At Interspeech 2012, ISCA Student Advisory Committee plans to organize 2 events 

that will enrich students experience of attending the conference: a lunch with the experts 

from the Academia, and an afternoon meeting/panel with the representatives from the industry. 

Please find the details of the events below: 

1. 'Students meet Experts' : Interspeech 2012 Student Event 12.00-13.30, September 11th, 2012 

Following the success of the Student Lunch Event at Interspeech 2011, ISCA Student Advisory 

Committee (ISCA SAC) with the support of ISCA Board and Interspeech 2012 organizes Student

 Lunch Event at Interspeech 2012, where students will be given the possibility to discuss their 

research themes, issues and educational topics with experts in the scientific community and 

with other students sharing their interests. This meeting will take place in an informal setup 

during one buffet lunch session to help people bonding and easily experience a constructive 

discussion. Small groups of students will talk about common issues with a senior reference

 member for the research are they are interested in while having a meal with the goal of 

making available to the new members of the scientific community the experience of the 

researchers attending Interspeech: the most important international conference concerning 

speech technology. Students will be asked to register for one of the tables before the time 

of the conference on the ISCA SAC website, and the research areas covered will follow those 

established for the main conference program. 

Registration link: http://www.isca-students.org/?q=is2012event 

2. 'Students discover Industrial career challenges' 13:30-15:30, September 12th, 2012 

This event is aiming to promote communication between students and professionals from

 industry. We expect the representatives from several companies to share their idea of the 

future in the field. Students attending the event can get a perspective of the work and 

challenges in the field from the industry point of view. Students will be asked to register 

before the time of the conference on the ISCA SAC website. 

Registration link: http://www.isca-students.org/?q=is2012industry 

 For both events, students have to register on our website through the system. The experts and professionals are contacted directly through the emails, so if they are interested, they can contact me as General coordinator of the events (maria@isca-students.org).

Best regards, Maria Eskevich 

Top

AISV (Italian Speech Association SIG) is organizing a 2012 Summer School on

'Scripta manent: teoria, strumenti e ambiti di applicazione della trascrizione del parlato' 17-21 settembre 2012, ExFadda, San Vito Dei Normanni, Brindisi http://www.aisv.it/summerschools/it
'Scripta manent: teory, tools and applications of speech transcription'
english page will be available soon http://www.aisv.it/summerschools/en

Top

AISV
(Italian Speech Association SIG)
is organizing a Workshop on


AISV 2013 - MaMChOC
Multimodalità e Multilingualità: la Sfida più Avanzata della Comunicazione Orale
9° Convegno Nazionale AISV 21-23 gennaio 2013, Università Ca' Foscari - Venezia

AISV 2013 - MaMChOC
Multimodality and Multilinguism: new Challenges for the study
of Oral Communication (MaMChOC)
9th AISV National Conference January 21st-23rd 2013, Università Ca' Foscari - Venezia

web page will be available soon
http://www.aisv.it/aisv2013

Top

Interspeech 2013 Lyon, France 25-29 August 2013 General Chair: Frédéric Bimbot

Conference will start in 593days 20h 32m 40s!

Interspeech 2013 will be the 14th annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), with a special focus on speech in life science and human societies. It will be held in Lyon, France, from 25 to 29 august 2013. The venue of Interspeech 2013 will be the Congress Center of Lyon.

Committees

• Steering committee
• Organisation committee
• Working groups (soon)
• Satellite events (soon)

Interspeech conferences

• Interspeech 2010(Makuhari, Japan, Sept. 26-30, 2010)
• Interspeech 2011(Florence, Italy, Aug. 27-31, 2011)
• Interspeech 2012 (Portland, USA, Sept. 9-13, 2012)

Venue

• City of Lyon
• Lyon congress center (some pictures)

Download

• Poster of the conference in PDF : A3 paper or A2 paper
• Poster of the conference in JPEG : 1000 px or 500 px
• Bookmark IS'13 (pdf)

Top

Call for Satellite Workshops during INTERSPEECH 2013

The Organizing Committee of InterSpeech 2013 invites proposals for
satellite workshops at InterSpeech 2013, which will be held in Lyon,
FRANCE on 25-29 August 2013. The theme of InterSpeech 2013 is ?Speech in
life science and human societies'.

The Organizing Committee would be pleased to host various workshops and
conferences organized as satellite events of InterSpeech 2013 in order
to stimulate research fields and disciplines related to speech and
language. If you are interested in organizing a satellite workshop, or
would like a planned event to be listed as an official satellite event,
please contact Workshops@InterSpeech2013.org.

The Satellite Workshop coordinator can also help you to connect with
local contacts in different places in France located less than 3 hours
from Lyon by train or car (Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble,
Montpellier, Paris, etc.).

Proposals should include:

* date and suited location of the workshop
* estimated number of participants
* a short description of the motivation for the workshop
* an outline of the program
* a list of the technical/scientific committee members.


* Proposals for satellite workshops must be submitted by email to
Workshops@InterSpeech2013.org before September 1st 2012.
* Notification of acceptance and ISCA approval / sponsorship is
scheduled for October 30, 2012.


If you have any questions about whether a potential event would be a
good candidate for an InterSpeech 2013 satellite workshop feel free to
contact the Satellite Workshops Chair.

