, Nicolaus Copernicus University
- Rory V. O'Connor, Professor at Dublin City University, Ireland, Head of
Delegation (for Ireland) to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7



PAPER SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

Papers should be submitted by May 15, 2018 (strict deadline, no
extensions). Preprints will be published on a USB memory stick provided to
the FedCSIS participants. Only papers presented during the conference will
be submitted to the IEEE for inclusion in the Xplore Digital Library.
Furthermore, proceedings, published in a volume with ISBN, ISSN and DOI
numbers, will posted within the conference Web portal. Moreover, most
Events' organizers arrange quality journals, edited volumes, etc., and may
invite selected extended and revised papers for post-conference
publications (information can be found at the websites of individual
events, or by contacting Chairs of said events).


IMPORTANT DATES

? Paper submission (strict deadline): May 15 2018 23:59:59 pm HST (there
will be no extension)
? Position paper submission: June 12, 2018
? Authors notification: June 24, 2018
? Final paper submission and registration: July 03, 2018
? Final deadline for discounted fee: August 01, 2018
? Conference dates: September 9-12, 2018



CHAIRS OF FedCSIS CONFERENCE SERIES

Maria Ganzha, Leszek A. Maciaszek, Marcin Paprzycki


CONTACT FedCSIS at: secretariat@fedcsis.org

FedCSIS on Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/FedCSISFacebook
FedCSIS on LinkedIN: https://tinyurl.com/FedCSISonLinkedIN
FedCSIS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FedCSIS
FedCSIS on XING: http://preview.tinyurl.com/FedCSISonXING

--

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CLEF 2018 Conference and Labs on the Evaluation Forum
Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality and Visualization
10 - 14 September 2018, Avignon - France

***********************************************************************************

Call for Lab Participation - Registration closes: 27 April 2018

Lab participants must register for the Labs via the CLEF website: http://clef2018-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/


Conference website: http://clef2018.clef-initiative.eu/
Labs flyer (pdf): http://clef2018.clef-initiative.eu/resources/CLEF2018-labs-flyer.pdf

Deadline Extension

Important Dates
---------------
?    Title, authors and abstract upload: 7 May 2018
?    Submission of Long and Short Papers: 14 May 2018
?    Notification of Acceptance: 8 June 2018
?    Camera Ready Copy due: 22 June 2018
?    Conference: 10-14 September 2018

CLEF 2018 is the 19th edition of CLEF which, since 2000, contributes to the systematic evaluation of information access systems. It consists of a peer-reviewed conference (see the separate call for papers) and a set of ten Labs designed to test different aspects of multilingual and multimedia IR systems:
    1. CENTRE@CLEF 2018, CLEF/NTCIR/TREC Reproducibility
    2. CheckThat! Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims
    3. CLEF eHealth
    4. DynSe, Dynamic Search for Complex Tasks
    5. eRISK, Early Risk Prediction on the Internet
    6. ImageCLEF, Multimedia Retrieval in CLEF
    7. LifeCLEF
    8. MC2, Multilingual Cultural Mining and Retrieval
    9. PAN, Lab on Digital Text Forensics
    10. PIR-CLEF, Evaluation of Personalised Information Retrieval

*****************
 
Organizers
*****************
Conference Chairs
Patrice Bellot, Aix-Marseille Université - CNRS LSIS, France
Chiraz Trabelsi, University of Tunis El Manar, T unis

Program Chairs
Josiane Mothe, SIG, IRIT, France)
Fionn Murtagh, University of Huddersfield, UK)

Lab Chairs
Jian Yun Nie, DIRO, Université de Montréal, Canada
Laure Soulier, LIP6, UPMC, France

Proceedings Chairs
Linda Cappellato, University of Padua, Italy
Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy

Publication
Labs Working Notes will be published in the CEUR-WS Proceedings:
http://ceur-ws.org/
Lab Paper Submission via Easychair: http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2018

*****************
         LABS        
*****************

CENTRE@CLEF 2018 - CLEF/NTCIR/TREC Reproducibility
The goal of CENTRE@CLEF 2018 is to run a joint CLEF/NTCIR/TREC task on challenging participants: 1) to reproduce best results of best/most interesting systems in previous editions of CLEF/NTCIR/TREC by using standard open source IR systems; 2) to contribute back to the community the additional components and resources developed to reproduce the results in order to improve existing open source systems.
    - Task 1 - Replicability: replicability of selected methods on the same experimental collections.
    - Task 2 - Reproducibility: reproducibility of selected methods on the different experimental collections. Task 3 - Re-reproducibility: using the components developed in T1 and T2 and made available by the other participants to replicate/reproduce their results.
Lab Coordination: Nicola Ferro (University of Padua), Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University), Ian Soboroff (NIST)
Lab website: http://www.centre-eval.org/    
Twitter: @_centre_

LifeCLEF
LifeCLEF lab aims at boosting research on the identification of living organisms and on the production of biodiversity data. Through its biodiversity informatics related challenges, LifeCLEF is intended to push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in several research directions at the frontier of multimedia information retrieval, machine learning and knowledge engineering. The lab is organized around three tasks:
    - Task 1 - GeoLifeCLEF: location-based species recommendation.
    - Task 2 - BirdCLEF: bird species identification from bird calls and songs.
    - Task 3 - ExpertLifeCLEF: experts vs. machines identification quality.
Lab Coordination: Alexis Joly (INRIA, LIRMM), Henning Müller (HES-SO), Pierre Bonnet (CIRAD, AMAP), Hervé Goëau (CIRAD, AMAP), Hervé Glotin (University of Toulon, LSIS CNRS), Simone Palazzo (University of Catania), Willem-Pier Vellinga (Xeno-Canto)
Lab website: http://lifeclef.org/

PAN - Lab on Digital Text Forensics
PAN is a series of scientific events and shared tasks on digital text forensics.
    - Task 1 - Author Identification: cross-domain authorship attribution. More specifically, cases where the topic of texts varies significantly will be examined. In addition, we will continue the pilot task of style change detection, focusing on finding switches of authors within documents based on an intrinsic style analysis.
    - Task 2 - Author Obfuscation: while the goal of author identification and author profiling is to model author style so as to deanomyize authors, the goal of author obfuscation technology is to prevent that by disguising the authors. We will study author masking vs. authorship verification.
    - Task 3 - Author Profiling: the goal is to identify an author's traits based on their writing style. The focus will be on age and gender, whereas text and image will be used as information sources, offering tweets in English, Spanish and Arabic.
Lab Coordination: Martin Potthast (Leipzig University), Paolo Rosso (Universitat Politècnica de València), Efstathios Stamatatos (Univerisity of the Aegean), Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Lab website: http://pan.webis.de/

CLEF eHealth
Medical content is available electronically in a variety of forms ranging from patient records and medical dossiers, scientific publications and health-related websites to medical-related topics shared across social networks. This lab aims to support the development of techniques to aid laypeople, clinicians and policy-makers in easily retrieving and making sense of medical content to support their decision making.
    - Task 1 - Multilingual Information Extraction: Participants will be required to extract the causes of death from death certificates, authored by physicians in European languages. This can be seen as a named entity recognition, normalization, and/or text classification task.
    - Task 2 - Technologically Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine: Participants will be challenged to retrieve medical studies relevant to conducting a systematic review on a given topic. This can be seen as a total recall problem and is addressed by both query generation and document ranking.
    - Task 3 - Patient-centred Information Retrieval: Participants must retrieve web pages that fulfil a given patient?s personalised information need. This needs to fulfil the following criteria: information reliability, quality, and suitability. The task also has a multilingual querying track.
Lab Coordination: Leif Azzopardi (Univ. of Strathclyde), Lorraine Goeuriot (Univ. J.Fourier), Evangelos Kanoulas (Univ. of Amsterdam), Liadh Kelly (Maynooth University), Aurélie Névéol (CNRS-LIMSI), Joao Palotti (Vienna Univ.), Aude Robert (INSERM/CepiDC), Rene Spijker (Cochrane), Hanna Suominen (Australian National Univ.), Guido Zuccon (Queensland Univ. of Technology)
Lab Website: https://sites.google.com/view/clef-ehealth-2018/home    
Twitter : @clefehealth

