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ISCApad Archive  »  2021  »  ISCApad #280  »  Academic and Industry Notes

ISCApad #280

Wednesday, October 06, 2021 by Chris Wellekens

4 Academic and Industry Notes
4-1New Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research covering all areas of language science,Univ. of Paris, France

The Paris Graduate School of Linguistics (PGSL) is a newly-formed Paris-area graduate program covering all areas of language science.

It offers a comprehensive Master curriculum integrating advanced study and research, in close connection with PhD programs as well as with the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics consortium. 

Research plays a central part in the program, and students also take elective courses to develop an interdisciplinary outlook. Prior knowledge of French is not required.

For more details, please see https://paris-gsl.org/index.html

New funding opportunity: https://u-paris.fr/en/call-for-applications-international-students-miem-scholarship-program/

 Application deadline : February 1st 2021 (program starting September 1st 2021)

PGSL is funded by Smarts-UP (Student-centered iMproved, Active Research-based Training Strategy at Université de Paris) through the ANR SFRI grant « Grandes universités de recherche » (PIA3) 2020-2029.

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4-2Bids for ICMR 2023

The ICMR Steering Committee invites interested parties to submit proposals to
organize the 13th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval,
ICMR2023 (sponsored by the ACM SIGMM). ACM ICMR is the premier
scientific conference for multimedia retrieval.  Its mission is
to provide a forum to discuss,  promote and advance the
state-of-the-arts in multimedia retrieval by bringing together
researchers and practitioners in its related field. It is thus essential
to ensure that the conference includes sessions for presenting high-quality
research papers and for sharing practitioner experience.  The list of
previous ICMRs is at http://www.acmicmr.org/.
We expect ICMR2023 to be held in Europe.

Parties interested in hosting ICMR2023 are invited to submit  their
proposals (20 pages or less) by Friday, 26 February 2021 by email with
the subject line: ICMR2023 to the steering committee chair.
The details of CFP is at http://acmicmr.org/icmr2023.cfo.final.pdf.

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4-3ACMMM 2021: Call for Grand Challenge Proposals

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ACMMM 2021: Call for Grand Challenge Proposals
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ACMMM 2021 is calling for Multimedia Grand Challenge (MGC) Proposals. The purpose of MGC is to engage the multimedia research community by establishing well-defined and objectively judged challenge problems intended to exercise the state-of-the-art methods and inspire future research directions. The key criteria for Grand Challenges are that they should be useful, interesting, and their solution should involve a series of research tasks over a long period of time, with pointers towards longer-term research. First presented in ACMMM 2009, MGC has established itself as a prestigious competition in the multimedia community. This year we emphasize the continuity of the grand challenges, which is important in order to support sustained and substantial progress in the state of the art. Therefore, We ask proposers to express a commitment to run their challenges multiple years in a row.

For MGC proposal guidelines, please see https://2021.acmmm.org/multimedia-grand-challenges.html


Submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ACMMM2021 (under the track 'Multimedia Grand Challenge Proposal')

*** Important Dates ****

Submission of Grand Challenge Proposals: 24 January, 2021
Notification of Acceptance: 14 February, 2021
Web Site and Call for Participation Ready: 1 March, 2021
Submission of Grand Challenge Solution Papers: 11 July, 2021


*** Contact ***

For questions regarding the Grand Challenges, please email the MGC Chairs:

Xirong Li (xirong@ruc.edu.cn), Renmin University of China, China
Lixin Duan (lxduan@uestc.edu.cn), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China
Lu Fang (fanglu@tsinghua.edu.cn), Tsinghua University, China
David Brady (djbrady@email.arizona.edu), University of Arizona, USA

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4-4Projet européen ELE (European Language Equality),

Dans le cadre du projet européen ELE (European Language Equality), qui vise à créer une
feuille de route pour atteindre une égalité linguistique numérique totale en Europe d'ici
2030,  une enquête détaillée concernant le support technologique pour plus de 70 langues
européennes est en cours de réalisation.

Notre contribution porte spécifiquement sur la langue française, et les autres langues
d'Europe, officielles ou non, seront traitées par d'autres groupes, avec un recensement
distinct des ressources.

Si vous fournissez des outils, services ou collections de données linguistiques liés à la
langue française, nous vous serions donc extrêmement reconnaissants de consacrer quelques
minutes à nous aider à identifier un maximum de ressources linguistiques pour le
français. Notez qu'un certain nombre d'enquêtes similaires sont actuellement en cours
pour les autres langues européennes.