Sincerely,

Laurent Besacier
Satellite Workshops Chair

Workshops@InterSpeech2013.org

Top

Conference Chair: Sebastian Möller, Technische Universität Berlin

Top

  Special Session at Interspeech 2012

Speech and Audio Analysis of Consumer and Semi-Professional Multimedia

             http://interspeech2012.org/Special.html

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


Consumer-grade and semi-professional multimedia material (video) is becoming abundant on the Internet and other online archives. It is easier than ever to download material of any kind. With cell-phones now featuring video recording capability along with broadband connectivity, multimedia material can be recorded and distributed across the world just as easily as text could just a couple of years ago. The easy availability of vast amounts of text gave a huge boost to the Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval research communities, The above-mentioned multimedia material is set to do the same for multi-modal audio and video analysis and generation. We argue that the speech and language research community should embrace that trend, as it would profit vastly from the availability of this material, and has significant own know-how and experience to contribute, which will help shape this field.

Consumer-created (as opposed to broadcast news, “professional style”) multimedia material offers a great opportunity for research on all aspects of human-to-human as well as man-machine interaction, which can be processed offline, but on a much larger scale than is possible in online, controlled experiments. Speech is naturally an important part of these interactions, which can link visual objects, people, and other observations across modalities. Research results will inform future research and development directions in interactive settings, e.g. robotics, interactive agents, etc., and give a significant boost to core (offline) analysis techniques such as robust audio and video processing, speech and language understanding, as well as multimodal fusion.

Large-scale multi-modal analysis of audio-visual material is beginning in a number of multi-site research projects across the world, driven by various communities, such as information retrieval, video search, copyright protection, etc. While each of these have slightly different targets, they are facing largely the same challenges: how to robustly and efficiently process large amounts of data, how to represent and then fuse information across modalities, how to train classifiers and segmenters on un-labeled data, how to include human feedback, etc. Speech, language and audio researchers have considerable interest and experience in these areas, and should be at the core and forefront of this research. To make progress at a useful rate, researchers must be connected in a focused way, and be aware of each other’s work, in order to discuss algorithmic approaches, ideas for evaluation and comparisons across corpora and modalities, training methods with various degrees of supervision, available data sets, etc. Sharing software, databases, research results and projects' descriptions are some of the key elements to success which are at the core of the Speech and Language in Multimedia (SLIM) SIG's objectives.

The special session will serve these goals by bringing together researchers from different fields – speech, but also audio, multimedia – to share experience, resources and foster new research directions and initiatives. Contributions are expected on all aspects of speech and audio processing for multimedia contents: research results but also presentation of ongoing research projects or software, multimedia databases and benchmarking initiatives, etc. A special session, as opposed to a regular session, offers unique opportunities to emphasize interaction between participants with the goal of strengthening and growing the SLIM community. The following format will be adopted: a few selected talks targeting a large audience (e.g., project or dataset descriptions, overview) will open the session, followed by a panel and open discussion on how to develop our community along with poster presentations.

Top

Symposium on Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing (MLSLP) http://ttic.edu/sigml/symposium2012/

This is the second annual meeting of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Machine Learning (SIGML).  

It will include invited talks and general submissions.  The deadline for general submissions is June 15, 2012.  

Please see the web site for up-to-date information.

Call for Participation

The goal of the symposium is to foster communication and collaboration between researchers in these synergistic areas, taking advantage of the nearby location of Interspeech 2012. It is the second annual meeting of the Machine Learning Special Interest Group (SIGML) of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). (See last year's symposium here.)

Topics

The workshop will feature both invited talks and general submissions. Submissions focusing on novel research are solicited. In addition, we especially encourage position and review papers addressing topics that are relevant to speech, machine learning, and NLP research. These areas include, but are not limited to, applications to speech/NLP of SVMs, log-linear models, neural networks, kernel methods, discriminative transforms, large-margin training, discriminative training, active/semi-supervised/unsupervised learning, structured prediction, Bayesian modeling, deep learning, and sparse representations.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers written in English via the 'Submissions' link to the left. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two reviewers, and each accepted paper must have at least one registered author.

Invited Speakers

Shai Ben-David, Inderjit Dhillon, Mark Gales, Brian Roark, Dirk van Compernolle, additional speakers TBA

Organizing Committee

Top

International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012)
Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones.
Paris, France, November 28-30, 2012

www.iwsds.org

** Final Announcement **

Following the success of IWSDS’2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS’2010 (Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan) and IWSDS’2011 (Granada, Spain), the Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012) will be held in Paris (France) on November 28-30, 2012.

The IWSDS Workshop series provides an international forum for the presentation of research and applications and for lively discussions among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest to the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems in everyday applications. Scientific achievements in language processing now results in the development of successful applications such as IBM Watson, Evi, Apple Siri or Google Assistant for access to knowledge and interaction with smartphones, while the coming of domestic robots advocates for the development of powerful communication means with their human users and fellow robots.

We therefore put this year workshop under the theme “Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones”, which covers:
- Dialog for robot interaction (including ethics),
- Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access,
- Dialog for interacting with smartphones,
- Mediated dialog (including multilingual dialog involving Speech Translation),
- Dialog quality evaluation.