MC2 - Multilingual Cultural Mining and Retrieval
Developing processing methods and resources to mine the social media sphere surrounding cultural events such as festivals. This requires to deal with almost all languages and dialects as well as informal expressions.There are three tasks:
    - Task 1 - Cross Language Cultural Retrieval over MicroBlogs: a) Small Microblogs Multilingual Information Retrieval in Arabic, English, French and Latin languages; b) Microblogs Bilingual Information Retrieval for tuning systems running on language pairs; c) Microblog Monolingual Information Retrieval based on 2017 language identification.
    - Task 2 - Mining Opinion Argumentation: a) Polarity detection in microblogs; b) Automatic identification of argumentation elements over Microblogs and WikiPedia; c) Classification and summarization of arguments in texts.
    - Task 3 - Dialectal Focus Retrieval: a) Arabic dialects in Blogs, MicroBlogs and Video News transcriptions; b) Spanish language variations in Blogs, MicroBlogs and Journals. Lab Coordination: Chiraz Latiri (University Tunis El Manar), Eric SanJuan (LIA, Avignon University), Catherine Berrut (LIG, Grenoble Alpes University), Lorraine Goeuriot (LIG, Grenoble Alpes University), Julio Gonzalo (UNED)
Lab website: https://mc2.talne.eu/
Twitter: @talne_mc2

ImageCLEF - Multimedia Retrieval in CLEF
The lab provides an evaluation forum for the language independent annotation and retrieval of images, a domain for which tools are by far not as advanced as for text analysis and retrieval.
    - Task 1 - ImageCLEFlifelog: An increasingly wide range of personal devices, such as smartphones, video cameras as well as wearable devices that allow capturing pictures, videos, and audio clips in every moment of our life are becoming available. The task addresses the problems of lifelogging data understanding, summarization and retrieval.
    - Task 2 - ImageCLEFcaption: Interpreting and summarizing the insights gained from medical images such as radiology output is a time-consuming task that involves highly trained experts and often represents a bottleneck in clinical diagnosis pipelines. The task addresses the problem of bio-medical image concept detection and caption prediction from large amounts of training data.
    - Task 3 - ImageCLEFtuberculosis: The objective of this task is to determine tuberculosis subtypes and drug resistances, as far as possible automatically, from the volumetric image information in computed tomography (CT) volumes (mainly texture analysis) and based on clinical information (e.g., age, gender, etc).
    - Task 4 - VisualQuestionAnswering: With the ongoing drive for improved patient engagement and access to the electronic medical records via patient portals, patients can now review structured and unstructured data from labs and images to text reports associated with their healthcare utilization. Given a medical image accompanied with a set of clinically relevant questions, participating systems are tasked with answering the questions based on the visual image content.
Lab Coordination: Bogdan Ionescu (University Politehnica of Bucharest), Mauricio Villegas (SearchInk), Henning Müller (HES-SO)
Lab website: http://www.imageclef.org/2018/ 
Twitter: @imageclef

PIR-CLEF - Evaluation of Personalised Information Retrieval
The primary aim of the PIR-CLEF 2018 laboratory is: 1) to facilitate comparative evaluation of PIR by offering participating research groups a mechanism for evaluation of their personalisation algorithms; 2) to give the participating groups the means to formally define and evaluate their own and novel user profiling approaches for PIR.
    - Task 1 - Personalized Search: we will provide a bag-of-words profile gathered during the query sessions performed by real searchers, the set of queries formulated by each user, together with the corresponding document relevance, and the the search logs of each user. Task participants will be expected to compute search results obtained by applying their personalization algorithms on these queries. The search will be carried out on the ClueWeb12 collection, by using the API provided by DCU.
    - Task 2 - User Profile Models: participants will be required to develop their own user profile models using the information gathered about the real user during her interactions with the system. The same information have been used for creating the baseline (keyword-based user profiles), which is provided in the benchmark.
Lab Coordination: Gabriella Pasi (University of Milano Bicocca), Gareth J. F. Jones (Dublin City University), Stefania Marrara (Consorzio C2T), Debasis Ganguly (IBM Research Dublin) , Procheta Sen (Dublin City University), Camilla Sanvitto (University of Milano Bicocca)
Lab website: http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/pir-clef2018/
Twitter: @clef2018_pir

eRISK - Early Risk Prediction on the Internet
eRisk explores the evaluation methodology, effectiveness metrics and practical applications (particularly those related to health and safety) of early risk detection on the Internet.
    - Task 1 - Early Detection of Signs of Depression: the challenge consists of sequentially processing pieces of evidence (Social Media entries) and detect early traces of depression as soon as possible.
    - Task 2 - Early Detection of Signs of Anorexia: the challenge consists of sequentially processing pieces of evidence (Social Media entries) and detect early traces of anorexia as soon as possible.
Both tasks are mainly concerned about evaluating Text Mining solutions and, thus, we concentrate on texts written in Social Media. Texts should be processed in the order they were posted. In this way, systems that effectively perform this task could be applied to sequentially monitor user interactions in blogs, social networks, or other types of online media.
Lab Coordination: David E. Losada (University of Santiago de Compostela), Fabio Crestani (University of Lugano), Javier Parapar (University of A Coruña)
Lab website: http://early.irlab.org/   
Twitter: @earlyrisk

DynSe - Dynamic Search for Complex Tasks
The primary aim of the CLEF Dynamic Search Lab is to develop algorithms which interact dynamically with user (or other algorithms) towards solving a task, and evaluation methodologies to quantify their effectiveness. The lab is organized along two tasks:
    - Task 1 - Query Suggestion: given a verbose topic description participants will generate and submit a sequence of queries and a ranking of the collection for each query. Queries will be evaluated over their effectiveness (query agent) and/or resemblance to user queries (user simulation). Query suggestion will be performed iteratively.
    - Task 2 - Result Composition: Given the obtained results from the aforementioned queries obtain a single ranked list by merging the individual rankings.
Lab Coordination: Evangelos Kanoulas (University of Amsterdam), Leif Azzopardi (University of Strathclyde)
Lab website: https://ekanou.github.io/dynamicsearch/ 
Twitter: @clef_dynamic

CheckThat! - Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims
CheckThat! aims to foster the development of technology capable of both spotting and verifying check-worthy claims in political debates in English and Arabic.
    - Task 1 - Check-Worthiness: Given a political debate, which is segmented into sentences with speakers annotated, identify which statements (claims) should be prioritized for fact-checking. This will be a ranking problem, and systems will be asked to produce a score, according to which the ranking will be performed.
    - Task 2 - Factuality: Given a list of already-extracted claims, classify them with factuality labels (e.g., true, half-true, false). This task will be run in an open mode. We will not provide any pre-selected set of documents to support the veracity labels. Participants will be free to use whatever resources they have and the Web in general, with the exception of the websites used by the organizers to collect the data.
Lab Coordination: Preslav Nakov, Lluís Màrquez, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño (Qatar Computing Research Institute), Wajdi Zaghouani (Carnegie Mellon University Qatar), Tamer Elsayed, Reem Suwaileh (Qatar University), Pepa Gencheva (Sofia University)
Lab website: http://alt.qcri.org/clef2018-factcheck/
Twitter: @_checkthat_

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 TSD 2018 - SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
         *********************************************************

Twenty-first International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2018)
              Brno, Czech Republic, 11-14 September 2018
                    http://www.tsdconference.org/

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen.  The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


THE MAIN SUBMISSION DEADLINE:

    March 22 2018 ............ Submission of full papers

Submission of abstract serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Kenneth Church, Baidu, USA
    Piek Vossen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. TSD Proceedings
are regularly indexed in Web of Science by Thomson Reuters and in Scopus.
Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases such as
DBLP, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.


