The 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL) and the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG) will be held jointly in Prague on September 11-15, 2023.

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in dialogue and discourse to both academic and industry researchers, continuing a series of 23 successful previous meetings. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization - the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for ACL and ISCA.

Topics of Interest

We welcome formal, corpus-based, implementation, experimental, or analytical work on discourse and dialogue including, but not restricted to, the following themes:

  *   Discourse Processing: Rhetorical and coherence relations, discourse parsing and discourse connectives. Reference resolution. Event representation and causality in narrative. Argument mining. Quality and style in text. Cross-lingual discourse analysis. Discourse issues in applications such as machine translation, text summarization, essay grading, question answering and information retrieval. Discourse issues in text generated by large language models.

  *   Dialogue Systems: Task oriented and open domain spoken, multi-modal, embedded, situated, and text-based dialogue systems, their components, evaluation and applications. Knowledge representation and extraction for dialogue. State representation, tracking and policy learning. Social and emotional intelligence. Dialogue issues in virtual reality and human-robot interaction. Entrainment, alignment and priming. Generation for dialogue. Style, voice, and personality. Safety and ethics issues in Dialogue.

  *   Corpora, Tools and Methodology: Corpus-based and experimental work on discourse and dialogue, including supporting topics such as annotation tools and schemes, crowdsourcing, evaluation methodology and corpora.

  *   Pragmatic and Semantic Modeling: Pragmatics and semantics of conversations(i.e., beyond a single sentence), e.g., rational speech act, conversation acts, intentions, conversational implicature, presuppositions.

  *   Applications of Dialogue and Discourse Processing Technology.

Submissions

The program committee welcomes the submission of long papers, short papers, and demo descriptions. Submitted long papers may be accepted  for oral or for poster presentation. Accepted short papers will be presented as posters.

  *   Long paper submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers must be no longer than 8 pages, including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. Two additional pages are allowed for appendices containing sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

  *   Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages, such as a small, focused contribution; a negative result; or an interesting application nugget. Short papers should be no longer than 4 pages including title, text, figures and tables. An unlimited number of pages is allowed for references. One additional page is allowed for sample discourses/dialogues and algorithms, and an extra page is allowed in the final version to address reviewers’ comments.

  *   Demo descriptions should be no longer than 4 pages including title, text, examples, figures, tables and references. A separate one-page document should be provided to the program co-chairs for demo descriptions, specifying furniture and equipment needed for the demo.

Authors are encouraged to also submit additional accompanying materials, such as corpora (or corpus examples), demo code, videos and sound files.

Multiple Submissions

SIGDIAL 2023 cannot accept work for publication or presentation that will be (or has been) published elsewhere and that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications whose review periods overlap with that of SIGDIAL. Overlap with the SIGDIAL workshop submissions is permitted for non-archived workshop proceedings. Any questions regarding submissions can be sent to program-chairs [at] sigdial.org.

Blind Review

Building on previous years’ move to anonymous long and short paper submissions, SIGDIAL  2023 will follow the ACL policies for preserving the integrity of double blind review (see author guidelines). Unlike long and short papers, demo descriptions will not be anonymous. Demo descriptions should include the authors’ names and affiliations, and self-references are allowed.

Submission Format

All long, short, and demonstration submissions must follow the two-column ACL format, which are available as an Overleaf template and also downloadable directly (Latex and Word)

Submissions must conform to the official ACL style guidelines, which are contained in these templates. Submissions must be electronic, in PDF format.

Submission Deadline

SIGDIAL will accept regular submissions through the Softconf/START system, as well as commitment of already reviewed papers through the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system.

Regular submission

Authors have to fill in the submission form in the Softconf/START system and upload an initial pdf of their papers before May 15, 2023 (23:59 GMT-11).  Details and the submission link will be posted on the conference website.

Submission via ACL Rolling Review (ARR)

Please refer to the ARR Call for Papers for detailed information about submission guidelines to ARR. The commitment deadline for authors to submit their reviewed papers, reviews, and meta-review to SIGDIAL 2023 is June 19, 2023. Note that the paper needs to be fully reviewed by ARR in order to make a commitment, thus the latest date for ARR submission will be April 15, 2023.

Mentoring

Acceptable submissions that require language (English) or organizational assistance will be flagged for mentoring, and accepted with a recommendation to revise with the help of a mentor. An experienced mentor who has previously published in the SIGDIAL venue will then help the authors of these flagged papers prepare their submissions for publication.

Best Paper Awards

In order to recognize significant advancements in dialogue/discourse science and technology, SIGDIAL 2023 will include best paper awards. All papers at the conference are eligible for the best paper awards. A selection committee consisting of prominent researchers in the fields of interest will select the recipients of the awards.

SIGDIAL 2023 Program Committee

Svetlana Stoyanchev and Shafiq Rayhan Joty

Conference Website: https://2023.sigdial.org/

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*** Call for Participation ***

SIGDIAL & INLG 2023 Conferences

September 11-15, 2023
Prague, Czechia & online
https://sigdialinlg2023.github.io/

Early Registration Deadline: **August 18 -- extended**
Late Registration Deadline: September 15
Non-presenters Free Registration: August 12 - September 15

Workshops: September 11-12
Main Conferences: September 13-15

The 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and
Dialogue (SIGdial 2023) and the 16th International Natural Language
Generation Conference (INLG 2023) will be held jointly this year in
Prague, Czechia. The event will be hybrid, but in-person participation
is strongly encouraged! Virtual attendance will be free for
non-presenters.

The organizers of SIGDIAL & INLG 2023 invite all researchers and
practitioners, SIGDial & SIGGEN members, and SIGDIAL & INLG 2023
industry partners and sponsors to join the conference.
The registration is now open, with early rates available until August
10 (see https://sigdialinlg2023.github.io/registration.html). A
limited number of hotel rooms at the conference venue is available for
booking at special rates until August 18.

**SIGDIAL** provides a regular forum for the presentation of
cutting-edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and
industry researchers. Continuing a series of 23 successful previous
meetings, this conference spans the research interest areas of
discourse and dialogue. The conference is sponsored by the SIGdial
organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group on discourse
and dialogue for both ACL and ISCA.

**INLG** is a yearly venue for presentations related to all aspects of
Natural Language Generation (NLG), including data-to-text,
concept-to-text, text-to-text and vision-to-text approaches. The event
is organized under the auspices of SIGGEN, the Special Interest Group
on Natural Language Generation of ACL.

The joint conference on Sep 13-15 will feature 4 keynote speeches by
Barbara Di Eugenio, Emmanuel Dupoux, Elena Simperl and Ryan Lowe, as
well as a number of regular paper presentations and system
demonstrations.
- Keynotes: https://sigdialinlg2023.github.io/speakers.html
- SIGDIAL accepted papers: https://2023.sigdial.org/accepted-papers/
- INLG accepted papers: https://inlg2023.github.io/accepted_papers.html

The event includes several workshops on Sep 11-12 (see
https://sigdialinlg2023.github.io/workshops.html):
- YRRSDS: 19th Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems
- The 1st Workshop on Counter Speech for Online Abuse
- DSTC11: The 11th Dialog System Technology Challenge
- PracticalD2T: 1st Workshop on Practical LLM-assisted Data-to-Text Generation
- Taming Large Language Models: Controllability in the era of
Interactive Assistants
- Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation and
Multilingual WebNLG Challenge
- Connecting multiple disciplines to AI techniques in
interaction-centric autism research and diagnosis
- Designing divergent agent tasks for SDS data collection


We thank you for your support and look forward to welcoming you at the
conference!