We would also like to encourage the discussion of common issues of theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques, and therefore also invite the submission of original papers in any related area, including but not limited to:
- Speech recognition and understanding,
- Dialog management, Adaptive dialog modeling,
- Recognition of emotions from speech, gestures, facial expressions and physiological data,
- Emotional and interactional dynamic profile of the speaker during dialog, User modeling,
- Planning and reasoning capabilities for coordination and conflict description,
- Conflict resolution in complex multi-level decisions,
- Multi-modality such as graphics, gesture and speech for input and output,
- Fusion, fission and information management, Learning and adaptability,
- Visual processing and recognition for advanced human-computer interaction,
- Spoken Dialog databases and corpora, including methodologies and ethics,
- Objective and subjective Spoken Dialog evaluation methodologies, strategies and paradigms,
- Spoken Dialog prototypes and products, etc.

Invited speakers: Jérôme Bellegarda (Apple Inc. (USA)), Axel Buendia (SpirOps (France)), Jonathan Ginzburg (Univ. Paris-Diderot (France), Alex Waibel (KIT (Germany), CMU (USA) and IMMI (France)), Marilyn Walker (University of California at Santa Cruz (USA))

PAPER SUBMISSION

We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a demonstration, and we will organize the conference in order to best accommodate these papers, whatever their category.

As usual, it is planned that a selection of accepted papers will be published in a book by Springer following the conference.

We distinguish between the following categories of submissions:

Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range of 8-12 pages.
Short Research Papers should not exceed 6 pages in total. Authors may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case studies or ongoing but interesting and original research efforts
Demo - System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system may choose this category and provide a description of their system and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submission: July 16, 2012
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2012
Deadline for final submission of accepted paper: October 8, 2012
Deadline for Early Bird registration: October 8, 2012
Final program available online: November 5, 2012
Workshop: November 28-30, 2012

VENUE: IWSDS 2012 will be held as a two-day residential seminar in the wonderful Castle of Ermenonville (http://www.chateau-ermenonville.com/en) near Paris, France, where attendees will be accommodated.

IWSDS Steering Committee: Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, Pohang, Korea), Ramón López-Cózar (Univ. of Granada, Spain), Joseph Mariani (LIMSI and IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Wolfgang Minker (Ulm Univ., Germany), Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)

IWSDS 2012 Program Committee: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI & IMMI-CNRS, Chair), Laurence Devillers (LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sorbonne 4), Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI-CNRS), Sophie Rosset (LIMSI-CNRS).

Organizing Committee: Martine Garnier-Rizet (Chair), Lynn Barreteau, Joseph Mariani (IMMI-CNRS).

Scientific Committee: Jan Alexandersson (DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany), Masahiro Araki (Interactive Intelligence lab, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan), Frédéric Béchet (LIF, Marseille, France), André Berton (Daimler R&D, Ulm, Germany), Axel Buendia (SpirOps, Paris, France), Susanne Burger (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg PA, USA), Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telecom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany), Zoraida Callejas (University of Granada, Spain), Nick Campbell (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland), Heriberto Cuayáhuitl (DFKI, Saarbrucken, Germany), Yannick Estève (LIUM, Université du Maine, Le Mans, France), Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan), Jon Ander Gomez (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain), David Griol (Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain), Joakim Gustafson (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden), Olivier Hamon (ELDA, Paris, France), Tobias Heinroth (Ulm University, Germany), Paul Heisterkamp (Daimler Research, Ulm, Germany), Luis Alfonso Hernandez (Polytechnic University of Madrid), Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, The Netherlands), Ryuichiro Higashinaka (NTT Cyber Space Laboratories, Yokosuka, Japan), Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University, New York, USA), M. Ehsan Hoque (MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, USA), Chiori Hori (NICT, Kyoto, Japan), Kristiina Jokinen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Tatsuya Kawahara (Kyoto University, Japan), Seokhwan Kim (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore), Harksoo Kim (Kangwon National University, Korea), Hong Kook Kim (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea), Lin-Shan Lee (National Taiwan University, Taiwan), Fabrice Lefèvre (LIA, Université d'Avignon et des Paysdu Vaucluse, France), Heizhou Li (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore), Michael McTear (University of Ulster, UK), Yasuhiro Minami (NTT Cyber Space Laboratories, Yokosuka, Japan), Teruhisa Misu (NICT, Kyoto, Japan), Mikio Nakano (Honda Research Institute, Japan), Shrikanth S. Narayanan (SAIL (Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory), Los Angeles), USA), Elmar Nöth (University of Erlangen, Germany), Roberto Pieraccini (ICSI - Berkeley, USA) , Olivier Pietquin (Sup'Elec, Metz, France), Sylvia Quarteroni (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Matthieu Quignard (ICAR, ENS Lyon, France), Norbert Reithinger (DFKI, Berlin, Germany), Alexander Schmitt (Ulm University, Germany), Björn Schuller (Institute for Human-Machine Communication, Technische Universität München, Germany), Elizabeth Shriberg (Microsoft, USA), Gabriel Skantze (KTH, Stockholm, Sweden), Sebastian Stüker (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany), Kazuya Takeda (University of Nagoya, Japan), Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom), Marilyn Walker (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), Hsin-min Wang (Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan).

Participating organizations: IMMI-CNRS and LIMSI-CNRS (France), Postech (Korea), University of Granada (Spain), Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) and National Institute of Information and Communications (NICT) (Japan), Ulm University (Germany).