CALL for SATELLITE WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

The TSD 2018 conference will be accompanied by one-day satellite workshops
or project meetings with organizational support by the TSD organizing
committee. The organizing committee can arrange for a meeting room at the
conference venue and prepare a workshop proceedings as a book with ISBN by
a local publisher. The workshop papers that will pass also the standard TSD
review process will appear in the Springer proceedings.  Each workshop is
a subject to proposal that should be sent to the contact e-mail
tsd2018@tsdconference.org ahead of the respective deadline.


TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

    Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual,
    text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation,
    specialized lexicons, dictionaries)

    Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional
    speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words,
    alternative way of feature extraction, new models for
    acoustic and language modelling)

    Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech
    (morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and
    disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis,
    credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization,
    authorship attribution)

    Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high
    fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing)

    Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information
    extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web,
    knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense
    disambiguation, plagiarism detection)

    Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing
    (machine translation, natural language understanding,
    question-answering strategies, assistive technologies)

    Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
    question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in
    dialogues)

    Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial
    animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions
    and personality modelling)

Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Elmar Noeth, Germany (general chair)
    Rodrigo Agerri, Spain
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Vladimir Benko, Slovakia
    Paul Cook, Australia
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia
    Kamil Ekstein, Czech Republic
    Karina Evgrafova, Russia
    Yevhen Fedorov, Ukraine
    Volker Fischer, Germany
    Darja Fiser, Slovenia
    Eleni Galiotou, Greece
    Björn Gambäck, Norway
    Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, USA
    Tino Haderlein, Germany
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Yannis Haralambous, France
    Hynek Hermansky, USA
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Maria Khokhlova, Russia
    Aidar Khusainov, Russia
    Daniil Kocharov, Russia
    Miloslav Konopik, Czech Republic
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Valia Kordoni, Germany
    Evgeny Kotelnikov, Russia
    Pavel Kral, Czech Republic
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Nikola LjubeÅ¡ić, Croatia
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Bernardo Magnini, Italy
    Oleksandr Marchenko, Ukraine
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    France Mihelic, Slovenia
    Roman Moucek, Czech Republic
    Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Poland
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave, Columbia
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Maciej Piasecki, Poland
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    German Rigau, Spain
    Marko Robnik Å ikonja, Slovenia
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Anna Rumshisky, USA
    Milan Rusko, Slovakia
    Pavel Rychly, Czech Republic
    Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Stefan Steidl, Germany
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Vitomir Å truc, Slovenia
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Aleksander Wawer, Poland
    Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands
    Yorick Wilks, United Kingdom
    Marcin Wolinski, Poland
    Alina Wróblewska, Poland
    Victor Zakharov, Russia
    Jerneja Žganec Gros, Slovenia


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will
be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

The Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards will be selected by the
Programme Committee and supported with a total prize of EUR 1000 from
Springer.

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.

The registration fee is the same as in 2016:

    Student: Early payment (by May 31) - 10,000 CZK (approx. EUR 395)
    Full participant: Early payment (by May 31) - 12,000 CZK (approx. EUR 475)

The fee has a 'all in one' form, to keep equality between participants.


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 8 pages
formatted in the LNCS style (see below). Those accepted will be
presented either orally or as posters. The decision about the
presentation format will be based on the recommendation of the
reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the
on-line form accessible from the conference website.

Papers submitted to TSD 2018 must not be under review by any other
conference or publication during the TSD review cycle, and must not be
previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...',
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as 'Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...'.  Papers that do not conform to the
requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.

The authors are strongly encouraged to write their papers in TeX or
LaTeX formats. These formats are necessary for the final versions of
the papers that will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes.
Authors using a WORD compatible software for the final version must
use the LNCS template for WORD and within the submit process ask the
Proceedings Editors to convert the paper to LaTeX format.  For this
service a service-and-license fee of CZK 2000 will be levied
automatically.

The paper format for review has to be in the PDF format with all
required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance, presenters
will receive further information on submitting their camera-ready and
electronic sources (for detailed instructions on the final paper
format see http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines,
Sample File typeinst.zip).

Authors are also invited to present actual projects, developed
software or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference.  The presenters of demonstrations should provide an
abstract not exceeding one page. The demonstration abstracts will not
appear in the conference proceedings.


IMPORTANT DATES

March 15 2018 ............ Submission of abstracts
March 22 2018 ............ Submission of full papers
May 16 2018 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2018 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
August 8 2018 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 15 2018 ........... Notification of acceptance for
                           demonstrations sent to the authors
September 11-14 2018 ..... Conference date

Submission of abstracts serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.

The accepted conference contributions will be published in Springer
proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time
of the conference.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 4-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation are available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
   
    Ales Horak, TSD 2018
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2018@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2018 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London and Munich,
and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, nearby places may
also be of interest.  Local ones include: Brno Castle now called
Spilberk, Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the
Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian
Margraves, Church of St.  James, Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul,
Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat
designed by Mies van der Rohe along with other important
buildings of between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with
Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of the Battle of
three emperors (Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz
- Battle by Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz),
Pernstejn Castle, Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice
Chateau, Letovice Chateau, Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish
cemeteries in Central Europe, Telc - a town on the UNESCO
heritage list, and many others are all within easy reach.

Top

 TSD 2018 - CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS
 *********************************************************

Twenty-first International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2018)
              Brno, Czech Republic, 11-14 September 2018
                    http://www.tsdconference.org/


SUBMISSION OF DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS

Authors are invited to present actual projects, developed software and
hardware or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference. The authors of the demonstrations should provide the
abstract not exceeding one page as plain text. The submission must be
made using the online form available at the conference www pages.

The accepted demonstrations will be presented during a special
Demonstration Session (see the Demo Instructions at
www.tsdconference.org).  Demonstrators can present their contribution
with their own notebook with an Internet connection provided by the
organisers or the organisers can prepare a PC computer with multimedia
support for demonstrators.

The demonstration abstracts will not appear in the Proceedings of TSD
2018, they will be published electronically at the conference website.


IMPORTANT DATES

August 8 2018 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 15 2018 ........... Notification of acceptance for
                           workshop papers and demonstrations
                           sent to the authors
September 11-14 2018 ..... Conference date


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Kenneth Church, Baidu, USA
    Minsky, Chomsky & Deep Nets

    Piek Vossen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    Leolani: a reference machine with a theory of mind for social communication

    Isabel Trancoso, INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
    Speech Analytics for Medical Applications

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen.  The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


TSD SERIES

TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. TSD Proceedings
are regularly indexed in Web of Science by Thomson Reuters and in Scopus.
Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major citation databases such as
DBLP, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.