Best regards,
SIGDIAL & INLG 2023 Organizers

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New developments in assessment approaches, tools and data for motor speech disorders

14-15 September 2023, Geneva, Switzerland

Location: 22, chemin de Pinchat, Carouge (Geneva), room 0-010

 PROGRAM

14.09.2023 (open to the language & speech research community)

13h20-13h30: Introduction

13h30-14h30: Corinne Fredouille (University of Avignon) Automatic detection of pathological speech and voice

14h30-15h30: Ingrid Aichert (LMU University of Munich) Assessment of intelligibility and other functional consequences of neurogenic sound production disorders

15h30-16h00: Pause

16h00-17h00: Jan Rusz (Czech Technical University in Prague) Markers of pathological speech in movement disorders

17h00-18h00: Tanja Schultz (University of Bremen) Biosignal-enabled speech communication

18h00: End of the “open program”

  Registration: participation is free but registration is mandatory

-Contact address: marina.laganaro(at)unige.ch

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CALL FOR PAPERS  --  ACM IVA 2023

The annual ACM Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the development, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents with a focus on the ability for social interaction, communication or cooperation. Such artificial agents can be embodied graphically (e.g. virtual characters, embodied conversational agents) or physically (e.g. social or collaborative robots). They are capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action allowing them to participate in dynamic social environments. This includes human-like interaction qualities such as multimodal communication using facial expressions, speech, and gesture, conversational interaction, socially assistive and affective interaction, interactive task-oriented cooperation, or social behaviour simulation. IVAs are highly relevant and widely applied in many important domains including health, tutoring, training, games, or assisted living.

We invite submissions of research on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to: theoretical foundations of intelligent virtual agents, agent and interactive behaviour modelling, evaluation, agents in simulations, games, and other applications. Please see the detailed list of topics below.

VENUE

======

IVA 2023 will take place in Würzburg, Germany. Würzburg is a vibrant town located by the river Main in northern Bavaria, between Frankfurt and Nuremberg. The mix of stunning historical architecture and the young population is what makes the atmosphere so unique, including 35,000 students from three different universities. The mild and sunny climate is ideal to enjoy the many activities Würzburg has to offer: visiting a beer garden next to the river, attending a sporting or cultural event or taking a stroll through one of the parks.

IVA is targeted to be an in-person conference. In case of extraordinary circumstances, such as visa problems or health issues, video presentation will be possible. However, there is no digital or hybrid conference system planned, thus it is not possible to attend this year’s IVA conference remotely.

IMPORTANT DATES

===================

Abstract submission: April 14, 2023

Paper submission: April 18, 2023

Review notification / start of rebuttal: May 31, 2023

Notification of acceptance: June 23, 2023

Camera ready deadline: July 18, 2023

Conference: September 19-22, 2023

All deadlines are anywhere on earth (UTC−12).

SPECIAL TOPIC

===================

This year’s conference will highlight a special topic on “IVAs in future mixed realities”, e.g., in social VR and potential incarnations of a Metaverse. Immersive and potentially distributed artificial virtual worlds provide new forms of full-size embodied human-human interaction via avatars of arbitrary looks, enabling interesting intra- and interpersonal effects. They also enable hybrid avatar-agent interactions between humans and A.I.s, unlocking the full potential of non-verbal behavior in digital face-to-face encounters, significantly enhancing the design space for IVAs to assist, guide, help but also to persuade and affect interacting users. We specifically welcome all kinds of novel research on technological, psychological, and sociological determinants of such immersive digital avatar-agent encounters.

TYPES OF SUBMISSION

===================

- Full Papers (7 pages + 1 additional page for references):

Full papers should present significant, novel, and substantial work of high quality.

- Extended Abstracts (2 pages + 1 additional page for references)

Extended abstracts may contain early results and work in progress.

- Demos (2 pages + 1 additional page for references +1 one page with demo requirements)

Demos submissions focus on implemented systems and should contain a link to a video of the system with a maximum length of 5 minutes.

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by a group of external expert reviewers. All accepted submissions will be published in the ACM proceedings.

Accepted full papers will be presented either in oral sessions or as posters during the conference (depending on the nature of the contribution), extended abstracts will be presented as posters, and demos will be showcased in dedicated sessions during the conference. For each accepted contribution, at least one of the authors must register for the conference.

IVA 2023 will also feature workshops and a doctoral consortium. Please visit the website (https://iva.acm.org/2023) for more details and updates.

TRACKS

===================

For full paper submissions, IVA will have different paper tracks with different review criteria. Authors need to indicate which one of the following tracks they want to submit their paper to:

1. Empirical Studies

• criteria: methodology, theoretical foundation, originality of result etc.

2. Computational Models and Methods

• criteria: technical soundness, novelty of the model or approach, proof of concept, etc.

3. Operational Systems and Applications

• criteria: innovation of the application, societal relevance, evaluation of effects, etc.

SCOPE AND LIST OF TOPICS

========================

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

AGENT DESIGN AND MODELING:

- Cognition (e.g. task, social, other)

- Emotion, personality and cultural differences

- Socially communicative behaviour (e.g., of emotions, personality, relationship)

- Conversational and dialog behavior

- Social perception and understanding of other’s states or traits

- Machine learning approaches to agent modeling

- Adaptive behavior and interaction dynamics

- Models informed by theoretical and empirical research from psychology

MULTIMODAL INTERACTION:

- Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination (synthesis)

- Multimodal/social behavior processing

- Face-to-face communication skills

- Interaction qualities  engagement, rapport, etc.)

- Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation

- Multi-party interaction

- Data-driven modeling

SOCIALLY INTERACTIVE AGENT ARCHITECTURES:

- Design criteria and design methodologies

- Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction

- Standards / measures to support interoperability

- Portability and reuse

- Specialized tools, toolkits, and toolchains

EVALUATION METHODS AND EMPIRICAL STUDIES:

- Evaluation methodologies and user studies

- Metrics and measures

- Ethical considerations and societal impact

- Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)

- Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

APPLICATIONS:

- Applications in education, skills training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.

- Virtual agents in games and simulations

- Social agents as tools in psychology, neuroscience, social simulation, etc

- Migration between platforms

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

=========================

Paper submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format. Please consulthttps://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for the Latex template, word interim template, or connection to the overleaf platform.

All papers need to be submitted in PDF-format.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.  ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors.  The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022.  We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

This event is sponsored by SIGAI.

Please visit the conference website for detailed information on how to submit your paper.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

===================

https://iva.acm.org/2023/

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Call for SS  Proposals at CBMI’2023==================

CBMI’2023  http://cbmi2023.org/ is calling for high quality Special Sessions  addressing innovative research in content – based multimedia indexing  and its related broad fields. The main scope of the conference is in  analysis and understanding of multimedia contents including

• Multimedia information retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
• Mobile media retrieval
• Event-based media retrieval
• Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for multimedia retrieval
• Multimedia data mining and analytics
• Multimedia retrieval for multimodal analytics and visualization
• Multimedia recommendation
• Multimedia verification (e.g., multimodal fact-checking, deep fake analysis)
• Large-scale multimedia database management
• Summarization, browsing, and organization of multimedia content
• Evaluation and benchmarking of multimedia retrieval systems
• Explanations of decisions of AI-in Multimedia
• Application domains : health, sustainable cities, ecology, culture… 

and all this in the era of Artificial Intelligence for analysis and indexing of multimedia and multimodal information.

A special oral session will contain oral presentations of long research papers, short papers will be presented as posters during poster sessions with special mention of an SS.

-        Long research papers should present complete work with evaluations on topics related to the Conference.

-        Short research papers should present preliminary results or more focused contributions.

-         

An SS proposal has to contain

-        Name, title, affiliation and a short bio of SS chairs;

-        The rational ;

-         A  list of at least 5 potential contributions with a provisional title, authors and affiliation.