Sponsors: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET).

Supporting organizations: Association Francophone pour la Communication Parlée (AFCP), Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues (ATALA), HUMAINE Emotion Research Network, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), Korean Society of Speech Sciences (KSSS), Spanish Thematic Network on Advanced Dialogue Systems (RTSDA), SIGdial.

** Please contact iwsds2012@immi-labs.org or visit www.iwsds.org to get more information. **

Top

EUSIPCO 2012
27-31 August 2012, Bucharest, Romania

Top

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON IMITATION AND CONVERGENCE IN SPEECH (ISICS 2012)

Aix-en-Provence, France, 3-5 September 2012

mail: isics2012@lpl-aix.fr
website: spim.risc.cnrs.fr/ISICS.htm

OVERVIEW

In the course of a conversational interaction, the behavior of each talker often tends to become more similar to that of the conversational partner. Such convergence effects have been shown to manifest themselves under many different forms, which include posture, body movements, facial expressions, and speech. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate their conversational exchange.  It occurs, by definition, within a social interaction, but has consequences for language that extend much beyond the temporal limits of that interaction. It has been suggested that imitation plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. The behavioral tendency shown by humans to imitate others may be connected at the brain level with the presence of mirror neurons, whose discovery has raised important issues about the role that these neurons may fulfill in many different domains, from sensorimotor integration to the understanding of others' behavior.

The focus of this international symposium will be the fast-growing body of research on convergence phenomena between speakers in speech. The symposium will also aim to assess current research on the brain and cognitive underpinnings of imitative behavior. Our main goal will be to bring together researchers with a large variety of scientific backgrounds (linguistics, speech sciences, psycholinguistics, experimental sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences) with a view to improving our understanding of the role of imitation in the production, comprehension and acquisition of spoken language.

The symposium is organized by the laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France (www.lpl.univ-aix.fr). It will be chaired by Noël Nguyen (LPL) and Marc Sato (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), and will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines.

INVITED SPEAKERS

. Luciano Fadiga, University of Ferrara, Italy
. Maëva Garnier, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
. Beatrice Szczepek Reed, University of York, United Kingdom

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on the topics covered by the symposium. Abstracts not exceeding 2 pages must be submitted electronically and in pdf format by 15 April 2012. They will be selected by the Scientific Committee on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the symposium. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent to the authors by 31 May 2012.

IMPORTANT DATES

. 15 April 2012: Abstract submission deadline
. 31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance / rejection
. 30 June 2012: Early registration deadline

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

. Patti Adank, University of Manchester, UK
. Martine Adda-Decker, laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris, France
. Gérard Bailly, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Roxane Bertrand, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Ann Bradlow, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
. Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, Urbana-Champaign, USA
. Mariapaola D’Imperio, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Laura Dilley, Department of Psychology and Linguistics, Michigan State University, USA
. Sophie Dufour, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA
. Jonathan Harrington, University of Munich, Germany
. Jennifer Hay, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
. Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, New York, USA
. Holger Mitterer, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
. Lorenza Mondada, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
. Kuniko Nielsen, Oakland University, Rochester, USA
. Noël Nguyen, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
. Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh, UK
. Marc Sato, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Jean-Luc Schwartz, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
. Véronique Traverso, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
. Sophie Wauquier, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

Top

TSD 2012 - CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS AND PARTICIPATION
      *********************************************************

Fifteenth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2012)
	      Brno, Czech Republic, 3-7 September 2012
		    http://www.tsdconference.org/


SUBMISSION OF DEMONSTRATION ABSTRACTS

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

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


IMPORTANT DATES

August  3 2012 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 10 2012 ............ Notification of acceptance for
                            demonstrations sent to the authors
September 3-7 2012 ........ Conference dates

The demonstration abstracts will not appear in the Proceedings of TSD
2012 but they will be published electronically at the conference website.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK
    The Impact of Anaphora and Coreference Resolution on NLP Applications

    Walter Daelemans, University of Antwerp, Belgium
    Computational Stylometry

    Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
    Getting to Know Your Corpus


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

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic


TSD SERIES

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


The TSD 2012 conference will be accompanied by a one-day satellite workshop

    Hybrid Machine Translation

Topics of the MT Workshop include all themes of machine translation (with
stress on hybrid aspects of MT).  The workshop is organized in cooperation
with the PRESEMT EU project Consortium, submissions from other EU machine
translation and related projects are more than welcomed.  The MT workshop
will take place on September 3 2012 in the conference venue.


TOPICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Hynek Hermansky, USA (general chair)
    Eneko Agirre, Spain
    Genevieve Baudoin, France
    Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
    Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
    Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
    Louise Guthrie, GB
    Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
    Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
    Patrick Hanks, GB
    Ludwig Hitzenberger, Germany
    Jaroslava Hlavacova, Czech Republic
    Ales Horak, Czech Republic
    Eduard Hovy, USA
    Ivan Kopecek, Czech Republic
    Steven Krauwer, The Netherlands
    Siegfried Kunzmann, Germany
    Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
    Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
    Diana McCarthy, UK
    Hermann Ney, Germany
    Elmar Noeth, Germany
    Karel Oliva, Czech Republic
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Nikola Pavesic, Slovenia
    Vladimir Petkevic, Czech Republic
    Fabio Pianesi, Italy
    Maciej Piasecki, Poland
    Jan Pomikálek, Czech Republic
    Adam Przepiorkowski, Poland
    Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
    James Pustejovsky, USA
    Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
    Milan Rusko, Slovakia
    Pavel Skrelin, Russia
    Pavel Smrz, Czech Republic
    Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
    Stefan Steidl, Germany
    Georg Stemmer, Germany
    Marko Tadic, Croatia
    Tamas Varadi, Hungary
    Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
    Taras Vintsiuk, Ukraine
    Pascal Wiggers, the Netherlands
    Yorick Wilks, GB
    Victor Zakharov, Russia


FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE

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

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


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

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


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
    
    Ales Horak, TSD 2012
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2012@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2012 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

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

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, Eindhoven, Rome and Prague and by trains or
buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

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

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

Top

*********************************************************
       Hybrid Machine Translation - LAST CALL FOR PAPERS
    *********************************************************

Hybrid Machine Translation Workshop, satellite workshop of TSD 2012
	     Brno, Czech Republic, 3 September 2012
     http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2012/conf_workshop.html

The MT Workshop is organized by the Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University, Brno, in cooperation with the PRESEMT EU
project Consortium. The MT Workshop is a satellite workshop of
the Text, Speech and Dialog Conference.

Venue: Brno, Czech Republic

EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE:

    March 25 2012 ............ Submission of full papers

The submission will be closed during the next day after the deadline.

HYBRID MACHINE TRANSLATION

Interest in flexible and adaptable MT systems, based on the
language-independent hybrid methods, whose principles ensure easy
portability to new language pairs has led us to organizing
an MT Workshop in the framework of the TSD Conference 2012. These
methods attempt to overcome well-known problems of some
MT approaches, e.g. bilingual corpora compilation or the
laborious creation of the new rules per language pair. We also
want to address the issue of effectively managing multilingual
content and would welcome interesting suggestions in the
direction of a language-independent machine-learning-based
methodology.

The key aspects that should be touched at the MT Workshop involve
among others syntactic phrase-based modelling, pattern
recognition approaches (such as extended clustering) or
techniques towards the development of a language-independent
analysis. These aspects are intended to be of a hybrid nature,
combining linguistic processing with the positive aspects of the
corpus-based approaches, such as SMT and EBMT.

The need for easy amenability to new language pairs and
relatively inexpensive, readily available language resources as
well as bilingual lexica should be touched too. Modelling of the
translation context on phrases can improve the translation
quality so it should be considered too. Producing phrases via
a semi-automatic and language-independent process of
morphological and syntactic analysis may remove the need for
compatible NLP tools per language pair.

Another relevant aspect to which the attention has to be paid is
a parallelisation of the main translation processes since their
investigation may help to reach a fast, high-quality translation
system. Furthermore, the optimisation and personalisation of the
system parameters via automated processes (such as GAs or swarm
intelligence) is an issue which deserves to be investigated in
any case.

One of the points relevant for MT systems is a user adaptability
and user feedback with appropriate integrated interactive
interfaces. Such systems can be easily customised to both new
language pairs and specific sublanguages.


TOPICS

Topics of the MT Workshop include all themes of machine
translation (with stress on hybrid aspects of MT).

The workshop is organized in cooperation with the PRESEMT EU project
Consortium, submissions from other EU machine translation and other
projects are more than welcomed.

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


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    George Tambouratzis, Greece (chair)
    Bjorn Gamback, Sweden
    Adam Kilgarriff, GB
    Karel Pala, Czech Republic
    Paul Schmidt, Germany


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    George Tambouratzis
        Institute for Lnaguage and Speech Processing, Greece
        PRESEMT Machine Translation System


FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP

The MT Workshop program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster session.

As a part of the main TSD 2012 Conference, social events including
a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow for additional informal
interactions.


TSD SERIES

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


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

The MT Workshop submissions will undergo two separate review processes
- the best papers which will succeed in both review processes (by the
TSD 2012 Conference PC and MT Workshop 2012 PC) will be published in
the TSD 2012 Springer Proceedings, all other accepted MT Workshop
papers will be published in a separate MT Workshop proceedings
with ISBN.

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

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

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

The authors are strongly encouraged to write their papers in TeX
or LaTeX formats. These formats are necessary for the final
versions of the papers that will be published in the Springer
Lecture Notes.  Authors using a WORD compatible software for the
final version must use the LNCS template for WORD and within the
submit process ask the Proceedings Editors to convert the paper
to LaTeX format.  For this service a service-and-license fee of
CZK 1500 will be levied automatically.

The paper format for review has to be either PDF or PostScript file
with all required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance,
presenters will receive further information on submitting their
camera-ready and electronic sources (for detailed instructions on
the final paper format see
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html#Proceedings).


IMPORTANT DATES

March 25 2012 ............ Submission of full papers
May 15 2012 .............. Notification of acceptance
May 31 2012 .............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
September 3 2012 ......... MT workshop date
September 4-7 2012 ....... TSD 2012 Conference date

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

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


OFFICIAL LANGUAGE

The official language of the conference is English.


ACCOMMODATION

The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 3-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation will be available at the conference website.


