ISCA - International Speech
Communication Association


ISCApad Archive  »  2020  »  ISCApad #269  »  Academic and Industry Notes

ISCApad #269

Thursday, November 12, 2020 by Chris Wellekens

4 Academic and Industry Notes
4-1M.Sc. Program in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Science, Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France)

M.Sc. Program in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Data Science
Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France)


The Institute of Digital Sciences, Management and Cognition
is opening a Masters Program in NLP - ??
Computer Science, Speech, Language and Knowledge Representation

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

http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/idmc-master-degree-in-natural-language-processing/
**************

So you want to be a specialist in Neural Networks, Logic, Speech
Processing, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Representation... all
for Natural Language? Well, now's your chance!

Natural Language Processing (NLP) lies at the crossroads of
linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence. This
Masters Program offers a modern curriculum which combines the
different approaches, and covers both theoretical and applied
perspectives.


In each semester, the program includes a hands-on project.
It ends with a 6-month paid internship in a company or a research
lab. You can find the course description below.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can apply to directly enter at either the first year (M1) or second year (M2) level.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Language
-------------
All courses are taught in English
(except the 'French for non-native speakers' class).


Fees
-------
The University of Lorraine is publicly funded and thus offers
tuition-free education for many students including students
from the EU (243 ? cost per year). The tuition fee for students
from other nations arriving in France at the beginning of
the 2019 academic year will be 3.770 ? per year.

Find more information here:
https://www.campusfrance.org/en/tuition-fees-France

Nancy?s high quality of life goes hand-in-hand with a low cost
of living.


Why Nancy?
---------------
Nancy is a center of excellence for NLP. It can boast of:

1/Two important research units:
- LORIA, the computer science research laboratory http://www.loria.fr/en/
- ATILF the linguistic research laboratory http://www.atilf.fr/

Both research units participate in many national and
international research projects. Their members are highly
visible in the international community and regularly publish
in the most prestigious conferences and journals of the field.

2/ Two Erasmus Mundus Masters funded by the European Union :
- Erasmus Mundus Master Language and Communication
Technology (LCT) http://lct-master.org/
- Erasmus Mundus Master EMLex.
        https://www.emlex.phil.fau.eu/


Why NLP?
--------------
Natural Language Processing is a rapidly expanding field.

With the proliferation of digital data, there is a massive need
for well-trained engineers and researchers able to exploit this
data for commercial (for example: e-commerce, recommender
systems and translation) and socio-political (for example:
e-learning, opinion mining, and behavioural predictions) purposes.

Start-ups, small firms with strong R&D profiles and large companies
(in France this includes Airbus, Thales, EDF, Orange, etc.) are
looking for scientists and engineers who can contribute to the
development of systems capable of managing and exploiting textual
data.

The GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) also recruit
intensively in both the NLP and the Speech processing domain.

There is also a strong need for Ph.D. candidates in the field, as
demonstrated by the many Ph.D. proposals in both the public and
the industrial domain.



Contacts
------------
Head of the Master program: Maxime Amblard
        maxime.amblard@univ-lorraine.fr
Secretary: Karine Weisse
        karine.weisse@univ-lorraine.fr

Location of the courses:
        École des Mines (Artem Campus, Tram stop 'Blandan')
        http://www.alliance-artem.fr/


Application
---------------
Non-European students
---------------
Students from most non-UE countries shall apply on
https://pastel.diplomatie.gouv.fr/etudesenfrance/dyn/public/authentification/login.html?_csrf=a530f0a6-e1d3-4052-ba91-f2cb8029fcd8&codeLangue=EN
(search Traitement Automatique des Langues Nancy)

Students from other non-EU countries can directly apply with the following file:
http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/applicationfilem-sc_-nlp19-20/


European students
---------------
The application file for EU students is available here:
https://ecandidat.univ-lorraine.fr

Create an account then follow:
        - Offre de formation
        - Institut des sciences du digital, management et cognition
        - Master
        - M1-Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) (NANCY) (FI)
           or
        - M2-Traitement Automatique des Langues (TAL) PT Informatique, langue, parole et
connaissances (NANCY) (FI)

More information:
http://institut-sciences-digitales.fr/application-process-nlp-master-degree/#application


Academic Year 2019-2020
-----------------------------------
From 3rd to 13th September 2019: Refresher courses in
mathematics (probability theory and statistics) and computer
science (algorithms and programming).