The dead line for SS proposals is coming:  23rd of January

Please submit your proposals to the SS chairs

jenny.benois-pineau@u-bordeaux.fr

mourad.oussalah@oulu.fi

adel.hafiane@insa-cvl.fr

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We invite you to submit to the first edition of our workshop on 'Linguistic Insights from
and for Multimodal Language Processing' that will be co-located with KONVENS 2023 in
Ingolstadt.

The deadline is extended by a week until July 14th, 2023. We are looking forward to your
contribution.

Our website is available at https://sites.google.com/view/limo2023/home

Please find the last CfP below.

Best wishes,
LIMO 2023 organizers

------------------------------------------------------
Last Call for Papers: Linguistic Insights from and for Multimodal Language Processing
@KONVENS 2023

Processing multimodal information (like visual representations of the environment,
auditory cues, images, gestures, gaze etc.) and integrating them is a constant and
effortless process in human language processing. Recent progress in the area of language
& vision, large-scale visually grounded language models, and multimodal learning have led
to breakthroughs in challenging multimodal NLP applications like image–text retrieval,
image captioning or visual question answering. Yet, modeling the semantics and pragmatics
of situated language understanding and generation and, generally, language processing
beyond the linguistic context, i.e. in combination with multiple other modalities, is
still one of the biggest challenges in NLP and Computational Linguistics.

While there have been recent venues and workshops targeting multimodal representation
learning and large-scale Language and Vision models, there is a lack of discussion in the
community that focuses on linguistic multimodal phenomena, domain- and task-specific
analyses of multimodality and, generally, contributions of computational linguistics to
multimodal learning and vice versa.  With this workshop, we aim to bring together
researchers who work on various linguistic aspects of multimodal language processing to
discuss and share the recent advances in this interdisciplinary field.

Topics of interest:
    ▪    New multimodal datasets and training schemes in text and dialogue
    ▪    Multimodal tasks and frameworks in CL
    ▪    Annotation of multimodal datasets
    ▪    Modeling and analysis of linguistic phenomena in multimodal datasets
    ▪    Analysis and discussion of shortcomings of existing multimodal language models
    ▪    Approaches to multimodality in different domains, e.g., documents, social media,
visual dialogue, situated dialogue, etc.
    ▪    Work on cross-modal and inter-modal representations, relationships, and
dependencies
    ▪    Opinion pieces and (theoretical) reflections on multimodality in
NLP/Computational Linguistics


Keynote Speakers
---------------
Sandro Pezzelle, University of Amsterdam
Letitia Parcalabescu, Heidelberg University


Important Dates
---------------
July 14, 2023     – Paper Submission Deadline (Extended)
August 21, 2023     – Notification of Acceptance
September 04, 2023     – Camera-ready Deadline
September 22, 2023     – Workshop Day (one of these days)

* All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 ('anywhere on Earth')

Paper Submission:
-----------------
All paper submissions must use the official KONVENS 2023 style templates.
    ▪    Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content.
    ▪    Short papers and demonstration papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content.
    ▪    Non-archival abstracts must not exceed one (1) page.
09-22) 

Organizers:
---------------
Piush Aggarwal, FernUniversität in Hagen, piush.aggarwal@fernuni-hagen.de
Özge Alaçam, Universität Bielefeld, oezge.alacam@uni-bielefeld.de
Carina Silberer, Universität Stuttgart, carina.silberer@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Sina Zarrieß, Universität Bielefeld, sina.zarriess@uni-bielefeld.de
Torsten Zesch, FernUniversität in Hagen, torsten.zesch@fernuni-hagen.de


Contact:
---------
Özge Alaçam (oezge.alacam@uni-bielefeld.de), Piush Aggarwal
(piush.aggarwal@fernuni-hagen.de)
Workshop webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/limo2023/home
KONVENS 2023 webpage: https://www.thi.de/konvens-2023/

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25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2023)

9-13 October 2023, Paris, France

The 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2023) will be held in Paris, France. ICMI is the premier international forum that brings together multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) and social interaction research. Multimodal AI encompasses technical challenges in machine learning and computational modeling such as representations, fusion, data and systems. The study of social interactions englobes both human-human interactions and human-computer interactions. A unique aspect of ICMI is its multidisciplinary nature which values both scientific discoveries and technical modeling achievements, with an eye towards impactful applications for the good of people and society.

ICMI 2023 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers, technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations), demonstrations, exhibits, doctoral consortium, and late-breaking papers. The conference will also feature tutorials, workshops and grand challenges. The proceedings of all ICMI 2023 papers, including Long and Short Papers, will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and Digital Library, and the adjunct proceedings will feature the workshop papers.

Novelty will be assessed along two dimensions: scientific novelty and technical novelty. Accepted papers at ICMI 2023 will need to be novel along one of the two dimensions:

• Scientific Novelty: Papers should bring new scientific knowledge about human social interactions, including human-computer interactions. For example, discovering new behavioral markers that are predictive of mental health or how new behavioral patterns relate to children’s interactions during learning. It is the responsibility of the authors to perform a proper literature review and clearly discuss the novelty in the scientific discoveries made in their paper.
• Technical Novelty: Papers should propose novelty in their computational approach for recognizing, generating or modeling multimodal data. Examples include: novelty in the learning and prediction algorithms, in the neural architecture, or in the data representation. Novelty can also be associated with new usages of an existing approach.

Please see the Submission Guidelines for Authors https://icmi.acm.org/ for detailed submission instructions. Commitment to ethical conduct is required and submissions must adhere to ethical standards in particular when human-derived data are employed. Authors are encouraged to read the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (https://ethics.acm.org/).

ICMI 2023 conference theme: The theme for this year’s conference is “Science of Multimodal Interactions”. As the community grows, it is important to understand the main scientific pillars involved in deep understanding of multimodal social interactions. As a first step, we want to acknowledge key discoveries and contributions that the ICMI community enabled over the past 20+ years. As a second step, we reflect on the core principles, foundational methodologies and scientific knowledge involved in studying and modeling multimodal interactions. This will help establish a distinctive research identity for the ICMI community while at the same time embracing its multidisciplinary collaborative nature. This research identity and long-term agenda will enable the community to develop future technologies and applications while maintaining commitment to world-class scientific research.

Additional topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Affective computing and interaction
• Cognitive modeling and multimodal interaction
• Gesture, touch and haptics
• Healthcare, assistive technologies
• Human communication dynamics
• Human-robot/agent multimodal interaction
• Human-centered A.I. and ethics
• Interaction with smart environment
• Machine learning for multimodal interaction
• Mobile multimodal systems
• Multimodal behaviour generation
• Multimodal datasets and validation
• Multimodal dialogue modeling
• Multimodal fusion and representation
• Multimodal interactive applications
• Novel multimodal datasets
• Speech behaviours in social interaction
• System components and multimodal platforms
• Visual behaviours in social interaction
• Virtual/augmented reality and multimodal interaction

Important Dates

Paper Submission: May 1, 2023 

Rebuttal period: June 26-29, 2023

Paper notification: July 21, 2023

Camera-ready paper: August 14, 2023

Presenting at main conference: October 9-13, 2023

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===========================================
ACM ICMI 2023 2ND CALL FOR BLUE SKY PAPERS   
===========================================
9-13 October 2023, Paris - France
https://icmi.acm.org/2023/
===========================================

ICMI 2023 is pleased to partner with the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to continue the Blue Sky Paper track, initialized in 2021 and continued in 2022, that emphasizes innovative, visionary, and high-impact contributions. This track solicits papers relevant to ICMI content that go beyond the usual research paper to present new visions that stimulate the ICMI community to pursue innovative directions. They may challenge existing assumptions and methodologies or propose new applications or theories. The papers are encouraged to present high-risk controversial ideas. Submitted papers are expected to represent deep reflection, argue rigorously, and present ideas from a high-level synthetic viewpoint (e.g., multidisciplinary, based on multiple methodologies).