ADDRESS

All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to

    Karel Pala, MT Workshop, TSD 2012
    Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
    Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
    phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
    fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
    email: tsd2012@tsdconference.org

The official TSD 2012 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/


LOCATION

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

Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, Eindhoven, Rome and Prague and by trains or
buses from Prague (200 km) or Vienna (130 km).

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

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

Top

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON IMITATION AND CONVERGENCE IN SPEECH (ISICS 2012)
Aix-en-Provence, France, 3-5 September 2012 

Second call for communications - Website: http://isics2012.sciencesconf.org/
Extended deadline to 30th April 2012. 

OVERVIEW

In the course of a conversational interaction, the behavior of each talker often tends to become more similar to that of the conversational partner. Such convergence effects have been shown to manifest themselves under many different forms, which include posture, body movements, facial expressions, and speech. Imitative speech behavior is a phenomenon that may be actively exploited by talkers to facilitate their conversational exchange. It occurs, by definition, within a social interaction, but has consequences for language that extend much beyond the temporal limits of that interaction. It has been suggested that imitation plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. The behavioral tendency shown by humans to imitate others may be connected at the brain level with the presence of mirror neurons, whose discovery has raised important issues about the role that these neuro
 ns may fulfill in many different domains, from sensorimotor integration to the understanding of others' behaviour.

The focus of this international symposium will be the fast-growing body of research on convergence phenomena between speakers in speech. The symposium will also aim to assess current research on the brain and cognitive underpinnings of imitative behavior. Our main goal will be to bring together researchers with a large variety of scientific backgrounds (linguistics, speech sciences, psycholinguistics, experimental sociolinguistics, neurosciences, cognitive sciences) with a view to improving our understanding of the role of imitation in the production, comprehension and acquisition of spoken language.

The symposium is organized by the laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France (www.lpl.univ-aix.fr). It will be chaired by Noël Nguyen (LPL) and Marc Sato (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), and will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines.

INVITED SPEAKERS

- Alessandro d'Ausilio, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy
- Maeva Garnier, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
- Beatrice Szczepek Reed, University of York, United Kingdom

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on the topics covered by the symposium. Abstracts not exceeding 2 pages must be submitted electronically and in pdf format by 30 April 2012 (http://isics2012.sciencesconf.org/). They will be selected by the Scientific Committee on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the symposium. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent to the authors by 31 May 2012.

IMPORTANT DATES

- 30 April 2012: Abstract submission extended deadline 
- 31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance / rejection
- 30 June 2012: Early registration deadline

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 

- Noël Nguyen (Chair)
- Marc Sato (Co-Chair)
- Nadéra Bureau
- Sophie Dufour
- Amandine Michelas
- Nadia Monségu

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

- Patti Adank, University of Manchester, UK
- Martine Adda-Decker, laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, Paris, France
- Gérard Bailly, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Roxane Bertrand, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Ann Bradlow, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
- Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, Urbana-Champaign, USA
- Mariapaola D'Imperio, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Laura Dilley, Department of Psychology and Linguistics, Michigan State University, USA
- Sophie Dufour, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA
- Jonathan Harrington, University of Munich, Germany
- Jennifer Hay, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
- Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, New York, USA
- Holger Mitterer, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- Lorenza Mondada, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
- Kuniko Nielsen, Oakland University, Rochester, USA
- Noël Nguyen, laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Marc Sato, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Jean-Luc Schwartz, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France
- Véronique Traverso, laboratoire ICAR, Lyon, France
- Sophie Wauquier, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

Top

Call for Participation
INTERSPEECH 2012 
Speaker Trait Challenge 

Personality, Likability, Pathology

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________

The Challenge

Whereas the first open comparative challenges in the field of paralinguistics targeted more 'conventional' phenomena such as emotion, age, and gender, there still exists a multiplicity of not yet covered, but highly relevant speaker states and traits. In the last instalment, we focused on speaker states, namely sleepiness and intoxication. Consequently, we now focus on speaker traits. The INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge broadens the scope by addressing three less researched speaker traits: the computational analysis of personality, likability, and pathology in speech. Apart from intelligent and socially competent future agents and robots, main applications are found in the medical domain.

In these respects, the INTERSPEECH 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge shall help bridging the gap between excellent research on paralinguistic information in spoken language and low compatibility of results.

Three Sub-Challenges are addressed:

. In the Personality Sub-Challenge, the personality of a speaker has to be determined based on acoustics potentially including linguistics for the OCEAN five personality dimensions, each mapped onto two classes.

. In the Likability Sub-Challenge, the likability of a speaker's voice has to be determined by a learning algorithm and acoustic features. While the annotation provides likability in multiple levels, the classification task is binarised.

. In the Pathology Sub-Challenge, the intelligibility of a speaker has to be determined by a classification algorithm and acoustic features.