M1:
        1st semester from September 2nd to January 10th
        2nd semester from January 13th to June 5th
M2:
        1st semester from September 2nd to March 27th
        Internship from February to August


In brief
----------
? A program with strong national and international visibility
? Taught entirely in English
? A high quality research environment with two research centers
covering a wide range of disciplines (linguistics, computer
science, speech and language processing) and applications
(human-machine interfaces, speech processing, knowledge
extraction, statistical machine translation, etc.)
? Studies in a vibrant, human-size city


Course Description
---------------------------
M1 Semester 1
---------------------------
PROBABILITIES, STATISTICS AND ALGORITHMS FOR AI
        ? Elementary mathematical tools, statistics, algorithms
        to define and solve artificial intelligence problems
        ? Case study approach towards mastering both theoretical
        and practical aspects of a topic

DESIGN AND ACQUISITION OF CORPORA
        ? Written corpora
        ? Speech corpora

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        ? Collecting, analysing and formalizing customers' needs
        ? Software design and development
        ? Functional analysis and specifications
        ? Project management

LINGUISTICS FOR NLP (1)
        ? Methods for Natural Language Processing
        ? Phonology
        ? Morphology

PROJECT AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Hands-on project
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M1 Semester 2
---------------------------
MACHINE LEARNING AND SEMANTIC WEB
        ? Machine learning theory
        ? Data mining
        ? Knowledge extraction

FORMAL TOOLS
        ? Logic
        ? Formal languages
        ? Calculability and complexity

DATA PROCESSING
        ? Storage and retrieval
        ? Data analysis

LINGUISTICS FOR NLP (2)
        ? Lexicology : lexical units and phraseology
        ? Syntax
        ? Semantics

PROJECT AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Hands-on project
        ? Scientific communication
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M2 Semester 1
---------------------------
DEEP LEARNING AND DATA MINING
        ? Neural Networks, Deep Neural Networks
        ? Data mining (structured data and text)
        ? Collaborative filtering

TEXT AND SPEECH PROCESSING
        ? Processing Textual Data
        ? Speech processing
        ? Terminology and ontology

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND DISCOURSE
        ? Application to text
        ? Computational semantics
        ? Discourse and Dialog modeling

LEXICONS AND GRAMMARS FOR NLP
        ? Diachronic and synchronic lexicology
        ? Lexical resources
        ? Syntactic framework

PROJECTS AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE
        ? Software project
        ? Law and ethics
        ? Research methods
        ? Professional integration
        ? Foreign language (French)

---------------------------
M2 Semester 2
---------------------------
Paid internship (company or research lab)

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4-2FIAT/IFTA Media Study Grants


 

 

FIAT/IFTA Media Study Grants

 

The Media Studies Commission of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) is dedicated to fostering collaboration between research and archive communities and mediating the growth of scholarly expertise that adds value to audiovisual archives by means of innovative research. To this purpose, the Media Studies Commission has set up the Media Studies Grant as a way to promote and ensure the valorization of academic knowledge for archival practice. It is a programme that offers support for research carried out at FIAT/IFTA member archives or is of direct relevance to one or more of our member archives. Priority is given to projects that are relevant for the history of member archive institutions, or promise innovative insights into (digital) media historiography or archival practice in general.

 

2020 Call for Projects

 

In 2020, FIAT/IFTA’s Media Studies Commission is looking to commission research that adds value to and helps us understand the role of audiovisual archives in a shifting, converging media environment.

 

Digitization and digital tools enable novel ways of doing and telling media histories. With it, new possibilities for working with archival material and data in academic research open up. At the same time, new tools for discovery, annotation, visualization now span the possibilities of analyzing cultural heritage with a ‘long data’ and distant reading perspective We welcome studies addressing (but not necessarily limited to) the following areas:

 

  1. Tools and (digital) methods: Producing new narratives in media history by means of digital tools and experimental methods of research and displaying different ways of doing (digital) media history as a way to redefine the value of historical archival content.

 

  1. Storytelling: Highlighting new and interactive forms of storytelling that help revisit media history practices in the digital age.