TOPICS

Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):

    Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual,
    text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, disambiguation,
    specialized lexicons, dictionaries)

    Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional
    speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words,
    alternative way of feature extraction, new models for
    acoustic and language modelling)

    Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech
    (morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and
    disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis,
    credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization,
    authorship attribution)

    Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high
    fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing)

    Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information
    extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web,
    knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense
    disambiguation, plagiarism detection)

    Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing
    (machine translation, natural language understanding,
    question-answering strategies, assistive technologies)

    Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
    question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in
    dialogues)

    Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial
    animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions
    and personality modelling)

Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Elmar Noeth, Germany (general chair)
    Rodrigo Agerri, Spain
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Vladimir Benko, Slovakia
    Archna Bhatia, USA
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia
    Kamil Ekstein, Czech Republic
    Karina Evgrafova, Russia
    Yevhen Fedorov, Ukraine
    Volker Fischer, Germany
    Darja Fiser, Slovenia
    Eleni Galiotou, Greece
    Björn Gambäck, Norway
    Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, USA
    Tino Haderlein, Germany
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Yannis Haralambous, France
    Hynek Hermansky, USA
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Denis Jouvet, France
    Maria Khokhlova, Russia
    Aidar Khusainov, Russia
    Daniil Kocharov, Russia
    Miloslav Konopik, Czech Republic
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Valia Kordoni, Germany
    Evgeny Kotelnikov, Russia
    Pavel Kral, Czech Republic
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Nikola LjubeÅ¡ić, Croatia
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Bernardo Magnini, Italy
    Oleksandr Marchenko, Ukraine
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    France Mihelic, Slovenia
    Roman Moucek, Czech Republic
    Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Poland
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave, Colombia
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Maciej Piasecki, Poland
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    German Rigau, Spain
    Marko Robnik Å ikonja, Slovenia
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Anna Rumshisky, USA
    Milan Rusko, Slovakia
    Pavel Rychly, Czech Republic
    Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Stefan Steidl, Germany
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Vitomir Å truc, Slovenia
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Aleksander Wawer, Poland
    Pascal Wiggers, The Netherlands
    Yorick Wilks, United Kingdom
    Marcin Wolinski, Poland
    Alina Wróblewska, Poland
    Victor Zakharov, Russia
    Jerneja Žganec Gros, Slovenia


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will
be presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.

The Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards will be selected by the
Programme Committee and supported with a total prize of EUR 1000 from
Springer.

Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee has arranged discounts on accommodation in
the 4-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation are available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
   
    Ales Horak, TSD 2018
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2018@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2018 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400.000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London and Munich,
and by trains or buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

For the participants with some extra time, nearby places may
also be of interest.  Local ones include: Brno Castle now called
Spilberk, Veveri Castle, the Old and New City Halls, the
Augustine Monastery with St. Thomas Church and crypt of Moravian
Margraves, Church of St.  James, Cathedral of St. Peter & Paul,
Cartesian Monastery in Kralovo Pole, the famous Villa Tugendhat
designed by Mies van der Rohe along with other important
buildings of between-war Czech architecture.

For those willing to venture out of Brno, Moravian Karst with
Macocha Chasm and Punkva caves, battlefield of the Battle of
three emperors (Napoleon, Russian Alexander and Austrian Franz
- Battle by Austerlitz), Chateau of Slavkov (Austerlitz),
Pernstejn Castle, Buchlov Castle, Lednice Chateau, Buchlovice
Chateau, Letovice Chateau, Mikulov with one of the largest Jewish
cemeteries in Central Europe, Telc - a town on the UNESCO
heritage list, and many others are all within easy reach.

Top

 MLSP2018
    IEEE International Workshop on MACHINE LEARNING FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING
    September 17-20, 2018    Aalborg, Denmark
    MLSP2018.CONWIZ.DK
   
    CALL FOR PAPERS
    The 28th MLSP workshop in the series of workshops organized by the IEEE
    Signal Processing Society MLSP Technical Committee will present the most
    recent and exciting advances in machine learning for signal processing
    through keynote talks, tutorials, as well as special and regular
    single-track sessions. Prospective authors are invited to submit papers
    on relevant algorithms and applications including, but not limited to:
   
    - Learning theory and modeling
    - Neural networks and deep learning
    - Bayesian Learning and modeling
    - Sequential learning; sequential decision methods
    - Information-theoretic learning
    - Graphical and kernel models
    - Bounds on performance
    - Source separation and independent component analysis
    - Signal detection, pattern recognition and classification
    - Tensor and structured matrix methods
    - Machine learning for big data
    - Large scale learning
    - Dictionary learning, subspace and manifold learning
    - Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning
    - Active and reinforcement learning
    - Learning from multimodal data
    - Resource efficient machine learning
    - Cognitive information processing
    - Bioinformatics applications
    - Biomedical applications and neural engineering
    - Speech and audio processing applications
    - Image and video processing applications
    - Intelligent multimedia and web processing
    - Communications applications
    - Other applications including social networks, games, smart grid,
    security and privacy
   
    DATA ANALYSIS AND SIGNAL PROCESSING COMPETITION
    MLSP2018 seeks proposals for Data Analysis and Signal Processing
    Competition. The goal of competition is to advance the current
    state-of-the-art in theoretical and practical aspects of signal
    processing domains.
   
    SPECIAL SESSIONS
    Special Sessions will be included to address research in emerging or
    interdisciplinary areas of particular interest, not covered already by
    traditional MLSP sessions.
   
    BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD
    The MLSP Best Student Paper Award will be granted to the best paper for
    which a student is the principal author and presenter.
   
    NETWORKING
    MLSP Networking will be organized as a new initiative to focus on
    stimulating collaboration among participants to solve grand societal
    challenges using machine learning and signal processing.
   
    PAPER SUBMISSION
    Prospective authors are invited to submit a double column paper of up to
    six pages using the electronic submission procedure at
    http://mlsp2018.conwiz.dk. Accepted papers will be published on a
    password-protected website that will be available during the workshop.
    The presented papers will be published in and indexed by IEEE Xplore.
   
    IMPORTANT DATES AND DEADLINES:
    Paper submission deadline      May 1, 2018
    Paper update deadline          May 4, 2018
    Review notification            June 18, 2018
    Rebuttal period                June 18-24, 2018
    Reviewer discussion period     June 25-30, 2018
    Decision notification          July 6, 2018
    Camera-ready papers and
    Author advance registration    July 31, 2018
   
    ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
    General Chair:
    Zheng-Hua Tan, Aalborg University, Denmark
   
    Program Chairs:
    Nelly Pustelnik, ENS Lyon, France
    Zhanyu Ma, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
   
    Finance Chair:
    Børge Lindberg, Aalborg University, Denmark
   
    Data Competition Chairs:
    Karim Seghouane, University of Melbourne, Australia
    Yuejie Chi, Ohio State University, USA
   
    Publicity and Social Media Chairs:
    Marc Van Hulle, KU Leuven, Belgium
    Jen-Tzung Chien, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
   
    Web and Publication Chair:
    Jan Larsen, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
   
    Advisory Committee:
    Søren Holdt Jensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
    Theodoridis Sergios, University of Athens, Greece
    Raviv Raich, Oregon State University, USA
    Vince Calhoun, University of New Mexico, USA

Top

 SPECOM-2018 - CALL FOR PAPERS
*********************************************************

20th International Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM-2018)
Venue: Leipzig, Germany, September 18-22, 2018
Web: www.specom2018.org

ORGANIZERS
The conference is organized by Leipzig University of Telecommunications (HfTL, Leipzig, Germany) in cooperation with St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Science (SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU, Moscow, Russia).