The measures of competition will be Unweighted Average Recall of the two classes. Transcription of the train and development sets will be known. All Sub-Challenges allow contributors to find their own features with their own machine learning algorithm. However, a standard feature set will be provided per corpus that may be used. Participants will have to stick to the definition of training, development, and test sets. They may report on results obtained on the development set, but have only five trials to upload their results on the test sets, whose labels are unknown to them. Each participation will be accompanied by a paper presenting the results that undergoes peer-review and has to be accepted for the conference in order to participate in the Challenge. The organisers preserve the right to re-evaluate the findings, but will not participate themselves in the Challenge. Participants are encouraged to compete in all Sub-Challenges. 
Overall, contributions using the provided or equivalent data are sought in (but not limited to) the following areas:

. Participation in the Personality Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Likability Sub-Challenge
. Participation in the Pathology Sub-Challenge
. Novel features and algorithms for the analysis of speaker traits
. Unsupervised learning methods for speaker trait analysis
. Perception studies, additional annotation and feature analysis on the given sets
. Context exploitation in speaker trait assessment

The results of the Challenge will be presented at Interspeech 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Prizes will be awarded to the Sub-Challenge winners. If you are interested and planning to participate in the Speaker Trait Challenge, or if you want to be kept informed about the Challenge, please send the organisers an e-mail to indicate your interest and visit the homepage: 
http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/is12-speaker-trait-challenge

_____________________________________________  

Organisers:

Björn Schuller (TUM, Germany)
Stefan Steidl (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Anton Batliner (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Elmar Nöth (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)
Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow, UK)
Felix Burkhardt (Deutsche Telekom, Germany)
Rob van Son (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Netherlands)
_____________________________________________  



If you want to participate, please find the License Agreement at:

http://emotion-research.net/sigs/speech-sig/IS12-STC-Agreement.pdf

Thank you for excusing cross-postings.


All the best,

Björn Schuller
On behalf of the Organisers


___________________________________________

Dr. Björn Schuller
Senior Lecturer

Technische Universität München
Institute for Human-Machine Communication
D-80333 München
Germany
+49-(0)89-289-28548

schuller@tum.de
www.mmk.ei.tum.de/~sch
___________________________________________

Top

Special session at the next Interspeech conference  Portland, Oregon, September 9-13, 2012.
 
This special session is entitled “Glottal Source Processing: from Analysis to Applications”.
 
The special session aims at gathering researchers interested in speech processing techniques dealing with the analysis of the glottal excitation, and in its applicability in various speech technologies such as voice pathology detection, speech synthesis, speaker identification and emotion recognition.
 
The deadline for full paper submission is April 1, 2012. Note that your paper will go through the regular reviewing system and will be included in the special session if it is accepted and fits the scope.
 
First we have to collect a list of potential papers that could be submitted to the special session. 
 
If you think that you could have a contribution to submit, please return the tentative title, authors and affiliations by email: thomas.drugman - at - umons.ac.be

 If you think that you could have a contribution to submit in April, could you please return by email for January 12 the tentative title, authors and affiliations
 
T. Drugman, P. Alku, B. Yegnanarayana and A. Alwan

Top

Special Session at Interspeech 2012

Speech and Audio Analysis of Consumer and Semi-Professional Multimedia

              http://interspeech2012.org/Special.html

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


Consumer-grade and semi-professional multimedia material (video) is becoming abundant on the Internet and other online archives. It is easier than ever to download material of any kind. With cell-phones now featuring video recording capability along with broadband connectivity, multimedia material can be recorded and distributed across the world just as easily as text could just a couple of years ago. The easy availability of vast amounts of text gave a huge boost to the Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval research communities, The above-mentioned multimedia material is set to do the same for multi-modal audio and video analysis and generation. We argue that the speech and language research community should embrace that trend, as it would profit vastly from the availability of this material, and has significant own know-how and experience to contribute, which will help shape this field.

Consumer-created (as opposed to broadcast news, “professional style”) multimedia material offers a great opportunity for research on all aspects of human-to-human as well as man-machine interaction, which can be processed offline, but on a much larger scale than is possible in online, controlled experiments. Speech is naturally an important part of these interactions, which can link visual objects, people, and other observations across modalities. Research results will inform future research and development directions in interactive settings, e.g. robotics, interactive agents, etc., and give a significant boost to core (offline) analysis techniques such as robust audio and video processing, speech and language understanding, as well as multimodal fusion.

Large-scale multi-modal analysis of audio-visual material is beginning in a number of multi-site research projects across the world, driven by various communities, such as information retrieval, video search, copyright protection, etc. While each of these have slightly different targets, they are facing largely the same challenges: how to robustly and efficiently process large amounts of data, how to represent and then fuse information across modalities, how to train classifiers and segmenters on un-labeled data, how to include human feedback, etc. Speech, language and audio researchers have considerable interest and experience in these areas, and should be at the core and forefront of this research. To make progress at a useful rate, researchers must be connected in a focused way, and be aware of each other’s work, in order to discuss algorithmic approaches, ideas for evaluation and comparisons across corpora and modalities, training methods with various degrees of supervision, available data sets, etc. Sharing software, databases, research results and projects' descriptions are some of the key elements to success which are at the core of the Speech and Language in Multimedia (SLIM) SIG's objectives.

The special session will serve these goals by bringing together researchers from different fields – speech, but also audio, multimedia – to share experience, resources and foster new research directions and initiatives. Contributions are expected on all aspects of speech and audio processing for multimedia contents: research results but also presentation of ongoing research projects or software, multimedia databases and benchmarking initiatives, etc. A special session, as opposed to a regular session, offers unique opportunities to emphasize interaction between participants with the goal of strengthening and growing the SLIM community. The following format will be adopted: a few selected talks targeting a large audience (e.g., project or dataset descriptions, overview) will open the session, followed by a panel and open discussion on how to develop our community along with poster presentations.