 

  1. Archives as (big) data: Reconceptualizing archives as (big) data to help us tap into unexplored narratives of media history. Reframing the historical and public value of audiovisual archives with mining and visualization tools.

 

  1. Archival access in the digital age: Renewing strategies and practices for making archives accessible through different digital spaces, including social media and mobile apps. Addressing archival access strategies in an international context or working with datasets1 from different archives.

 

  1. Users and use practices: Revisiting approaches for researching users and user practices in relation to digital archives.

 

Awarded candidated are expected to deliver by the end of their grant period:

 

  • A written report of their research at the quality standards of a scholarly article.

  • An audiovisual essay, an interactive digital story or a creative demo (depending on the nature of the proposed project). Please make sure there are no copyright restrictions for the archival material you may want to re-use in this type of output.2

 

All output needs to mention the support of FIAT/IFTA. Successful candidates are required to present their research results at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dublin, 26-29 October 2020.

 

Objectives

The Media Studies Grant makes available a maximum of €7000 for original and innovative projects that aim to:

 

  • help us understand the role of audiovisual archives in a digital environment.

  • unearth new narratives of media history.

  • collect, disseminate and engage with historical sources that complement existing archive collections.

  • conceptualize new ways of doing media history in the digital age.

  • experiment with innovative methods of researching (digital) archives.

  • valorize and disseminate knowledge of archive collections by means of interactive publications, multi-media presentations, digital applications and other creative demos.

  • Produce open-source softwares aimed at a better understanding and exploitation of audiovisual archives.

  • Release open-data corpora that would contribute to help further media studies.

 

Any questions? Please contact our commission members! For questions pertaining to access, archival collections and datasets made available for reasearch by different archival institutions, you may contact our following members:

 

Herbert Hayduck (ORF, Austria): archiv@orf.at
Claude Mussou (INA, France):
cmussou@ina.fr
Silvia Proscia (RAI, Italy):
silvia.proscia@rai.it
Masaya Maéda (NHK, Japan):
maeda.m-is@nhk.or.jp
Daniela Floris (RAI, Italy):
daniela.floris@rai.it
David Doukhan (INA, France):
ddoukhan@ina.fr
Virginia Bazán Gil (RTVE, Spain):
virginia.bazan@rtve.es
Lisa Kerrigan (BFI, UK):
Lisa.Kerrigan@bfi.org.uk
Bas Agterberg (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NL):
bagterberg@beeldengeluid.nl
Liam Wylie (RTÉ, Ireland):
Liam.Wylie@rte.ie

 

Questions pertaining to academic research can be addressed to:

Dana Mustata, University of Groningen, D.Mustata@rug.nl
Andy O’Dwyer, University of Luxembourg,
andy.odwyer@uni.lu

Requirements

 

  • Candidates are required to send in their application in PDF format by 15 March 2020.

  • Applications should be emailed to: Herbert Hayduck, archiv@orf.at

  • Candidates are required to present their findings at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference and deliever all output as agreed upon in the funding agreemenent between FIAT/IFTA and the candidate.

  • All results, publications and presentations derived from the study should mention the support of FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission and should be made available to FIAT/IFTA.

  • FIAT/IFTA reserves the right to make accessible the output of funded studies on its own website.

  • Proposed studies can be part of a bigger project (e.g. master thesis, PhD dissertation, book project, etc.) or can be stand-alone research initiatives that the candidate wishes to pursue.

 

Budget

Applicants can ask for a budget of €2500 up to a maximum of €7000 to support their travel and accommodation costs for the purpose of the proposed study, including travel to FIAT/IFTA-event (see below under “output”).

 

Researchers affiliated to a research institution who also have teaching responsibilities can use (part of) the allocated budget to buy themselves the research time needed for the proposed study. In this case, they should specify the research time that will be charged on the budget.

 

Senior researchers may use (parts of) the budget to hire interns or student assistants to assist with tasks on the project (e.g, corpus annotation). When third-party personnel is hired on the project, the senior researcher remains in charge of the project and is resonsibible for the final output.

 

 

Eligibility

We encourage master and PhD students as well as researchers affiliated to a university to apply for a Media Studies Grant with FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission.

 

Master and PhD students applying for a Study Grant need to send in together with their application a letter from their thesis supervisor showing support for the proposed study.