SPECOM-2018 CO-CHAIRS
Oliver Jokisch, Leipzig University of Telecommunications, Germany
Alexey Karpov, SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia
Rodmonga Potapova, MSLU, Moscow, Russia

CONFERENCE TOPICS
The SPECOM conference is devoted to issues of speech technology, human-machine interaction, machine learning and signal processing, particularly:
Affective computing
Applications for human-computer interaction
Audio-visual speech processing
Automatic language identification
Corpus linguistics and linguistic processing
Forensic speech investigations and security systems
Multichannel signal processing
Multimedia processing
Multimodal analysis and synthesis
Signal processing and feature extraction
Speaker identification and diarization
Speaker verification systems
Speech and language resources
Speech analytics and audio mining
Speech dereverberation
Speech driving systems in robotics
Speech enhancement
Speech perception and speech disorders
Speech recognition and understanding
Speech translation automatic systems
Spoken dialogue systems
Spoken language processing
Text-to-speech and Speech-to-text systems
Virtual and augmented reality

SPECIAL SESSIONS
Positioning and Power Relations in Conversations: www.specom2018.org/satellites/session1
Advanced Cognitive Models for Human-Machine and Human-Robot Interaction: www.specom2018.org/satellites/session2
Big Data in Speech Computation: www.specom2018.org/satellites/session3

SATELLITE EVENT
3rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2018: http://specom.nw.ru/icr2018 

INVITED SPEAKERS
Tanja Schultz - Advances in Biosignal-Based Spoken Communication 
Sebastian Moller - Quality Engineering of Speech and Language Services
Dongheui Lee - Robot learning through Physical Interaction and Human Guidance
www.specom2018.org/invited-speakers

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
The official language of the event is English. However, papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly encouraged.

FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE
The conference program will include presentation of invited papers, oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 10 pages formatted in the LNCS style. Those accepted will be presented either orally or as posters. The decision on the presentation format will be based upon the recommendation of several independent reviewers. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the on-line submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specom2018
Papers submitted to SPECOM-2018 must not be under review by any other conference or publication during the SPECOM review cycle, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

PROCEEDINGS
SPECOM Proceedings will be published by Springer as a book in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI/LNCS) series listed in all major citation databases such as  Web of Science, Scopus, DBLP, etc. SPECOM Proceedings are included in the list of forthcoming proceedings for September 2018.

IMPORTANT DATES
April 15, 2018 ............ Submission of full papers
May   30, 2018 ............ Notification of acceptance
June  15, 2018 ............ Final papers (camera ready) and early registration
Sept. 18-22, 2018 ......... Conference dates

VENUE
The conference will be organized at the at the Leipzig University of Telecommunications.

CONTACTS
All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:
SPECOM-2018 Secretariat:
E-mails: specom@iias.spb.su; jokisch@hft-leipzig.de
SPECOM-2018 web-site: http://www.specom2018.org; http://specom.nw.ru

Top

LAUGHTER WORKSHOP 2018

Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbruecken (2007), Berlin (2009), Dublin (2012) and Enschede (2015), we have the pleasure to announce a forthcoming workshop in Paris, France in September 2018.

Non-verbal vocalisations in human-human and human-machine interactions play important roles in displaying social and affective behaviors and in controlling the flow of interaction. Laughter, sighs, filled pauses, and short utterances such as feedback responses are among some of the non-verbal vocalisations that have been studied previously from various research fields. However, much is still unknown about the phonetic or visual characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations (production/encoding) and their relations to their intentions and perceived meanings (perception/decoding) in interaction.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together scientists from diverse research areas and to provide an exchange forum for interdisciplinary discussions in order to gain a better understanding of laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations. The workshop will consist of invited talks and oral presentations of ongoing research and discussion papers.

We invite contributions concerning laughter and other non-verbal vocalisations from the fields of phonetics, linguistics, psychology, conversation analysis, social signal processing, and human-machine/robot interaction. In particular, topics related to the following aspects are very much welcomed:

* Multimodal interaction: visual aspects of non-verbal vocalisations, e.g., smiles, relation between non-verbal vocalisations and visual behaviors
* Social and affective behavior: decoding and encoding of emotion/socio-related states in non-verbal vocalisations
* Conversation: (pragmatic) role of non-verbal vocalisations in dialog
* Computation: automatic analysis and generation of non-verbal vocalisations

Submission procedure
 
Researchers are invited to submit an extended abstract of their work, including work in progress. Please send your extended abstract of max. 4 pages, 11pt font (including references) in PDF format to laughterworkshop2018@isir.upmc.fr. Each submission should follow the ACL style ? the author kits (LaTeX and Word) can be downloaded from the workshop web site. In the email, please include the name of the authors, their affiliations and the email address of the corresponding author, and a title of the abstract. Abstracts will undergo a review process performed by at least 2 reviewers. The submissions will be made available online.

Registration
 
Attendees are asked to register by sending an email to laughterworkshop2018 at isir dot upmc dot fr.

Important dates

 * Abstract submission deadline:  26 May 2018
* Notification acceptance/rejection:  29 June 2018
* Registration deadline by email: 14 September 2018
* Workshop dates: 27-28 September 2018

Venue
 
ISIR, Sorbonne University

http://www.isir.upmc.fr/

Website

 Please check the website 

http://pages.isir.upmc.fr/~pelachaud/site/LaughterWorkshop18.html

for updated information about the workshop

Organizers
 

Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS ? ISIR, Sorbonne University

Jonathan Ginzburg, University Paris Diderot

Jürgen Trouvain, Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University
Nick Campbell, School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, Trinity College Dublin
Khiet Truong, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente/Radboud University
Dirk Heylen, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente

Contact information

 Catherine Pelachaud

CNRS - ISIR, Sorbonne University

catherine.pelachaud@upmc.fr

Top

Link to Call for Papers and Submission Website:
https://easychair.org/cfp/ETAP4 (see also text below)

Conference website: https://etap4.krisyu.org

The 4th Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP4)
conference will be held from October 11-13, 2018, at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. This conference
focuses on questions about the production, interpretation, and
characterization of speech prosody, bringing together researchers in
linguistics, psychology, and computer science.

The theme of ETAP4 is ?Sociolectal and dialectal variability in
prosody.? As in many language fields, studies of prosody have focused
on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in
social structures. The goal of ETAP4 is to help diversify prosody
research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as
well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The
conference will bring together prosody researchers and researchers
exploring the role of sociological variation in prosody, with a focus
on understudied dialects and endangered languages, and individual
differences based on gender and sexuality. Invited speakers will (i)
raise what questions and areas they think would benefit from prosodic
research, (ii) teach prosody researchers what they need to know to do
research in these areas, and (iii) share insights from their
experience engaging with the public around issues of understudied and
endangered languages, linguistic bias, and intersectionality in
science.

A satellite workshop on African-American English prosody will be held
on October 10, 2018 to bring together participants to contribute
common data sets and discuss the development of shared data resources
and methodological considerations such as challenges in prosodic
transcription. For updates on this workshop, subscribe to the e-mail
list here: https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/etap4-aae/

We invite submission of abstracts describing work related to the
conference theme as well as topics in prosody more generally from
diverse approaches, including fieldwork, experiments, computational
modeling, theoretical analyses, etc. These topics include:

- Phonology and phonetics of prosody
- Cognitive processing and modelling of prosody
- Tone and intonation
- Acquisition of prosody
- Interfaces with syntax, semantics, pragmatics
- Prosody in natural language processing

In addition to talks from invited speakers, there will be additional
talks, and two poster sessions.