The review of the submissions will be handled by the Blue Sky Paper Chairs: Carlos Busso (University of Texas At Dallas), Philippe Palanque (University Toulouse III, France), and Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg, Germany). Three winners will be selected for presentation in the Blue Sky Paper track and publication in the conference proceedings. The CCC will sponsor awards to honor the first ($1,000), second ($750), and third ($500) place winners in the form of travel grants. In addition, they will further distribute and publicize the three Blue Sky award papers.

Important Dates
---------------
Paper Submission                June 17th, 2023
Paper notification                July 14th, 2023
Camera-ready paper                August 14th, 2023
Presenting at main conference        October 9-13, 2023

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ACM ICMI 2023 CALL FOR LATE-BREAKING RESULTS
9-13 October 2023, Paris - France
https://icmi.acm.org/2023/doctoral-consortium/
========================================================

Based on the success of the LBR in the past ICMI, the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2023 continues soliciting submissions for the special venue titled Late-Breaking Results (LBR). The goal of this venue is to provide a way for researchers to share emerging results at the conference. Accepted submissions will be presented in a poster session at the conference, and the extended abstract will be published in the new Adjunct Proceedings (Companion Volume) of the main ICMI Proceedings. Like similar venues at other conferences, the LBR venue is intended to allow sharing of ideas, getting formative feedback on early-stage work, and furthering collaborations among colleagues.

Online Submission
For online paper submissions, please click on the following link:
https://new.precisionconference.com/user/login?next=https%3A//new.precisionconference.com/submissions/icmi23a

Highlights
* Submission deadline: July 16th, 2023, 23:59 PDT (GMT-7) Deadline extended to July 21st, 2023 

* Notifications: August 13th, 2023

* Camera-ready deadline: September 3rd, 2023
* Conference Dates: October  9-13, 2023
* Submission format: Anonymized, short paper (four-page paper in a double column format, not including references), following the submission guidelines, available here: https://icmi.acm.org/2023/guidelines-for-authors/
* Selection process: Peer-Reviewed
* Presentation format: Participation in the conference poster session
* Proceedings: Included in Adjunct Proceedings and ACM Digital Library
* LBR Co-chairs: Jean-Marc Odobez and Chi-Chun Lee

What are Late-Breaking Results?
Late-Breaking Work (LBR) submissions represent work such as preliminary results, provoking and current topics, novel experiences or interactions that may not have been fully validated yet, cutting edge or emerging work that is still in exploratory stages, smaller-scale studies, or in general, work that has not yet reached a level of maturity expected for the full-length main track papers. However, LBR papers are still expected to bring a contribution to the ICMI community, commensurate with the preliminary, short, and quasi-informal nature of this track.

Why submit to the Late-Breaking Results track at ICMI?
Accepted LBR papers will be presented as posters during the conference. This provides an opportunity for researchers to receive feedback on early-stage work, explore potential collaborations, and otherwise engage in exciting thought-provoking discussions about their work in an informal setting that is significantly less constrained than a paper presentation. The LBR (posters) track also offers those new to the ICMI community a chance to share their preliminary research as they become familiar with this field.

Late-Breaking Results papers appear in the Adjunct Proceedings (Companion Volume) of the ICMI Proceedings. Copyright is retained by the authors, and the material from these papers can be used as the basis for future publications as long as there are 'significant' revisions from the original, as per the ACM and ACM SIGCHI policies.

Submission Guidelines
Extended Abstract: An anonymized short paper, four-page paper in a double column ACM conference  format, using LaTeX or Word (excluding references). Papers should follow the same guidelines as papers published in the proceedings of the ACM ICMI conference: https://icmi.acm.org/2023/guidelines-for-authors/. The paper should be submitted in PDF format and through the ICMI submission system in the “Late-Breaking Results” track. Due to the tight publication timeline, it is recommended that authors submit a very nearly finalized paper that is as close to camera-ready as possible, as there will be a very short timeframe for preparing the final camera-ready version and no deadline extensions can be granted.

Anonymization: Authors are instructed not to include author information in their submission. In order to help reviewers judge the situation of the LBR to prior work, authors should not remove or anonymize references to their own prior work. Instead, we recommend that authors obscure references to their own prior work by referring to it in the third person during submission. If desired, after acceptance, such references can be changed to first-person.

Review Process
LBRs will be evaluated to the extent that they are presenting work still in progress, rather than complete work which is under-described in order to fit into the LBR format. The LBR track will undergo an external peer review process. Submissions will be evaluated by a number of factors including (1) the relevance of the work to ICMI, (2) the quality of the submission, and (3) the degree to which it 'fits' the LBR track (e.g., in-progress results). 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. Authors should clearly justify how the proposed ideas can bring some measurable breakthroughs compared to the state-of-the-art of the field.

Attendance
Similar rules for registration and attendance will be applied for authors of LBR papers as for regular papers. Further information will be available later on and given on the main page of the website.

Questions?
For more information and updates on the ICMI 2023 Late-Breaking Results (LBR), visit the LBR page of the main conference website: https://icmi.acm.org/2023/late-breaking-results/.

For further questions, contact the LBR co-chairs (Jean-Marc Odobez and Chi-Chun Lee) at icmi2023-late-breaking-results-chairs@acm.org

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Call for participation: GENEA Challenge 2023 on speech-driven gesture generation
Starting date: May 1

Location: Official Grand Challenge of ICMI 2023, Paris, France

Website: https://genea-workshop.github.io/2023/challenge/
*********************************************************************

Overview
*********************

The state of the art in co-speech gesture generation is difficult to assess, since every research group tends to use their own data, embodiment, and evaluation methodology. To better understand and compare methods for gesture generation and evaluation, we are continuing the GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Challenge, wherein different gesture-generation approaches are evaluated side by side in a large user study. This 2023 challenge is a Grand Challenge for ICMI 2023 and is a follow-up to the first and second editions of the GENEA Challenge, arranged in 2020 and 2022.

This year the challenge will focus on gesture synthesis in a dyadic setting, i.e., gestures that depend not only on speech, but also on the behaviour of an interlocutor in a conversation. We invite researchers in academia and industry working on any form of corpus-based non-verbal behaviour generation and gesticulation to submit entries to the challenge, whether their method is driven by rule or machine learning. Participants are provided a large, common dataset of speech (audio+aligned text transcriptions) and 3D motion to develop their systems, and then use these systems to generate motion on given test inputs. The generated motion clips are rendered onto a common virtual agent and evaluated for aspects such as motion quality and appropriateness in a large-scale crowdsourced user study.

Data

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

The 2023 challenge is based on the Talking With Hands 16.2M dataset (https://github.com/facebookresearch/TalkingWithHands32M). The official challenge dataset also includes additional annotations, and is only available to registered participants.

Timeline

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

April 1  – Participant registration opens

May 1 – Challenge training dataset released to participants

June 7 – Test input released to participants

June 14 – Deadline for participants to submit generated motion

July 3 – Release of crowdsourced evaluation results to participants

July 14 – Paper submission deadline

August 4 – Author notification

August 11 – Camera-ready papers due

October 9 or 13 – Challenge presentations at ICMI

If you would like to receive a notification when challenge registration opens, please follow this link: https://forms.gle/MFEXv84xGL3NrY3d9/.