 

Awarded studies must be affiliated to a FIAT/IFTA member archive, either by exploring their collection or datasets for research purposes and/or carrying out research that is of direct relevance to a member archive institution.

 

Applicants should provide a support letter from FIAT/IFTA member‘s representative providing the collections which will be used in the study.

 

How to apply:

Applicants must send in an application for a Media Studies Grant. The applications should not exceed a maximum of 1000 words and need to include a:

 

Project description. This should outline the rationale of the project, the main research question(s), a description of the topic being researched, indication of the archival material or dataset to be studied and an explanation of the relevance of the proposed study for the research as well as archive communities. In case the project is part of a larger project, the candidate needs to specify how the proposed study contributes to the overall project.

 

Output. Candidates should specify the output resulting from the proposed study, including publications, presentations, software development, corpora annotation, and any other forms of knowledge utilization (e.g. virtual exhibitions, video essays, interactive storytelling applications etc.). At the end of their study, successful candidates are required to present their findings at a FIAT/IFTA public event to be agreed between the Media Studies Commission and the successful candidate and send in a written report outlining the research they’ve conducted and the main findings of their research. This report will be made available on the FIAT/IFTA website.

 

Workplan. Applicants should detail as much as possible all the research activities they plan to carry out as part of the proposed study and the time allocated for each of these activities. Please be aware that the Media Studies Grant only supports small-scale projects of 3-5 months.

 

Budget. Travel, accommodation and secondment costs can be covered by the Media Studies Grant. The budget can also be used for funding short-term internships, archive annotation campaigns, or paying for transport/accomodation fees required for the interactions with the FIAT archive member. For experimental projects, minimal technical costs may be eligible. In any technical costs are involved, we encourage the applicant to make contact with the Media Studies Commission before submitting their application, to ensure that the costs can be covered by the grant. Applicants should detail how the budget will be used. In case the proposed study is part of a bigger project, the applicant should specify any additional funding he/she may have received. Researchers asking for a secondment grant, should specify how their allocation of teaching and research time is divided and how much research time they wish to allocate to the proposed study and charge on the budget. Senior researchers hiring interns or student assistants to assist with the project, need to provide a statement with the number of hours and the budget allocated to the hired personnel.

 

Communication and dissemination activities. Applicants should present a communication and dissemination plan of how they intend to publicize and make available the findings of their study for the research and archive communities.

 

Applications should be sent in PDF format by 15 March 2020 to Herbert Hayduck at: archiv@orf.at.

 

All applications will be assessed internally by the members of the Media Studies Commission. Selected candidates are expected to present their study at the International FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dublin.

 

 

 

More about the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA)

FIAT/IFTA provides a forum for exchange of knowledge and experience between its members, to promote the study of any topic relevant to the development and use of audiovisual archives and to establish international standards on key issues regarding all aspects of audiovisual media archive management. Within FIAT/IFTA, the Media Studies Commission promotes academic research that promotes knowledge, understanding and research of holdings of member audiovisual archives.

1 Please check in advance whether any datasets are available for research at the archive institution you’re interested in collaborating with.

2 The candidates carry full responsibility for determining the copyright status of the archival material they may want to re-use their digital output. To avoid copyright infringements, always check with the archive holder on the copyright status of the archival material you’re interested in re-using.



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4-3Speech research and COVID 19 at the Indian Institute or Science, Bangalore
This project, named ''Coswara'' (https://coswara.iisc.ac.in/), attempts to provide a simple tool for diagnostics of Covid-19 based on respiratory, cough and speech sounds. As most of the major symptoms of the disease include respiratory problems, the proposed project aims to detect and quantify the biomarkers of the disease in the acoustics of these sounds. The project requires the participants to perform a recording of breathing sounds, cough sounds, sustained phonation of vowel sounds and a counting exercise. The entire response requires about 5 minutes of recording time. Along with these recordings, the tool also records patient's health status (without any personally identifiable information) as well as age, gender and location. The audio dataset collected will be released for researchers across the world to develop a potential diagnostic tool using signal processing and machine learning methods. The project is in the data collection stage and will go through an experimental validation before the full approval as a potential diagnostic tool. Given the highly simplistic and cost effective nature of the tool, we hypothesize that, even a partial success success for the tool would enable a massive deployment as a first line of diagnostic tool for the pandemic. The project is not aimed to replace the chemical testing or the imaging methods but to merely supplement those with a cost effective, fast and simple technique.  
 