Abstracts for talks and posters must be submitted in a pdf format.
Your abstract must include the submission?s title at the top, and must
not include authors? names and affiliations, or any identifying
information (i.e., ?In Liberman & Pierrehumbert (1984), we
showed...?). Abstracts should be submitted in letter format (8.5' x
11' - not A4), with 1-inch margins on all sides, and in Arial 11 point
font. The abstract itself (text) may be no longer than one page; a
second page containing additional figures, tables, other graphics
and/or references may be included.

To get updates on the conference, subscribe to the e-mail list here:
https://list.umass.edu/mailman/listinfo/etap4

Submission deadline: May  14, 2018, 11:59 PM AoE (anywhere on earth). Updated

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6th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STATISTICAL LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING
 
SLSP 2018
 
Mons, Belgium
 
October 15-17, 2018
 
Co-organized by:
 
NUMEDIART Institute
University of Mons
 
LANGUAGE Institute
University of Mons
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA), Brussels/London
 
http://slsp2018.irdta.eu/
 
**********************************************************************************
 
AIMS:
 
SLSP is a yearly conference series aimed at promoting and displaying excellent research on the wide spectrum of statistical methods that are currently in use in computational language or speech processing. It aims at attracting contributions from both fields. Though there exist large, well-known conferences and workshops hosting contributions to any of these areas, SLSP is a more focused meeting where synergies between subdomains and people will hopefully happen. In SLSP 2018, significant room will be reserved to young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology.
 
VENUE:
 
SLSP 2018 will take place in Mons, which was European Capital of Culture in 2015. The venue will be:
 
University of Mons
31 Bvd Dolez, 7000 Mons
Belgium
 
SCOPE:
 
The conference invites submissions discussing the employment of statistical models (including machine learning) within language and speech processing. Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:
 
anaphora and coreference resolution
authorship identification, plagiarism and spam filtering
computer-aided translation
corpora and language resources
data mining and semantic web
information extraction
information retrieval
knowledge representation and ontologies
lexicons and dictionaries
machine translation
multimodal technologies
natural language understanding
neural representation of speech and language
opinion mining and sentiment analysis
parsing
part-of-speech tagging
question-answering systems
semantic role labelling
speaker identification and verification
speech and language generation
speech recognition
speech synthesis
speech transcription
spelling correction
spoken dialogue systems
term extraction
text categorisation
text summarisation
user modeling
 
STRUCTURE:
 
SLSP 2018 will consist of:
 
invited talks
peer-reviewed contributions
posters
 
INVITED SPEAKERS:
 
Thomas Hain (University of Sheffield), Crossing Domains in Automatic Speech Recognition
 
Simon King (University of Edinburgh), Does 'End-to-End' Speech Synthesis Make any Sense?
 
Isabel Trancoso (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon), Analysing Speech for Clinical Applications
 
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
 
Steven Abney (University of Michigan, US)
Srinivas Bangalore (Interactions LLC, US)
Jean-François Bonastre (University of Avignon et Pays du Vaucluse, FR)
Pierrette Bouillon (University of Geneva, CH)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Italian National Research Council, IT)
Erik Cambria (Nanyang Technological University, SG)
Kenneth W. Church (Baidu Research, US)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp, BE)
Thierry Dutoit (University of Mons, BE)
Marcello Federico (Bruno Kessler Foundation, IT)
Robert Gaizauskas (University of Sheffield, UK)
Ralph Grishman (New York University, US)
Udo Hahn (University of Jena, DE)
Siegfried Handschuh (University of Passau, DE)
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (University of Illinois, Urbana?Champaign, US)
Keikichi Hirose (University of Tokyo, JP)
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University, US)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College, US)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, IE)
Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Haizhou Li (National University of Singapore, SG)
Carlos Martín-Vide (Rovira i Virgili University, ES, chair)
Yuji Matsumoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, JP)
Alessandro Moschitti (Qatar Computing Research Institute, QA)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, DE)
Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montréal, CA)
Elmar Nöth (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, DE)
Cecile Paris (CSIRO Data61, AU)
Jong C. Park (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, KR)
Alexandros Potamianos (National Technical University of Athens, GR)
Paul Rayson (Lancaster University, UK)
Mats Rooth (Cornell University, US)
Paolo Rosso (Technical University of Valencia, ES)
Alexander Rudnicky (Carnegie Mellon University, US)
Tanja Schultz (University of Bremen, DE)
Holger Schwenk (Facebook AI Research, FR)
Vijay K. Shanker (University of Delaware, US)
Richard Sproat (Google Research, US)
Tomoki Toda (Nagoya University, JP)
Gökhan Tür (Google Research, US)
Yorick Wilks (Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, US)
Phil Woodland (University of Cambridge, UK)
Dekai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK)
Junichi Yamagishi (University of Edinburgh, UK)
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
 
Stéphane Dupont (Mons)
Thierry Dutoit (Mons, co-chair)
Kévin El Haddad (Mons)
Kathy Huet (Mons)
Sara Morales (Brussels)
Manuel J. Parra Royón (Granada)
Gueorgui Pironkov (Mons)
David Silva (London, co-chair)
 
SUBMISSIONS:
 
Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (all included) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).
 
Submissions have to be uploaded to:
 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slsp2018
 
PUBLICATIONS:
 
A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS/LNAI series will be available by the time of the conference.
 
A special issue of Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier, JCR 2016 impact factor: 1.900) will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.
 
REGISTRATION:
 
The registration form can be found at:
 
http://slsp2018.irdta.eu/Registration.php
 
DEADLINES (all at 23:59 CET):
 
Paper submission: May 27, 2018
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: July 3, 2018
Final version of the paper for the LNCS/LNAI proceedings: July 13, 2018
Early registration: July 13, 2018
Late registration: October 1, 2018
Submission to the journal special issue: January 17, 2019
 
QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
 
david@irdta.eu
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
 
Université de Mons
 
Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice (IRDTA), Brussels/London

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4th International Workshop on

Multimodal Analyses enabling Artificial Agents in Human-Machine Interaction

(MA3HMI 2018)

October 16th, 2018 in Boulder, USA.

In conjunction with ICMI2018.

http://MA3HMI.cogsy.de

Scope:

One of the aims in building multimodal user interfaces and combining them with technical devices is to make the interaction between user and system as natural as possible. The most natural form of interaction may be how we interact with other humans. Although technology is still far from human-like, and systems can reflect a wide range of technical solutions. They are often represented as artificial agents to facilitate smooth inter-actions. While the analysis of human-human communication has resulted in many insights.

Transferring these to human-machine interactions remains challenging especially if multiple possible interlocutors are present in a certain area. This situation requires that multimodal inputs from the main speaker (e.g., speech, gaze, facial expressions) as well as possible co-speaker are recorded and interpreted. This interpretation has to occur at both the semantic and affective levels, including aspects such as the personality, mood, or intentions of the user, anticipating the counterpart. These processes have to be performed in real-time in order for the system to respond without delays, in a natural environment.

The MA3HMI workshop aims at bringing together researchers working on the analysis of multimodal data as a means to develop technical devices that can interact with humans. In particular, artificial agents can be regarded in their broadest sense, including virtual chat agents, empathic speech interfaces and life-style coaches on a smart-phone. More general, multimodal analyses support any technical system being located in the research area of human-machine interaction. For the 2018 edition, we focus on the environment and situation an interaction is situated in extending the investigations on real-time aspects of human-machine interaction. We address the synergy of situation, context, and interaction history in the development and evaluation of multimodal, real-time systems.