Pour ce faire, le plus simple sera de nous signaler par retour de courrier les ressources
produites dans vos équipes que vous souhaitez voir figurer dans cet inventaire, en nous
fournissant par exemple un lien vers une page Web documentant la ou les ressources. Merci
de prendre soin de vérifier au préalable que la ressource n'est pas déjà connue
(https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French).

Nous sommes intéressés par toutes les ressources et technologies linguistiques qui
existent actuellement et sont opérationnelles, quelle que soit la politique d'accès,
telles que:
- les corpus : collections de segments de texte ou de documents bruts ou annotés,
monolingues ou bi-/multilingues, mono- ou multimodaux, transcriptions audio, scripts,
enregistrements audio et vidéo, etc. ainsi que les corpus d'apprenants et les corpus de
langue des signes.
- des descriptions linguistiques, comprenant des modèles de langage et des grammaires
computationnelles
- ressources lexicales/conceptuelles, comprenant des lexiques informatiques, des bases de
données terminologiques, des répertoires, des ontologies, des listes de termes, des
thésaurus, etc.
- des outils et services : services offerts via le web, d'autres réseaux ou fonctionnant
dans le cloud, mais aussi outils téléchargeables, code source, etc. Il s'agit notamment
d'outils de base pour le français (analyseurs morphologiques, tagueurs POS, lemmatiseurs,
analyseurs syntaxiques, etc.), d'outils d'aide à la rédaction (par exemple, correcteurs
d'orthographe, de grammaire et de style), d'outils/services pour la
recherche/extraction/fouille d'informations, l'analyse de texte et de parole, la
traduction automatique, la compréhension et la génération de langue naturelle, les
technologies vocales, les systèmes conversationnels, etc.

Notez que dans le cadre de cette collecte, un certain nombre de ressources répertoriées
dans des catalogues publiquement accessibles ont déja été répertoriées et peuvent être
retrouvées dans le catalogue ELG:
https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/#/?language__term=French

*Il n'est donc pas nécessaire de les documenter à nouveau.*

Vous trouverez de plus amples informations sur le projet à l'adresse suivante :
https://european-language-equality.eu/.

Si vous avez des questions concernant cette enquête, merci de nous contacter directement.

Merci beaucoup

Gilles Adda, Ioana Vasilescu et François Yvon
LISN, CNRS

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4-5'The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021 enhanced at NeurIPS 2021'

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 The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021 enhanced at NeurIPS 2021'
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 Dear colleagues,
 
We are pleased to officially announce the second round of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, on spoken language modelling, which will take the form of a competition at NeurIPS. While the benchmark remains the same, this enhanced edition of the challenge introduces some twists, including a new, optional, TRACK 2 on visually grounded spoken language modelling.
 
We invite:
 
- New approaches to spoken language models, particularly, but not limited to, larger ('higher-budget') language models
- Systems exploring the utility of weak supervision with images or videos (Track 2)
- Further, substantive development of existing systems doing spoken language modelling, including major modifications to or improvements upon systems submitted in the first, Interspeech round of the challenge
 
For more detailed information, please see the ZeroSpeech 2021 website:
 
https://zerospeech.com/2021/
 
We are also in the planning stages of a NeurIPS workshop on the general theme of unsupervised and semi-supervised speech, which will be an excellent venue to submit detailed reports on your systems. While the workshop submission deadline has yet to be announced, we expect that it will be in mid-October.
 
For groups wishing a little extra time to improve their systems after the workshop deadline, the *final* competition submission deadline to be considered for inclusion in the presentation of the results at NeurIPS has been set for November 19th.
 
Please get in touch with us if you have questions or comments about this continuation of the 2021 Zero Resource Speech Challenge, and we look forward to seeing the results!
 
Best,
The Zero Resource Speech Challenge Organizers
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4-6CfP for the 'European Performing Science Night',

Call for participation for the 'European Performing Science Night', a project for the European Research Night

Led by the Fundació Èpica-La Fura dels Baus and with the participation of the LPL (AMU-CNRS-ILCB) and four other partners, a research team will organize several events during the prestigious European Research Night on 24 September 2021, in Badalone (Catalonia). The project - co-financed under the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie actions - aims to bring scientists closer to the general public through an innovative language based on the performing arts and new language tools for researchers.