The webpage for data collection is here.  
 
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4-4Recorded ICASSP 2020 on-demand

ICASSP 2020 registration has re-opened! Sign up to view recorded on-demand content through June 8, 2020.

In case you missed the sold-out ICASSP 2020 last week, you can now register to view the content on-demand at no cost. Registration provides you access to the ICASSP 2020 Virtual Platform which includes:
  • Recordings of live sessions, including Plenaries, Industry Keynotes, Panels, Tutorials, and Workshops
  • The ability to search through 2000+ Presentations by keywords and tracks
  • The ability to ask questions to authors and presenters
  • Patron & Exhibitor Virtual Spaces

Track Topics Include:

  • Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing
  • Special Sessions
  • Collaborative Sessions in Data Science
  • [OTH-IOT] Signal Processing for Internet of Things
  • Human Language Technology
  • Speech Processing
  • Signal Processing Theory and Methods
  • Signal Processing for Communications and Networking
  • Show and Tell Demonstrations
  • Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing
  • Multimedia Signal Processing
  • Machine Learning for Signal Processing
  • Industry DSP
  • Information Forensics and Security
  • Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
  • Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems
  • Computational Imaging
  • Biomedical Imaging and Signal Processing
ICASSP 2020 registration is complimentary to any attendees that are not covering a paper, with the goal of being able to bring cutting-edge ICASSP sessions to our community around the globe. Register today to view content at your convenience through June 8, 2020 until the platform closes.
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4-5IEEE/ACM TASLP Special issue on Eight Dialog System Technology Challenge

Call for Papers
IEEE/ACM TASLP Special Issue on

Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge

Dear Members,

The IEEE Signal Processing Society would like to express our concern and support for the members of our global community and all affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic. The need for current, timely, openly accessible research and information has never been more apparent. IEEE Signal Processing Society publications continue to accept submissions and publish impactful, cutting-edge research. Our online publications remain available to researchers and students around the world.
The Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC) is an ongoing series of research competitions for dialog systems. To accelerate the development of new dialog technologies, the DSTCs have provided common testbeds for various research problems. The Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC8) consists of the following four main tracks including two newly introduced tasks and two followup tasks of DSTC7. 

Topics of interest in this special issue include (but are not limited to):
  1. Multi-domain task-completion track addresses the end-to-end response generation problems in multi-domain task completion and cross-domain adaptation scenarios.
     
  2. NOESIS II: Predicting Responses, Identifying Success, and Managing Complexity in Task-Oriented Dialogue explores a response selection task extending the first NOESIS track in DSTC7 and offers two additional subtasks for identifying task success and disentangling conversations.
     
  3. Audio visual scene-aware dialog track is another follow-up track of DSTC7 which aims to generate dialog responses using multi-modal information given in an input video.
     
  4. Schema-guided dialog state tracking revisits dialog state tracking problems in a practical setting associated with a large number of services/APIs required to build virtual assistants in practice. 
This special issue will host work on any of the DSTC8 tasks. Papers may describe entries in the official DSTC8 challenge, or any research utilizing DSTC8 datasets irrespective of the participation in the official challenge. We also welcome papers that analyze the DSTC8 tasks or results themselves. Finally, we also invite papers on previous DSTC tasks as well as general technical papers on any dialog-related research problems.
 
For any query regarding this special issue, please contact seokim@dstc.community.
 
 

Important Dates

  • Manuscript Submissions due:  August 15, 2020
  • First review completed: October 15, 2020
  • Revised manuscript due: November 30, 2020
  • Second review completed: January 15, 2021
  • Final manuscript due: February 28, 2021
  • Publication: May 2021

Guest Editors

 
 
 
 
 
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4-6Call for contributions to a thesis at University of Toulouse.

 

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are contacting you in the context of a research project on the development of standard reading passages for speech and voice assessment. This study is part of Timothy Pommée’s PhD thesis at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, France). This project is carried out in collaboration with the Hospitals of Toulouse, the University Cancer Institute of Toulouse Oncopole and the University of Oslo. The primary aim of this thesis is to identify the needs for objective assessment of speech disorders (particularly speech intelligibility), in order to help develop new speech assessment tools that are tailored to the needs of clinicians and researchers.