Challenge paper

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

Challenge participants are required to submit a paper that describes their system and findings, and will present their work at the Grand Challenge session at ICMI. All accepted papers will be part of the ACM ICMI 2023 main proceedings. Papers that are not accepted will have a chance to be considered for the GENEA Workshop 2023, whose papers are published in the ACM ICMI 2023 companion proceedings.

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Website: https://sites.google.com/mit.edu/mcapnd2023

Submission deadline: July 23rd, 2023

Submission platform: https://openreview.net/group?id=ACM.org/ICMI/2023/MCAPND (accepted papers will be indexed by ACM Digital Library)


Dear colleagues,

The International Workshop on Multimodal Conversational Agents for Individuals with Neurodevelopmental Disorders is now accepting submissions. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) on 9th-13th October 2023 in Paris. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of multimodal conversational agents for individuals with NDD to foster a multidisciplinary discourse on the latest research, technologies, and applications in the field. More info can be found on the workshop website: https://sites.google.com/mit.edu/mcapnd2023

We hope this workshop will be a venue for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, share findings, and identify future research directions.
We look forward to your participation!

Best regards,
The organization committee
(Fabio Catania - MIT
Tanya Talkar - MIT and Harvard University
Franca Garzotto - Politecnico di Milano
Satrajit Ghosh - MIT and Harvard University
Thomas Quatieri - MIT and Harvard University
Benjamin Cowan - University College Dublin)


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

Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
-Design and development of multimodal conversational agents for individuals with NDD
-Evaluating the effectiveness of these systems in real-world settings
-Understanding the specific needs of individuals with NDD and tailoring the systems accordingly
-Use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the development of these systems
-Voice analysis and perception
-Social and ethical implications of using these systems

Submission
The deadline for submitting papers is July 23rd, 2023.
For online paper submissions, please click on the following link:
https://openreview.net/group?id=ACM.org/ICMI/2023/MCAPND
All papers submitted to the workshop should follow the same guidelines as papers published in the proceedings of the ACM ICMI conference:
https://icmi.acm.org/2023/guidelines-for-authors/
We accept two different paper formats: long paper (up to 14 pages) and short paper (up to 7 pages). Papers should be anonymous, and authors should not include any identifiable information in the paper, including acknowledgments and references.

Review
All submissions will be double-blindly peer-reviewed by at least two independent reviewers.

Publication
Workshop papers will be indexed by ACM Digital Library in an adjunct proceeding, and a short workshop summary by the organizers will be published in the main conference proceedings.

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Call for Participation:

ACM Multimedia 2023 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE) - Emotion Share and Requests http://www.compare.openaudio.eu/2023-2/

The ACM Multimedia 2023 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE) is an open Grand Challenge dealing with states and traits of speakers as manifested in their speech signal’s properties and beyond. In this 14th edition, we introduce two new Sub-Challenges:

	• Emotion Share Sub-Challenge,
	• Requests Sub-Challenge

Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. Participants have five trials on the test set per Sub-Challenge. Participation has to be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes the ACM peer-review.

Contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought for (but not limited to):

	• Participation in a Sub-Challenge
	• Contributions around the Challenge topics

Results of the Challenge and Prizes will be presented at ACM Multimedia 2023 in Ottawa between 29 October and 3 November 2023.

Organizers

  General Chairs:
    - Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg, Germany / Imperial College London, UK / audEERING)
    - Anton Batliner (University of Augsburg, Germany) 
    - Shahin Amiriparian (University of Augsburg, Germany)
    - Alexander Barnhill (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Erlangen, Germany)
    - Alan S. Cowen (Hume.AI, USA)
    - Claude Montacié (Sorbonne University, France)

  Data Chairs:
    - Alice Baird (Hume.AI, USA)
    - Nikola Lackovic (Malakoff Humanis, France)
 [IMPORTANT] Please note, in case of participation: for the Requests sub-challenge, you have to sign the EULA the same way as in previous years: it is mandatory that it is signed by a *permanent* member of the staff, not  for instance by a student!

For the Emotion Share Sub-Challenge, EULAs and data will be handled by Hume.AI. For more information visit

http://www.compare.openaudio.eu/2023-2/

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Call for Participation: the 2nd Conversational Head Generation Challenge @ ACM Multimedia 2023

We are pleased to invite multimedia researchers to participate the 2nd 'Conversational Head Generation Challenge,' co-located with ACM Multimedia 2023.

About the Challenge:
Conversational head generation highlights both the talking and listening roles generation in an interactive face-to-face conversation. Generating vivid talking head video and proper responsive listening behavior are both essential for digital humans during face-to-face human-computer interaction. More details can be found via: https://vico.solutions/challenge/2023

This distinctive challenge is based on the newly extended ViCo dataset (https://vico.solutions/vico), composed with conversation videos between real humans. Our aim is to bring face-to-face interactive head video generation into a visual competition through this challenge. This year, two tracks will be hosted:
- Talking head video generation (audio-driven speaker video generation) conditioned on the identity and audio signals of the speaker.
- Responsive Listening Head Video Generation (video-driven listener video generation) conditioned on the identity of the listener and with real-time responses to the speaker's behaviors.

As a starting point for the participates, we also provide an open-source baseline method (https://github.com/dc3ea9f/vico_challenge_baseline) that includes audio/video-driven head generation, rendering, and scripts for 13 evaluation metrics.

Important Dates:
- Dataset available for download (training set): March 27th.
- Challenge launch date: April 3rd.
- Paper submissions deadline: July 14th.
- Top submissions will have the opportunity to present their work at the workshop during ACM Multimedia 2023. We encourage all participating teams to submit a paper (up to 4 pages + up to 2 extra pages for references only) briefly describing their solution.

Find out more about the challenge:
- Challenge mainpage (including challenge registration, online evaluation results): https://vico.solutions/challenge/2023
- Challenge page at ACM MM 2023: https://www.acmmm2023.org/grand-challenges-2/

We believe this challenge would greatly benefit from your knowledge and expertise. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or require further information.

Contact: Yalong Bai, Mohan Zhou, Wei Zhang
vico-challenge@outlook.com

The organizing team
March 2023

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The 35th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) organizing committee is inviting you to submit your research papers.
The conference will be held in person, on November 6-8, 2023 in Atlanta.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED to JULY 21, 2023 (Firm deadline).
We look forward to your submissions on Easy Chair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ictai2023

Details on the conference venue and registration will appear on the ICTAI 2023 website: https://ictai.computer.org/2023/

SO PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline Paper submission: July 21, 2023 ()
Acceptance notification: August 24, 2023
Camera-ready: September 20, 2023

The IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) is a leading IEEE-CS annual scientific meeting for three decades.
It provides a major international forum where the creation and exchange of ideas related to artificial intelligence are fostered among academia, industry, and government agencies.
The conference facilitates the cross-fertilization of these ideas and promotes their transfer into practical tools, for developing intelligent systems and pursuing artificial intelligence applications.
The ICTAI encompasses all technical aspects of specifying, developing, and evaluating the theoretical underpinnings and applied mechanisms of the AI-based components such as algorithms, architectures, and languages.

Topics include (but not limited to):
1. AI Foundations
2. AI in Domain-specific Applications
3. AI in Computer Systems
4. AI in Data Analytics, Data Mining and Big Data
5. AI in Smart Cities
6. AI Synergistic Models
7. Machine Learning
8. Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, Cognition
9. AI and Decision Systems
10. Uncertainty in AI
11. AI and Societal Impact

Paper submission:

SUBMISSION should be made through the Easy Chair link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ictai2023

The submissions should contain original, high quality, not submitted or published elsewhere work.
Papers should be submitted electronically in pdf and should conform to IEEE specifications (single spaced double column, 10 point font size, up to maximum 8 pages).