 

Call for participation open from June 7 to July 15: Open Call September ? EPSN (epicalab.com)

Contact at the LPL: Clément François clement.francois@univ-amu.fr

European Performing Science Night project website: EPSN ? European Performing Science Night (epicalab.com)

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4-7Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval - Community Evaluation Effort for MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) on Covid-19

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval - Community Evaluation Effort for MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) on Covid-19

******* ROUND II *******
Call for Participation in the Second Evaluation Round: Runs due by 15 September-15 October 2021

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

Overall Description

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval organizes a community evaluation effort aimed at accelerating the creation of resources and tools for improved MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) in the current emergency situation with a reference to a general public use case:
?Sofia has heard that a drug has been experimented in different countries and she would like to have a consolidated and trustworthy view of the main findings, whether the drug is effective or not, and whether there are any adverse effects?.
Distillation for the general public also implies a level of specialist-non-specialist communication, when the aggregated sources contain both disseminative and specialised sources. Therefore, the general public would need to understand medical expertise by using their correspondent in the 'everyday ' language or by using an appropriately calibrated language for the communication to be effective.
Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval adopts an incremental and iterative evaluation methodology to enable the release of intermediate (but functional) resources and to progressively (iteration-after-iteration) move towards finally consolidated tools and resources. We plan for three rounds, tentatively one and half-month long each.

Each round consists of the following phases:

  • data release
  • submission of participants? runs
  • ground-truth creation (when needed)
  • scoring of participants? runs
  • writing of the rolling technical report
  • round wrap virtual meeting

An integral part of the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval approach is the sharing of information and ideas among the participants. This happens via the rolling technical report where participants describe their solutions as the evaluation rounds progress and the virtual meetings at the end of each round where participants briefly present the main highlights of what worked and what did not work and interactively discuss together in order to share ideas and improve for the next round.

Moreover, to facilitate the exchange of resources and components and to jointly work together for improving MLIA technologies for Covid-19, participants are provided with a dedicated git repository where to push and share the outcomes of your participation in the different rounds, i.e. runs, code, (language) resources, and a technical report. To facilitate sharing and re-use, all the contents of the repositories are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Tasks

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval offered the following tasks for its first round and will continue for this second round:

We offer tasks in the following languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Swedish.

Registration for the tasks is open at: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/registration/

Important Dates -  Second Round

- Registration Opens: 14 June 2021
- Second Round Starts: 21 June 2021 (data release)
- Submission of Runs: 15 September - 15 October 2021 (depending on task)
- Submission of Technical Report: 19 November 2021
- Round II Wrap-up Virtual Meeting: 30 November-2 December 2021 (exact date TBD)
- Second Round Ends: 2 December 2021

More detailed dates are provided on the Web pages dedicated to each specific task, since the internal scheduling of each task may differ slightly to better match the task design.

Organizers

Overall

Khalid Choukri, ELDA, France
Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy

Data Acquisition and Engineering

Miltos Deligiannis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Marwa Hadj Salah, ELDA, France
Guillaume Jacquet, JRC, Italy
Vassilis Papavassiliou, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Stelios Piperidis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece
Prokopis Prokopidis, ILSP/Athena RC, Greece

Information Extraction

Cyril Grouin, LISN, France
Thierry Declerck, DFKI, Germany
Pierre Zweigenbaum, LISN, France

Multilingual Semantic Search

Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy
Maria Eskevich, CLARIN ERIC

Machine Translation

Francisco Casacuberta, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Miguel Domingo, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Mercedes García-Martínez, Pangeanic, Spain
Manuel Herranz, Pangeanic, Spain

Supporters

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval is an evaluation effort promoted by several communities which are closely working together.



We hope that other communities will join us in this shared effort. You are very welcome!

Any question? Please email us at  info@covid19-mlia.eu.

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4-8Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval)

Multimedia Evaluation Benchmark (MediaEval)

MediaEval 2021 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 2021 Tasks:


Driving Road Safety Forward: Video Data Privacy

Emerging News: Detecting emerging stories from social media and news feeds

Emotional Mario: A Games Analytics Challenge

Emotions and Themes in Music

FakeNews: Corona Virus and Conspiracies Multimedia Analysis Task

Insight for Wellbeing: Cross-Data Analytics for (transboundary) Haze Prediction

Medico: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation

NewsImages: The relation between images and text in news articles

Predicting Media Memorability

Sports Video: Fine Grained Action Detection and Classification of Table Tennis Strokes from videos

Visual Sentiment Analysis: A Natural Disaster Use-case

WaterMM: Water Quality in Social Multimedia


For details of the tasks and information on how to register visit: https://multimediaeval.github.io/editions/2021/


Tasks will start to release data at the end of July and continue through August. Submissions will be due in early November. The MediaEval 2021 Workshop is a hybrid workshop that will take place in Bergen, Norway 6-8 December 2021 and also provide an opportunity for online participation. 