We aim to create a new standard reading passage, specifically designed for speech and voice assessment. As, to our knowledge, no guidelines exist for this task, we have initiated this Delphi project in which we would like to invite you to take part. The aim of this project is to involve a large international panel of professionals (clinicians and researchers) active in the fields of speech and voice, in order to reach a consensus on what criteria have to be taken into account when creating a standard reading passage for speech/voice assessment.

Target audience:

This study is addressed to professionals (clinicians, researchers, lecturers) who are currently engaged in activities in at least one of the following fields:

- speech sound disorders (incl. dysarthria, apraxia/dyspraxia, orofacial structural deficits, head and neck oncology, velar insufficiencies, hearing impairment and articulation disorders)

- fluency disorders (stuttering/stammering)

- voice disorders

By 'activities', we understand (if at least approximatively 20% relate to speech/voice):

- clinical activity

- research

- academic activity

- industrial activity

- a combination of the above

The Delphi method:

The Delphi technique is an extensively used group survey methodology that is conducted over several consecutive rounds and aims to reach a consensus among a panel of individuals with expertise (both professional and experience-based) in the investigated field.

This study is quasi-anonymous: the identity of each participant is only known to the main investigator/moderator, and only via the provided email address (to monitor round-to-round response 2

rates); participants remain anonymous to each other, which allows for freedom of expression without any social or professional pressure from peers.

For more information about the Delphi method:

- Diamond IR, Grant RC, Feldman BM, Pencharz PB, Ling SC, Moore AM, et al. Defining consensus: A systematic review recommends methodologic criteria for reporting of Delphi studies. J Clin Epidemiol 2014;67:401–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2013.12.002.

- Hasson F, Keeney S, McKenna H. Research guidelines for the Delphi survey technique. J Adv Nurs 2000;32:1008–15. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.t01-1-01567.x.

- Hsu C-C, Sandford BA. The Delphi technique: Making sense of consensus. Pract Assessment, Res Eval 2007;12. https://doi.org/10.7275/pdz9-th90.

- McPherson S, Reese C, Wendler MC. Methodology update: Delphi studies. Nurs Res 2018;67:404–10. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNR.0000000000000297.

Our study:

As stated above, this Delphi survey yields to seek agreement through an international decision-making process, on what criteria should be taken into account when creating a new reading passage for speech/voice assessment. There also appears to be a lack of consensus regarding the terminology of speech-related concepts as well as the assessment methods, which in turn may influence the decisions taken when implementing new speech assessment materials.

This consensus survey will be structured as follows:

1) Definitions of speech-related concepts*

2) Perceptual and objective speech measures*

3) Criteria for creating standard reading passages

*questions in these sections will only be presented to participants with activities in speech and fluency disorders

In light of the investigated topic and the targeted expert group, we hope to achieve our goal within three (max. four) rounds, between July 2020 and not later than February 2021. Each online survey will be available for 2-3 weeks for you to complete at your convenience and the first round will take about 30-40 minutes to complete (the following rounds will be shorter). None of the surveys will have to be completed in a single sitting, as you will be able to save your answers at any time to resume the questionnaire later. It is very important that participants complete the survey in each round. The reliability of the results could be compromised if participants drop out of the study before its completion. However, it is of course possible at any time to withdraw from the study. To reduce the likelihood of high drop-out rates affecting the outcome of this study, we ask you to only agree to participate if you think you will be available to complete all three to four rounds.

You may access the questionnaire via the following link: https://enquetes.univ-tlse3.fr/index.php/623792?lang=en

 

Information notice

 

Project title: « Delphi consensus survey – Developing reading passages for the assessment of

speech and voice »

Principal investigators responsible for the project: Timothy Pommée (PhD), Julien Pinquier (thesis supervisor), Julie Mauclair and Virginie Woisard (co-supervisors), Renée Speyer Research location: Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III, France)

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are contacting you in the context of a research project on the development of standard reading passages for speech and voice assessment. This study is part of Timothy Pommée’s PhD thesis at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, France). This project is carried out in collaboration with the Hospitals of Toulouse, the University Cancer Institute of Toulouse Oncopole and the University of Oslo. The primary aim of this thesis is to identify the needs for objective assessment of speech disorders (particularly speech intelligibility), in order to help develop new speech assessment tools that are tailored to the needs of clinicians and researchers.