We solicit papers that concern the different perspectives of such human-machine interaction. Tools and systems that address real-time conversations with artificial agents and technical systems are also within the scope of the workshop.

Topics (but not limited to):

a) Multimodal Environment Analyses

- Multimodal understanding of situation and environment of natural interactions

- Annotation paradigms for user analyses in natural interactions

- Novel strategies of human-machine interaction in terms of situation and environment

b) Multimodal User Analyses

- Multimodal understanding of user behavior and affective state

- Dialogue management using multimodal output

- Multimodal understanding of multiple users behavior and affective

- Annotation paradigms for user analyses in natural interactions

- Novel strategies of human-machine interactions

c) Applications, Tools, and Systems

- Novel application domains and embodied interaction

- Prototype development and uptake of technology

- User studies with (partial) functional systems

- Tools for the recording, annotation and analysis of conversations

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: July 30th, 2018

Notification of Acceptance: September 10th, 2018

Camera-ready Deadline: September 15th, 2018

Workshop Date: October 16th, 2018

Submissions:

Prospective authors are invited to submit full papers (8 pages) and short papers (5 pages) in ACM format as specified by ICMI 2018. Accepted papers will be published as post-proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. All submissions should be anonymous.

Organisers:

Ronald Böck, University Magdeburg, Germany

Francesca Bonin, IBM Research, Ireland

Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Ronald Poppe, Utrecht University, Netherland

--

Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Inf. Ronald Böck

FEIT IIKT-Cognitive Systems

Building 03, Room 322

Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg

Universitaetsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany

Phone: +49 391 67 50061

E-mail:

ronald.boeck@ieee.org

ronald.boeck@ovgu.de

Web: http://www.kognitivesysteme.de

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Boulder, Colorado, October 16th, 2018
http://h3-icmi2018.cse.tamu.edu

Workshop in conjunction with:
20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
Boulder, Colorado, USA, October 16-20th, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS
In the Internet of Things era, digital human interaction with the habitat environment can be perceived as the continuous interconnection and exchange of cognitive, social, and affective signals between an individual or a group, and any type of environment built for humans. Through the integration of various interconnected devices, we can collect multimodal data including speech, spoken content, physiological, psychophysiological, and environmental signals, that enable the sensing of a person?s activity, mood, emotions, preferences, and/or health state, and ultimately provide appropriate feedback. Applications of these include artificial conversational agents, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, that enable voice powered human computer interaction to provide new information or conduct procedural tasks, in-the-moment automatic habitat adaptation systems that provide comfort and relaxation, human health and well-being support systems that are able to track the progress of a disease, detect high-risk episodes, and ultimately provide feedback or take appropriate. For example, such systems can monitor linguistic and acoustic markers of patients with depression, predict suicidal tendencies, and take appropriate action, or track individuals? stress levels and guide them through mini-interventions. Some of the challenges involved in these tasks include the diverse nature of the acquired data, the high variability present in habitat environments, and the inherent unpredictability and multi-faceted nature of human behavior. The H3 workshop aims to bring together experts from academia and industry spanning a set of multi-disciplinary fields, including computer science, speech and spoken language understanding, construction science, life-sciences, health sciences, and psychology, to discuss their respective views of the problem and identify synergistic and converging solutions.

A special issue of a journal based on the selected contributions from the workshop is planned.

WORKSHOP TOPICS
We encourage submissions including, but not limited to, the following topics:
* Open challenges in capturing and modeling human-habitat interaction (e.g., scarcity of available data)
* Audio processing applications for habitat environments, including speech recognition, speaker identification, emotion and mood recognition
* Spoken language understanding applications that consider user state, emotions, personalization, and other user or environment context
* Physiological signal processing, including noise removal, motion artifact elimination, feature extraction
* Integration of environmental sensors (e.g., temperature, humidity, lighting) for building context-specific models of human behavior and affect
* Human-computer interaction in the habitat environment (e.g., conversational agents, assistive/leisure robots)
* Well-being and clinical applications including promoting user comfort, or heath-state monitoring and intervention
* Human interaction with virtual reality environments
* Privacy and ethical considerations when developing smart environments and related applications

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International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI)

Boulder, Colorado, October 16-20th, 2018

https://icmi.acm.org/2018/

Call for Doctoral Consortium Contributions

EXTENDED June 25th, Decisions July 20th, Camera Ready July 31st.

Submission and general info: https://icmi.acm.org/2018/index.php?id=cfdc  

**********

The goal of the ICMI Doctoral Consortium is to provide PhD students with an opportunity to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from a diverse set of academic and industrial institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young researchers interested in designing and developing multimodal interfaces and interaction. We invite students from all PhD granting institutions who are in the process of forming or carrying out a plan for their PhD research in the area of designing and developing multimodal interfaces. The Consortium will be held on October 16, 2018. We expect to provide economic support to most attendees that will cover part of their costs (travel, registration, meals etc.).

Who should apply?

While we encourage applications from students at any stage of doctoral training, the doctoral consortium will benefit most the students who are in the process of forming or developing their doctoral research. These students will have passed their qualifiers or have completed the majority of their coursework, will be planning or developing their dissertation research, and will not be very close to completing their dissertation research. Students from any PhD granting institution whose research falls within designing and developing multimodal interfaces and interaction are encouraged to apply.

Submission Guidelines

Graduate students pursuing a PhD degree in a field related to designing multimodal interfaces should submit the following materials:

1) Extended Abstract: A four-page description of your PhD research plan and progress in the ACM SigConf format. Your extended abstract should follow the same outline, details, and format of the ICMI short papers. The submissions will not be anonymous. In particular, it should cover:

  - The key research questions and motivation of your research,

  - Background and related work that informs your research,

  - A statement of hypotheses or a description of the scope of the technical problem,

  - Your research plan, outlining stages of system development or series of studies,

  - The research approach and methodology,

  - Your results to date (if any) and a description of remaining work,

  - A statement of research contributions to date (if any) and expected contributions of your PhD work.

2) Advisor Letter: A one-page letter of nomination from the student's PhD advisor. This letter is not a letter of support. Instead, it should focus on the student's PhD plan and how the Doctoral Consortium event might contribute to the student's PhD training and research.

3) CV: A two-page curriculum vitae of the student.

All materials should be prepared in PDF format and submitted through the ICMI submission system.

Review Process

The Doctoral Consortium will follow a review process in which submissions will be evaluated by a number of factors including (1) the quality of the submission, (2) the expected benefits of the consortium for the student's PhD research, and (3) the student's contribution to the diversity of topics, backgrounds, and institutions, in order of importance. More particularly, the quality of the submission will be evaluated based on the potential contributions of the research to the field of multimodal interfaces and its impact on the field and beyond. Finally, we hope to achieve a diversity of research topics, disciplinary backgrounds, methodological approaches, and home institutions in this year's Doctoral Consortium cohort. We do not expect more than two students to be invited from each institution to represent a diverse sample. Women and other underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply.

Financial Support

We hope to provide most student attendees with partial financial support to cover the costs of attending the Doctoral Consortium and the conference. However, the details on the number of students to be funded and funding coverage is currently unknown, as we are currently working on raising funds. More detail on travel support will be announced on the Doctoral Consortium page of the main conference website.

Attendance

All authors of accepted submissions are expected to attend the Doctoral Consortium and the main conference poster session. The attendees will present their PhD work as a short talk at the Consortium and as a poster at the conference poster session. A detailed program for the Consortium and the participation guidelines for the poster session will be available after the camera-ready deadline.