For more information see https://multimediaeval.github.io or contact Martha Larson m.larson at cs.ru.nl or Steven Hicks steven@simula.no

 

On behalf on the MediaEval organization team, Gabi Constantin Researcher at: Personal page: http://gconstantin.aimultimedialab.ro/ AI Multimedia Lab: https://www.aimultimedialab.ro/ CAMPUS Research Center: http://www.campus.pub.ro/ University Politehnica of Bucharest https://upb.ro/en/

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4-9The Second DiCOVA Challenge announcement
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The Second DiCOVA Challenge announcement
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Can sound samples serve as acoustic biomarkers of COVID-19? If yes, an acoustics based COVID-19 diagnosis can provide a fast, contactless and inexpensive testing scheme, with potential to supplement the existing molecular testing methods, such as RT-PCR and RAT. The DiCOVA Challenge Series is an exploration of ideas to find answers to this question.
We are excited to share with you the announcement on the Second DiCOVA Challenge on Diagnosing COVID-19 using Acoustics. The challenge features the following three parallel tracks and one fusion track.
---
Track-1: Breathing Sound Samples 
Track-2: Cough Sound Samples 
Track-3: Speech Sound Samples 
Track-4: Fusion. Here participants can use any combination of above sound categories.
--
The task in all the tracks requires building a binary classifier for COVID-19 detection using only sound samples. As was the case in the first DiCOVA challenge, a dataset and a baseline system will be released, and a leaderboard style platform for evaluation using a blind test set will be provided to all participants.
For more information please check out the below links.
--
Event website: https://dicovachallenge.github.io/
Registration Details: https://dicovachallenge.github.io/#register
Flyer: https://dicovachallenge.github.io/docs/Second_DiCOVA_challenge2022_flyer.pdf

Looking forward to your participation in the challenge.
---
The challenge timeline is chosen to suit the paper submission deadline (1st Oct. 2021) of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, Signal Processing (ICASSP), a flagship conference of the IEEE (https://2022.ieeeicassp.org/).

(If not done already), we request you to express your interest in participating in this challenge by filling the form at the  link below by 14th Aug (midnight GMT) with tentative details on Abstract, Title, and Authors. This information will help us in proposing a Special Session at ICASSP 2022.
Form Link: https://forms.office.com/r/rkEduk9FzR
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4-10ACM ICMI 2021: Announcing Blue Sky Paper Awards
ACM ICMI 2021: Announcing Blue Sky Paper Awards
https://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=award
18-22 Oct 2021, Montreal, Canada
***************************************

Announcing New ACM ICMI 2021 Blue Sky Paper Awards

The Blue Sky Paper Awards have been announced. Congratulations to awardees! 
The papers will be presented at ICMI 2021, in the Blue Sky Papers session 
moderated by Prof. Sharon Oviatt. The tentative conference program is available at https://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=program

First Place: Sandy Pentland
Optimized Human-A.I. Group Decision Making: A Personal View

Second Place: Georgios Rizos
Towards Sonification in Multimodal and User-Friendly Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Third Place: Philippe Palanque
Dependability and Safety: Two Clouds in the Blue Sky of Multimodal Interaction


The Blue Sky paper track at ACM ICMI 2021 emphasizes innovative, visionary, and highimpact contributions. 
This track solicited papers relevant to ICMI content that go beyond the usual research paper to present 
new visions that stimulate the community to pursue innovative new research directions. 
The papers were encouraged to present high-risk controversial 
ideas that may challenge existing assumptions and methodologies, 
or propose new applications or theories.  
Submitted papers were expected to represent deep reflection, 
to argue rigorously, and to present ideas from a high-level 
synthetic viewpoint (e.g., multidisciplinary, based on multiple methodologies). 

The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 
(ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. 
ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary 
research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, 
interfaces, and system development. The main conference themes in 2021 will 
be behavioral health and virtual connectivity, but other major topics of 
central interest include human communication and multimodal language/dialogue processing,
 human-robot/agent interaction, affective computing and social interaction, 
cognitive modeling, multimodal representations and fusion-based architectures, 
machine learning for multimodal interaction and system applications, speech, 
gesture, haptics, olfaction, gaze and vision, multimodal datasets and platforms, 
mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, interfaces for virtual/augmented reality,
 smart environments, and assistive technologies.
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