We also aim to create a new standard reading passage, specifically designed for speech and voice assessment. As, to our knowledge, no guidelines exist for this task, we have initiated this Delphi project in which we would like to invite you to take part. The aim of this project is to involve a large international panel of professionals (clinicians and researchers) active in the fields of speech and voice, in order to reach a consensus on what criteria have to be taken into account when creating a standard reading passage for speech/voice assessment.

Target audience:

This study is addressed to professionals (clinicians, researchers, lecturers) who are currently engaged in activities in at least one of the following fields:

- speech sound disorders (incl. dysarthria, apraxia/dyspraxia, orofacial structural deficits, head and neck oncology, velar insufficiencies, hearing impairment and articulation disorders)

- fluency disorders (stuttering/stammering)

- voice disorders

By 'activities', we understand (if at least approximatively 20% relate to speech/voice):

- clinical activity

- research 

- academic activity

- industrial activity

- a combination of the above

The Delphi method:

The Delphi technique is an extensively used group survey methodology that is conducted over several consecutive rounds and aims to reach a consensus among a panel of individuals with expertise (both professional and experience-based) in the investigated field.

This study is quasi-anonymous: the identity of each participant is only known to the main investigator/moderator, and only via the provided email address (to monitor round-to-round response rates); participants remain anonymous to each other, which allows for freedom of expression without any social or professional pressure from peers.

For more information about the Delphi method:

- Diamond IR, Grant RC, Feldman BM, Pencharz PB, Ling SC, Moore AM, et al. Defining consensus: A systematic review recommends methodologic criteria for reporting of Delphi studies. J Clin Epidemiol 2014;67:401–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2013.12.002.

- Hasson F, Keeney S, McKenna H. Research guidelines for the Delphi survey technique. J Adv Nurs 2000;32:1008–15. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.t01-1-01567.x.

- Hsu C-C, Sandford BA. The Delphi technique: Making sense of consensus. Pract Assessment, Res Eval 2007;12. https://doi.org/10.7275/pdz9-th90.

- McPherson S, Reese C, Wendler MC. Methodology update: Delphi studies. Nurs Res 2018;67:404–10. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNR.0000000000000297.

Our study:

As stated above, this Delphi survey yields to seek agreement through an international decision-making process, on what criteria should be taken into account when creating a new reading passage for speech/voice assessment. There also appears to be a lack of consensus regarding the terminology of speech-related concepts as well as the assessment methods, which in turn may influence the decisions taken when implementing new speech assessment materials.

This consensus survey will be structured as follows:

1) Definitions of speech-related concepts*

2) Perceptual and objective speech measures*

3) Criteria for creating standard reading passages

*questions in these sections will only be presented to participants with activities in speech and fluency disorders

In light of the investigated topic and the targeted expert group, we hope to achieve our goal within three (max. four) rounds, between July 2020 and not later than February 2021. Each online survey will be available for 2-3 weeks for you to complete at your convenience and the first round will take about 30-40 minutes to complete (the following rounds will be shorter). None of the surveys will have to be completed in a single sitting, as you will be able to save your answers at any time to resume the questionnaire later. It is very important that participants complete the survey in each round. The

reliability of the results could be compromised if participants drop out of the study before its completion. However, it is of course possible at any time to withdraw from the study. To reduce the likelihood of high drop-out rates affecting the outcome of this study, we ask you to only agree to participate if you think you will be available to complete all three to four rounds.

You may access the questionnaire via the following link: https://enquetes.univ-tlse3.fr/index.php/623792?lang=en

 

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4-7Tests on the spatial resolution of human voice directivity, TU Berlin, Germany

Dear All,


We propose a listening test to determine a perceptual threshold for the spatial resolution (in terms of order of spherical harmonics) of the human voice directivity. If you have confirmed normal hearing, we would like to ask you to take part in this listening test. It will take about 20-25 minutes. The sound stimuli of this listening test are binaural signals therefore please use headphones.