Proceedings:
All accepted papers will be examined by at least two-three reviewers of the program committee.
All presented papers will be included in proceedings of ICTAI 2023 published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Special Issues Extended versions of the conference best papers will be invited for publication in various IEEE and Int. Journals.

ICTAI provide several financial awards to the top-5 best student papers and to the ICTAI Best Paper Award

ICTAI 2023 INVITED SPEAKERS:

Dr. Wendy Nilsen, National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, USA
Professor Dr Björn W. Schuller, Imperial College London, UK
Dr. Daniel Koller, Director Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA,USA
Professor Dr. Sukarno Mertoguno, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

ICTAI 2023 organizing committee

General Chair
Anna Esposito, University of Campania, Italy

Program Chairs
Ming Yang, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA
Gennaro Cordasco, University of Campania, Italy

Financial-Registration Chairs
Michail Alexiou, GIT, Atlanta, GA, USA
Zhigang Li, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA

Local Web Chair
Narayana Varma Addepalli, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA

Publicity Chairs
Carmela Comito, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Jian Yu, Tianjin University, China
Chloe Xie, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA

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======================================================================

Les RJCP sont des journées marrainées par l'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (https://www.afcp-parole.org/) qui offrent aux jeunes chercheurs l’occasion de se rencontrer, de présenter leurs travaux, d'élargir leurs connaissances et d’échanger sur les divers domaines de la Parole. Nous serons heureux d'accueillir tous les intéressés par des échanges autour de la recherche en parole, jeunes chercheurs ou non  (dans la limite des places disponibles). Il y aura au progamme des sessions posters, des conférences, des formations et des visites de plateformes expérimentales dédiées à la parole. Une table ronde consacrée aux poursuites de carrière/perspectives professionnelles après la thèse vous sera également proposée. Plus d’informations seront affichées sur notre site Web au cours de l'été (à découvrir ici) !

DATES IMPORTANTES

• 15/06/2023 - Ouverture de l’appel à posters  

• 16/09/2023 - Date limite d'envoi des résumés (extended)

• 22/09/2023 - Notification d’acceptation aux auteurs

• 25/09/2023 - 1ère phase d’ouverture des inscriptions 

• 30/10/2023 - Fermeture des inscriptions (celle-ci pourra intervenir plus tôt si nous atteignons rapidement le nombre maximum de personnes que nous pouvons accueillir)

• 29/11/2023 - 01/12/2023 - RJCP
  
  

THÈMES

Nous invitons les communications sur les thèmes suivants (liste non exhaustive):

* Acoustique de la parole
* Acquisition de la parole et du langage 
* Analyse, codage et compression de la parole
* Applications à composantes orales (dialogue, indexation, etc)
* Apprentissage d’une langue seconde
* Communication multimodale 
* Dialectologie 
* Évaluation, corpus et ressources 
* Langues en danger 
* Modèles de langage 
* Parole audio-visuelle
* Pathologies de la parole 
* Phonétique et phonologie 
* Phonétique clinique 
* Production / Perception de la parole
* Prosodie
* Psycholinguistique 
* Reconnaissance et compréhension de la parole 
* Reconnaissance de la langue
* Reconnaissance du locuteur
* Signaux sociaux, sociophonétique 
* Synthèse de la parole…

APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS

Masterants, doctorants, post-doctorants*, industriels* et jeunes chercheurs en recherche d'emploi* sont invités à soumettre un résumé de 300 mots maximum présentant leurs travaux à venir, en cours ou terminés pour la session posters: https://rjcp-2023.sciencesconf.org/submission/submit 

Le nombre de pages de références n’est pas restreint. Les templates seront à retrouver sous peu sur notre site, dans la section “Appel à Communications”.

Le Comité d’organisation RJCP pourra prendre en charge l’impression des posters pour les personnes non affiliées à un laboratoire de recherche. Cette décision sera prise après discussion. Pour en faire la demande, veuillez nous contacter à jcparole@gmail.com.

*Jusqu’à 3 ans après la thèse

Nous espérons vous voir nombreux,

Le comité d'organisation

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Special attractions for commemorating Silver Jubilee of SPECOM

• Students Special Session

• Special Session on Speech Processing for Under-Resource Languages

• Special Session on Industrial Speech and Language Technology

• Satellite Workshop on “Speaker and Language Identification, Verification and Diarization” @ Goa

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The 2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2023) will be held on December 16 – 20, 2023, at Taipei, Taiwan. The workshop is held every two years and has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting to discuss problems of common interest in automatic speech recognition and understanding. The conference will be an 'in-person' event (with a virtual component for those that can not attend physically). The event will be held in the Beitou Area, the town of hot springs of Taipei. We encourage all to join us for this wonderful event in Taiwan; looking forward to seeing you all in Taiwan. The paper submission deadline is July 3rd, 2023.
http://www.asru2023.org/

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Call for Papers

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

6th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports (MMSports'23) @ ACM Multimedia, Oct 29 – Nov 3, 2023, Ottawa, Canada

We'd like to invite you to submit your paper proposals for the 6th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports to be held in Ottawa, Canada together with ACM Multimedia 2023. The ambition of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from many different disciplines to share ideas and methods 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 in sports

- tracking people/ athlete and objects in sports

- activity recognition, classification, and evaluation in sports

- 3D scene and motion reconstruction in sports

- event detection and indexing in sports

- performance assessment in sports

- injury analysis and prevention in sports

- data driven analysis in sports

- graphical augmentation and visualization in sports

- automated training assistance in sports

- camera pose and motion tracking in sports

- brave new ideas / extraordinary multimodal solutions in sports

- personal virtual (home) trainers/coaches in sports

- datasets in sports

- graphical effects in sports

- alternative sensing in sports (beyond the visible spectrum)

- multimodal perception in sports

- exploiting physical knowledge in learning systems for sports

- sports knowledge discovery

- narrative generation and narrative analysis in sports

- mobile sports application

- multimedia in sports beyond video, including 3D data and sensor data

Submissions can be of varying length from 4 to 8 pages, plus additional pages for the reference pages. There is no distinction between long and short papers, but the authors may themselves decide on the appropriate length of their paper. All papers will undergo the same review process and review period.

Please refer to the workshop website for further information: 

http://mmsports.multimedia-computing.de/mmsports2023/index.html

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Due:                            14 July 2023 

Acceptance Notification:             30 July 2023

Camera Ready Submission:         12 August 2023 

Workshop Date:                            TBA; either Oct 29 or Nov 3, 2023

Challenges

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

This year again, MMSports carries out a competition where participants can compete on state-of-the-art problems applied to real-world sport specific data. The competition is made of individual challenges, each of which is sponsored by SportRadar with a US$1,000.00 prize. Each challenge comes with a toolkit describing the task, the dataset and metrics on which participants will be evaluated. More information on the challenges will be coming soon.

ACM MMSports’23 Chairs: Thomas Moeslund, Rainer Lienhart and Hideo Saito

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Second Call for Papers for the 30th International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling — MMM 2024

January 29 – February 2, 2024 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands


*** MMM is a B-ranked conference, following the CORE ranking updates published in June 2021.


MMM is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners for sharing new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. The conference calls for research papers reporting original investigation results and demonstrations reporting novel and compelling applications. Special sessions, Brave New Ideas session, keynote lectures, the Video Browser Showdown and the MediaEval workshop will also contribute to a high-quality program.