Process

- Submission format: Four-page extended abstract using the ACM format (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#aL2).

- Submission system: To be updated.

- Selection process: Peer-Reviewed

- Presentation format: Talk on consortium day and participation in the conference poster session

- Proceedings: Included in conference proceedings and ACM Digital Library

- Doctoral Consortium Co-chairs: Roland Goecke (U Canberra) and Yelin Kim (SUNY Albany)

Dates

Submission deadline: EXTENDED to June 25th 2018

Notifications: July 20th 2018

Camera-ready deadline: July 31st 2018

Doctoral Consortium Date: October 16th 2018

Questions?

For more information and updates on the ICMI 2018 Doctoral Consortium, visit the Doctoral Consortium page of the main conference website (https://icmi.acm.org/2018/index.php?id=cfdc)

For further questions, contact the Doctoral Consortium co-chairs:

- Roland Goecke (U Canberra) Roland.Goecke@canberra.edu.au

- Yelin Kim (SUNY Albany) yelinkim@albany.edu

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Call for Papers (Submission deadline EXTENDED to July 15)

---------------------------------------------------------

First International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports @ ACM Multimedia, October 22-26, 2018, Seoul, Korea

We'd like to invite you to submit your paper proposals for the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports to be held in Seoul, Korea together with ACM Multimedia 2018. The ambition of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share ideas on current multimedia/multimodal content analysis research in sports. We welcome multimodal-based research contributions as well as best-practice contributions focusing on the following (and similar, but not limited to) topics:

– annotation and indexing

– athlete and object tracking

– activity recognition, classification and evaluation

– event detection and indexing

– performance assessment

– injury analysis and prevention

– data driven analysis in sports

– graphical augmentation and visualization in sports

– automated training assistance

– camera pose and motion tracking

– brave new ideas / extraordinary multimodal solutions

Please refer to the workshop website for further information:

http://www.multimedia-computing.de/mmsports/

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Due:              EXTENDED TO: July 15, 2018

Acceptance Notification:     August 5, 2018

Camera Ready Submission:     August 12, 2018

Workshop Date:               TBA; either Oct 22 or Oct 26, 2018

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• Bipolar Disorder Sub-challenge (BDS) ? participants have to classify patients suffering from bipolar disorder into remission, hypo-mania and mania, as defined by the young mania rating scale, from audio-visual recordings of structured interviews (BD corpus); performance is measured by the unweighted average recall over the three classes.

• Cross-cultural Emotion Sub-challenge (CES) ? participants have to predict the level of three emotional dimensions (arousal, valence, and likability) time-continuously in a cross-cultural setup (German => Hungarian) from audio-visual recordings of dyadic interactions (SEWA corpus); performance is the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) averaged over the dimensions.

• Gold-standard Emotion Sub-Challenge (GES) ? participants have to generate a gold-standard (i.e., a single time series of emotion labels) from individual ratings of emotional dimensions (arousal, valence) that will be evaluated by a multimodal (audio, video, physiology) emotion recognition system from recordings of dyadic interactions (RECOLA corpus); performance is the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) averaged over the dimensions.

• Multimodal Affect Sensing

• Audio-based Health/Emotion Recognition
• Video-based Health/Emotion Recognition
• Physiological-based Health/Emotion Recognition
• Multimodal Representation Learning
• Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Learning
• Multi-view learning of Multiple Dimensions
• Personalised Health/Emotion Recognition
• Context in Health/Emotion Recognition
• Multiple Rater Ambiguity and Asynchrony

• Application
• Multimedia Coding and Retrieval
• Mobile and Online Applications 

• Paper submission: June 30, 2018
• Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2018
• Camera ready paper: August 14, 2018
• Workshop: October 22-26, 2018 (to be communicated)

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CALL FOR PAPERS

XV1^th International Conference of Creole Studies

'Creole Worlds, Creole Languages and Development: Educational, Cultural and Economic Challenges'

28 October 2018 - 3 November 2018, Mahé, Seychelles

The International Committee for Creole Studies (Comité International des Etudes Créoles (CIEC)) has organized International Conferences on Creole Studies for the past fifty years, at regular intervals. In 2018, the XVIth International Conference of Creole Studies will be held in Seychelles; the organization has been entrusted to the University of Seychelles in liaison with the CIEC.

The international community (UNESCO, UNDP etc.) and the Organization Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) support the educational linguistic policy and the possible institutionalization of Creole languages in the dozen of Creole-speaking countries (France and its Departments, Haiti, Dominica, Mauritius, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, San Tome and Principe) that are members of OIF. Creole studies are called upon to contribute decisively to these programs and endeavours.

The importance of Creole studies stems primarily from its contributions to the linguistic, cultural and social development of Creole -speaking societies. Beyond, the study of the genesis and development of Creole social, linguistic and cultural systems constitutes a remarkable field of study for human and social sciences, because 'Creole' societies have been formed recently (three to four centuries of existence as a rule) and because of how they are composed and evolve.

The XVIth International Symposium on Creole Studies will focus on:

'Creole Worlds, Creole Languages, Development: Educational, Cultural and Economic Challenges'.

This theme invites philosophers, historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, linguists and other researchers in human and social sciences to present their work on contemporary Creole societies in their historical, linguistic, social, political, economic and cultural evolution.

The focus of the colloquium will be on the following four major themes:

A. Creole languages and education

B. Creole Worlds and their Cultural and Economic Challenges of Development

C. Creole languages in a multilingual environment: description and analysis of the dynamics of Creole languages

D. Creole grammar: typology, variation and teaching

Presentation of the themes of the Conference

A. Creole languages and education

Faced with the challenges of education for all, in basic and middle schools, sovereign countries that use a French Creole language have introduced some measure of Creole language teaching in their schools. Some states, such as Seychelles or Haiti, have acquired a vast experience in the domain that should be examined. Mauritius has recently also embarked on this venture which calls for evaluation. The Creole-speaking Outremer Departments, whose creoles are recognized regional languages of France and which benefit from the texts regulating the teaching of regional languages in France, have also many educational practices to share.

B. Creole Worlds and their Cultural and Economic Challenges of Development

Anthropology and the history of Creole worlds are called upon to account for how the creole-speaking social formations, resulting from European colonial expansion, are facing the challenges of development and globalization.

The role of Creole languages in the development of economy (tourism, reception of migrants, etc.) has to be assessed.

Literary production in the Creole speaking islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean has developed greatly in recent years in French and English as well as in Creole languages. The study of this renewal of literature and cultural practices also forms part of theme B.

The migratory movements of creole speakers (see also topic C) will also be discussed.

What are the paths of the institutionalization of the Creole languages in their respective areas of influence (see the question of Creole language academies)? Creole militant practices may also be mentioned.

C. Creole languages in a multilingual environment: description and analysis of the dynamics of Creole languages.

Recent globalization have caused many displacements of Creole-speaking populations towards more developed economic zones. New Creole-speaking communities have thus been created outside the territories of birth, such as Haitian communities in North America, populations from the Creole speaking Departments in metropolitan France, Mauritians in Australia and Seychellois in the United Kingdom. Creole speaking newcomers are found in prosperous creole-speaking areas, for instance, Haitians in Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean.Immigration to Creole-speaking areas also leads to the emergence of neo-learners of Creole languages. Globalization has led to an unprecedented diffusion of Creole languages, including via language and culture industries. These new sociolinguistic situations of diffusion have hardly been described to date. Similarly, little is known about the impact of these migratory movements on the dynamics of Creole languages. To these themes may be added the study of the genesis and evolution of Creole languages.