Here is the link to the test:
https://vc.users.ak.tu-berlin.de/

Simply follow the instructions on the screen. If you have any trouble with opening the link, please try another browser (Chrome, Firefox and Edge worked for us). If you still experience some issues, please contact us.

The test is anonymous and respects the European General Data Protection Regulation.

If you would like to know more about this project do not hesitate to contact us.

 
Thank you in advance for your participation!


Best regards,

Paul Luizard
Aurian Quelennec

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4-8MediaEval 2020 Registration Now Open

Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval)
MediaEval 2020 Registration Now Open
https://multimediaeval.github.io
*******************************************************

The Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval) offers challenges in
the form of shared tasks. The goal of MediaEval is to develop and
evaluate new algorithms and technologies for multimedia retrieval,
analysis and exploration. MediaEval tasks are innovative, involving
multiple modalities, (e.g., images, video, music, user interaction
data, sensor data, lifelogging data) and focusing on the human and
social aspects of multimedia. Our larger aim is to promote
reproducible research that makes multimedia a positive force for
society.

MediaEval 2020 Tasks:

Emotion and theme recognition in music
Emotional Mario: Believable AI agents in video games
FakeNews detection on social media
Flood-related multimedia: Analyzing social media on natural disasters
Insight for wellbeing: Multimodal personal health lifelog data analysis
Medico medical multimedia
NewsImages: The role of images in online news
No-audio multimodal speech detection
Pixel privacy: Quality camouflage for social images
Predicting media memorability
Scene change: Fun faux photos
Sports video classification

For details of the tasks and information on how to register visit:
https://multimediaeval.github.io/editions/2020/

Tasks will start to release data at the end of July and submissions
will be due 31 October. The MediaEval 2020 workshop will be an online
event. It will be held at the beginning of December, exact dates to be
announced.  For more information see https://multimediaeval.github.io
or contact Martha Larson m.larson at cs.ru.nl

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4-9Delphi consensus survey - Developing reading passages for the assessment of speech and voice (update)

The deadline for participating in the first round of this survey has been postponed to the 15th of September, so as to allow those who are not available during the summer holidays to participate.

The information notice and invitation letter (in English and in French), which also contain the survey link, have been updated and are available here: https://cloud.irit.fr/index.php/s/NPuKydZ89KYx8vU

Please, feel free to contact me at any time for further information.

Thanking you for your consideration and for your help,
Kind regards,

Timothy Pommée
SLP and PhD student in computer science and telecommunications
timothy.pommee@irit.fr



Dear Sir or Madam,

I am a speech & language pathologist and PhD student (IRIT, UT3, Toulouse, France), currently conducting a thesis on the clinical relevance of intelligibility measures. In this context, I am interested in collecting the opinions of a large international panel of speech and voice professionals (both clinicians and researchers in the fields of speech pathology, phoniatrics, phonetics, prosody, speech-related computer sciences…), in order to reach a consensus on what criteria have to be taken into account when creating a standard reading passage specifically designed for speech and voice assessment

 

For this purpose, I will be using the Delphi methodology, an extensively used group survey methodology that is conducted over several (usually three) consecutive rounds and is quasi-anonymous (the identity of each participant is only known to the main investigator/moderator, participants remain anonymous to each other, which allows for freedom of expression without any social or professional pressure from peers). 

 

This consensus survey, which will be carried out online on LimeSurvey, will be structured as follows: 

    1) Definitions of speech-related concepts*

    2) Perceptual and objective speech measures*

    3) Criteria for creating standard reading passages

*questions in these sections will only be presented to participants with activities in speech and fluency disorders

 

Attached to this email, you will find a notice containing more information about the project as well as the invitation letter which contains the link to the online survey.

 

In order for me to collect as many answers as possible, could I ask you kindly to distribute my request to your affiliates? Or to suggest other contact persons?

 

The deadline to complete the first questionnaire is currently set to 31 August 2020  September 15th, 2020

Here is a link to the updated information notice and invitation letter (in English and in French) which contain the survey link, as well as to the Ethics Committee Approval: https://cloud.irit.fr/index.php/s/NPuKydZ89KYx8vU 

I thank you very much for your consideration and for your help. 

Please, feel free to contact me at any time for further information.

 

Kind regards,

 

Timothy Pommée

SLP and PhD student in computer science and telecommunications

timothy.pommee@irit.fr

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