Conference Website: http://mmm2024.org/


MMM 2024 proposes eight special sessions:

  *   MDRE: Multimedia Datasets for Repeatable Experimentation
  *   MOMST: Multi-Object Multi-Sensor Tracking
  *   MARGeM: Multimodal Analytics and Retrieval of Georeferenced Multimedia
  *   ICDAR: Intelligent Cross-Data Analysis and Retrieval
  *   XR-MACCI: eXtended Reality and Multimedia: Advancing Content Creation and Interaction
  *   FMM: Foundation Models for Multimedia
  *   MULTICOM: Towards Multimedia and Multimodality in Conversational Systems
  *   CultMM Cultural AI in Multimedia


MMM 2024 also hosts two community events:

  *   Video Browser Showdown (VBS): https://videobrowsershowdown.org<https://videobrowsershowdown.org/>
  *   MediaEval: https://multimediaeval.github.io/editions/2023/


Submission Deadlines

  *   Regular and special session papers are due September 4, 2023
  *   BNI papers and demonstration submissions are due October 2, 2023
  *   MediaEval and VBS deadlines are separately defined by the respective event organisers


Submission website is now open. Regular and special session paper submissions are limited to 12 content pages, including all figures, tables, and appendices, in the Springer LNCS style. Additional 2 pages containing only cited references are allowed. Please note that this is a change from previous MMM conference editions.


MMM seeks contributions on the following research topics:


Multimedia Content Analysis

  *   Multimedia indexing
  *   Multimedia mining
  *   Multimedia abstraction and summarisation
  *   Multimedia annotation, tagging and recommendation
  *   Multimodal analysis for retrieval applications
  *   Semantic analysis of multimedia and contextual data
  *   Interactive learning
  *   Multimedia knowledge acquisition and construction
  *   Multimedia verification
  *   Multimedia fusion methods
  *   Multimedia content generation

Multimedia Signal Processing and Communications

  *   Media representation and algorithms
  *   Multimedia sensors and interaction modes
  *   Multimedia privacy, security and content protection
  *   Multimedia standards and related issues
  *   Multimedia databases, query processing, and scalability
  *   Multimedia content delivery, transport and streaming
  *   Wireless and mobile multimedia networking
  *   Sensor networks (video surveillance, distributed systems)
  *   Audio, image, video processing, coding and compression
  *   Multi-camera and multi-view systems

Multimedia Applications, Interfaces and Services

  *   Media content retrieval, browsing and recommendation tools
  *   Extended reality (AR/VR/MR) and virtual environments
  *   Real-time and interactive multimedia applications
  *   Multimedia analytics applications
  *   Egocentric, wearable and personal multimedia
  *   Urban and satellite multimedia
  *   Mobile multimedia applications
  *   Question answering, multimodal conversational AI and hybrid intelligence
  *   Multimedia authoring and personalisation
  *   Cultural, educational and social multimedia applications
  *   Multimedia for e-health and medical applications

Ethical, Legal and Societal Aspects of Multimedia

  *   Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics in multimedia modeling
  *   Environmental footprint of multimedia modeling
  *   Large multimedia models and LLMs
  *   Multimodal pretraining and representation learning
  *   Reproducibility, interpretability, explainability and robustness
  *   Embodied multimodal applications and tasks
  *   Responsible multimedia modeling and learning
  *   Legal and ethical aspects of multimodal generative AI
  *   Multimedia research valorisation
  *   Digital transformation

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Dear Speech Prosody SIG members,

We are delighted to announce that Speech Prosody 2024 will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands (02–05 July 2024). The conference aims to showcase the facets of prosodic variation and their role in the production, comprehension, and acquisition of speech in order to obtain a better understanding of the structure and function of prosody. The theme includes four subthemes:

a. Prosody through the lifespan

b. Typology and cross-linguistic variation

c. Individual and social variation

d. Contact-induced variation

The conference will include both thematic sessions, based on the above subthemes, and non-thematic sessions. We also invite proposals for special sessions, workshops, and tutorials.

We welcome submissions on any aspect of prosody in language. Contributions relating to the conference themes, and particularly, submissions by junior researchers, on under-studied languages, and/or with interdisciplinary research methods, are strongly encouraged.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Phonology and phonetics of prosody

Prosody and its interfaces with morphology, syntax, and semantics

Prosody and pragmatics

Rhythm and timing

Tone and intonation

Interaction between segmental and suprasegmental features

Production and perception of prosody

Acquisition of first, second, and third language prosody

Prosody in neurodevelopmental disorders

Prosody and speech and language impairments

Assessment of prosody and measures to evaluate prosodic skills

Prosody in infant-directed speech, child-directed speech, and elderly speakers

Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural correlates of prosody

Cognitive processing and modelling of prosody

Prosody in language contact

Prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects

Audiovisual and multimodal prosody

Prosody of sign language

Prosody in language and music

Prosody in speaker characterization and recognition

Prosody in speech synthesis, recognition, and understanding

Forensic voice and language investigation

Prosody in computer language learning systems

Computational modelling and applications of prosody

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

Call for Special Sessions: Deadline 30 October 2023

We invite proposals for special sessions on interdisciplinary, under-studied, and emerging topics.

Proposals should be sent to sp2024@hum.leidenuniv.nl as a PDF file and include:

• Title of the proposed session
• Names and affiliations of organizers (including brief bio and contact information)
• Motivation and description (maximally 500 words)

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

Call for Workshops and Tutorials: Deadline 30 October 2023

We invite proposals for workshops and tutorials, to be held in Leiden on 01 July 2024.  We encourage proposals on interdisciplinary, under-studied, and emerging topics, as well as cutting-edge research methods that address those topics.

Proposals should be sent to sp2024@hum.leidenuniv.nl as a PDF file and include:

• Title of the workshop/tutorial and a brief description (maximally 500 words)
• Names and affiliations of organizers (including brief bio and contact information)
• Invited speakers (if any) for workshops and expected audience for tutorials
• Proposed duration of the workshop/tutorial and estimated number of participants
• Technical and administrative requirements

• Sources of funding for the proposed workshop/tutorial

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

Call for Abstracts and Papers:

Deadlines: 20 December 2023 for abstract and 07 January 2024 for 4-page paper

Abtracts (including title, author information, and a 200-word description of the research) should be submitted by 20 December, 2023. The deadline for submitting a full 4-page full paper is 07 January 2024.

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

Important dates:

Special session proposal deadline                               30/10/2023

Workshop and tutorial proposal deadline                   30/10/2023

Abstract submission opens                                         20/11/2023

Abstract submission deadline                                     20/12/2023

Full paper submission deadline                                   07/01/2023

Notification of acceptance (by email)                         25/02/2024

Yiya Chen  sp2024@hum.leidenuniv.nl

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13th International Conference

on Voice Physiology and Biomechanics

Erlangen, Germany 22nd-26th of July 2024

we cordially invite you to participate in the 13th International Conference on Voice Physiology and Biomechanics, July 22nd – 26th of 2024!

After the successful hosting in 2012, we are pleased to welcome you back in Erlangen, Germany! There will be two days of workshops prior to the three days of conference and several social events in the beautiful Nuremberg Metropolitan Region.

The workshops (July 22nd-23rd) and the conference (July 24th-26th) will focus on voice physiology and biomechanics including computational, numerical and experimental modeling, machine learning, tissue engineering, laryngeal pathologies and many more. Abstract submission and registration will be open from November 1st, 2023.

We are looking forward to your contributions and to seeing you in Erlangen, July 2024!

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Call for Labs Proposals @CLEF 2024

At its 25th edition, the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is a continuation of the very successful series of evaluation campaigns of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) which ran between 2000 and 2009, and established a framework of systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. As a leading annual international conference, CLEF uniquely combines evaluation laboratories and workshops with research presentations, panels, posters and demo sessions. In 2024, CLEF takes place in September,  9-12 at the University of Grenoble Alpes, France.

Researchers and practitioners from all areas of information access and related communities are invited to submit proposals for running evaluation labs as part of CLEF 2024. Proposals will be reviewed by a lab selection committee, composed of researchers with extensive experience in evaluating information retrieval and extraction systems. Organisers of selected proposals will be invited to include their lab in the CLEF 2024 labs programme, possibly subject to suggested modifications to their proposal to better suit the CLEF lab workflow or timeline.

Background

The CLEF Initiative (http://www.clef-initiative.eu/) is a self-organised body whose main mission is to promote research, innovation, and development of information access systems with an emphasis on multilingual information in different modalities - including text and multimedia - with various levels of structure. CLEF promotes research and development by providing an infrastructure for:

1. independent evaluation of information access systems;

2. investigation of the use of unstructured, semi-structured, highly-structured, and semantically enriched data in information access; 

3. creation of reusable test collections for benchmarking; 

4. exploration of new evaluation methodologies and innovative ways of using experimental data; 

5. discussion of results, comparison of approaches, exchange of ideas, and transfer of knowledge.
   
   

Scope of CLEF Labs

We invite submission of proposals for two types of labs:

1. “Campaign-style” Evaluation Labs for specific information access problems (during the twelve months period preceding the conference), similar in nature to the traditional CLEF campaign “tracks”. Topics covered by campaign-style labs can be inspired by any information access-related domain or task.
   
   

2. Labs that follow a more classical “workshop” pattern, exploring evaluation methodology, metrics, processes, etc. in information access and closely related fields, such as natural language processing, machine translation, and human-computer interaction.
   
   

We highly recommend organisers new to the CLEF format of shared task evaluation campaigns to first consider organising a lab workshop to discuss the format of their proposed task, the problem space and practicalities of the shared task. The CLEF 2024 programme will reserve about half of the conference schedule for lab sessions. During the conference, the lab organisers will present their overall results in overview presentations during the plenary scientific paper sessions to give non-participants insights into where the research frontiers are moving. During the conference, lab organisers are expected to organise separate sessions for their lab with ample time for general discussion and engagement with all participants - not just those presenting campaign results and papers. Organisers should plan time in their sessions for activities such as panels, demos, poster sessions, etc. as appropriate. CLEF is always interested in receiving and facilitating innovative lab proposals. 

Potential task proposers unsure of the suitability of their task proposal or its format for inclusion at CLEF are encouraged to contact the CLEF 2024 Lab Organizing Committee Chairs to discuss its suitability or design at an early stage.

Proposal Submission

Lab proposals must provide sufficient information to judge the relevance, timeliness, scientific quality, benefits for the research community, and the competence of the proposers to coordinate the lab. Each lab proposal should identify one or more organisers as responsible for ensuring the timely execution of the lab. Proposals should be 3 to 4 pages long and should provide the following information:

1. Title of the proposed lab.
    

2. A brief description of the lab topic and goals, its relevance to CLEF and the significance for the field.
    

3. A brief and clear statement on usage scenarios and domain to which the activity is intended to contribute, including the evaluation setup and metrics.
    

4. Details on the lab organiser(s), including identifying the task chair(s) responsible for ensuring the running of the task. This should include details of any previous involvement in organising or participating in evaluation tasks at CLEF or similar campaigns.
    

5. The planned format of the lab, i.e., campaign-style (“track”) or workshop.
    

6. Is the lab a continuation of an activity from previous year(s) or a new activity?  

1. For activities continued from previous year(s): Statistics from previous years (number of participants/runs for each task), a clear statement on why another edition is needed, an explicit listing of the changes proposed, and a discussion of lessons to be learned or insights to be made.
   
   

2. For new activities: A statement on why a new evaluation campaign is needed and how the community would benefit from the activity.
    

7. Details of the expected target audience, i.e., who do you expect to participate in the task(s), and how do you propose to reach them.
    

8. Brief details of tasks to be carried out in the lab. The proposal should clearly motivate the need for each of the proposed tasks and provide evidence of its capability of attracting enough participation. The dataset which will be adopted by the Lab needs to be described and motivated in the perspective of the goals of the Labs; also indications on how the dataset will be shared are useful. It is fine for a lab to have a single task, but labs often contain multiple closely related tasks, needing a strong motivation for more than 3 tasks, to avoid useless fragmentation.
    

9. Expected length of the lab session at the conference: half-day, one day, two days. This should include high-level details of planned structure of the session, e.g. participant presentations, invited speaker(s), panels, etc., to justify the requested session length.
    

10. Arrangements for the organisation of the lab campaign: who will be responsible for activities within the task; how will data be acquired or created, what tools or methods will be used, e.g., how will necessary queries be created or relevance assessment carried out; any other information which is relevant to the conduct of your lab.
     

11. If the lab proposes to set up a steering committee to oversee and advise its activities, include names, addresses, and homepage links of people you propose to be involved.
    
    

Lab proposals must be submitted at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2024

choosing the “CLEF 2024 Lab Proposals” track.

Reviewing Process

Each submitted proposal will be reviewed by the CLEF 2024 Lab Organizing Committee. The acceptance decision will be sent by email to the responsible organiser by 28 July 2023. The final length of the lab session at the conference will be determined based on the overall organisation of the conference and the number of participant submissions received by a lab.

Advertising Labs at CLEF 2023 and ECIR 2024

Organisers of accepted labs are expected to advertise their labs at both CLEF 2023 (18-21 September 2023, Thessaloniki, Greece) and ECIR 2024 (24-28 March 2024, Glasgow, Scotland). So, at least one lab representative should attend these events.

Advertising at CLEF 2023 will consist of displaying a poster describing the new lab, running a break-out session to discuss the lab with prospective participants, and advertising/announcing it during the closing session.

Advertising at ECIR 2024 will consist of submitting a lab description to be included in ECIR 2024 proceedings (11 October 2023) and advertising the lab in a booster session during ECIR 2024.

Mentorship Program for Lab Proposals from newcomers

CLEF 2019 introduced a mentorship program to support the preparation of lab proposals for newcomers to CLEF. The program will be continued at CLEF 2024 and we encourage newcomers to refer to Friedberg et al. (2015) for initial guidance on preparing their proposal:

Friedberg I, Wass MN, Mooney SD, Radivojac P. Ten simple rules for a community computational challenge. PLoS Comput Biol. 2015 Apr 23;11(4):e1004150.

The CLEF newcomers mentoring program offers help, guidance, and feedback on the writing of your draft lab proposal by assigning a mentor to you, who help you in preparing and maturing the lab proposal for submission. If your lab proposal falls into the scope of an already existing CLEF lab, the mentor will help you to get in touch with those lab organisers and team up forces.

Lab proposals for mentorship must be submitted at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clef2024

choosing the “CLEF 2024 Lab Mentorship” track.

Important Dates

• 29 May 2023: Requests for mentorship submission (only newcomers)

• 29 May 2023 - 16 June 2023: Mentorship period

• 7 July 2023: Lab proposals submission (newcomers and veterans)

• 28 July 2023: Notification of lab acceptance

• 18-21 Sep 2023: Advertising Accepted Labs at CLEF 2023, Thessaloniki, Greece

• 11 October 2023: Submission of short lab description for ECIR 2024

• 13 November 2023: Lab registration opens

• 24-28 March 2024: Advertising labs at ECIR 2024, Glasgow, UK

CLEF 2024 Lab Chairs

• Petra Galuscakova, University of Stavanger, Norway

• Alba García Seco de Herrera, University of Essex, UK

CLEF 2024 Lab Mentorship Chair

• Liana Ermakova, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France

• Florina Piroi, TU Wien, Austria

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