Top

54th International Symposium ELMAR-2012
                   September 12-14, 2012
                     Zadar, Croatia

        Paper submission deadline: March 19, 2012

               http://www.elmar-zadar.org/


                     CALL FOR PAPERS


 TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS

 IEEE Region 8
 IEEE Croatia Section
 IEEE Croatia Section SP, AP and MTT Chapters
 EURASIP - European Association for Signal Processing


 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS INDEXED BY

 IEEE Xplore, INSPEC, SCOPUS and CPCI 
 (Conference Proceedings Citation Index)


 TOPICS

 --> Image and Video Processing
 --> Multimedia Communications
 --> Speech and Audio Processing
 --> Wireless Communications
 --> Telecommunications
 --> Antennas and Propagation
 --> e-Learning and m-Learning
 --> Navigation Systems
 --> Ship Electronic Systems
 --> Power Electronics and Automation
 --> Naval Architecture
 --> Sea Ecology

 --> Special Sessions:
     http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2012/special_sessions/

 --> Student Session (B.Sc. and M.Sc. students only):
     http://www.elmar-zadar.org/2012/student_session/


 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 * Prof. Abdelhak M. Zoubir, Germany:
   Recent Advances on Bootstrap for Signal Processing

 * Prof. Alan Hanjalic, The Netherlands:
   Advances in Multimedia Information Retrieval


 SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES

 Deadline for submission of full papers: March 19, 2012
 Notification of acceptance mailed out by: May 21, 2012
 Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: May 29, 2012
 Preliminary program available online by: June 12, 2012
 Registration forms and payment deadline: June 19, 2012

Top

WOCCI 2012 - Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction

Satellite Event of INTERSPEECH 2012

September 14-15, 2012

Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.

http://www.wocci.org/
http://interspeech2012.org/SatelliteWorkshops.html
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=22624&copyownerid=21284

!!! Deadline for full paper (4-8 pages) submission: June 15, 2012 !!!

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

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

Technical Scope:

Papers are solicited on any technical areas relevant to the Workshop.
The technical scope of the Workshop includes, but it is not limited to:

Speech Interfaces:
- acoustic and linguistic analysis of children's speech
- discourse analysis of spoken language in child-machine interaction
- age-dependent characteristics of spoken language
- automatic speech recognition for children and spoken dialogue systems

Multi-Modality and Robotics:
- multi-modal child-machine interaction
- multi-modal input and output interfaces
- including robotic interfaces
- intrusive, non-intrusive devices for environmental data processing
- pen or gesture/visual interfaces

User Modelling:
- user modelling and adaptation
- usability studies accounting for age preferences in child-machine interaction

Cognitive Models:
- internal learning models
- personality types
- user-centered and participatory design

Application Areas:
- diagnostic tools and training systems for child-related medical conditions such as autism and learning and attention disorders
- educational software
- gaming interfaces.

The technical committee will select papers for oral/poster presentation.

Important Dates:

Full paper (4-8 pages) submission: June 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2012
Final paper submission and authors' registration: July 31, 2012
Workshop: September 14-15, 2012

Organizing Committee:

Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
Kay Berkling, Inline GmbH, Germany
Stefan Steidl, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Program Committee:

Kay Berkling, Inline GmbH, Germany
Justine Cassell, Northwestern University, USA
Diego Giuliani, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
John Hansen, University of Texas, USA
Takayuki Kanda, ATR, Japan
Hiromichi Kawanami, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Helen Meng, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, PRC
Alex Potamianos, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California, USA
Elmar Nöth, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Rupal Patel, Northeastern University, Boston, USA
Martin Russell, University of Birmingham, UK
Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
Stefan Steidl, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Serdar Yildirim, Mustafa Kemal University, Turkey

Top

Human Activity and Vision Summer School 
- Monday 1st to Friday 5th of October 2012 - INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis/Nice on the French Riviera - website: http://www.multitel.be/events/human-activity-and-vision-summer-school == Overview The Human Activity and Vision Summer School will address the broad domains of human activity modeling and human behavior recognition, with an emphasis on vision sensors as capturing modality. Courses will comprise both tutorials and presentations of state-of-the-art methods by active researchers in the field. The goal of the courses will be to cover most of the whole human activity analysis chain, starting from the low level processing of videos and audio for detection and feature extraction, to medium level (tracking and behavior cue extraction) and higher level modeling and recognition using both supervised and unsupervised techniques. Applications of the different methods to action and activity recognition in different domains ranging from Activities of Daily Living to surveillance (individual behavior recognition, crowd monitoring) will be considered. Presentation of real uses cases, market needs, and current bottlenecks in the surveillance domain will also be addressed, with one half day devoted to presentations and panel discussions with professional and industrial presenters. See list of topics and speaker below. == Audience The summer school is open to young researchers (in particular master or Ph.D. students) and researchers from both the academia and industry working or interested in the human activity analysis domain or connected fields like surveillance. == Application/Registration The registration is Euros 300. This includes all the courses, coffee breaks and lunch. The fee does not include accommodation or dinners. A limited number of cheap accommodations for students are available. To apply for a position at the Summer School and find more practical information, please go to: http://www.multitel.be/events/human-activity-and-vision-summer-school == List of topics and confirmed speakers * Object detection and tracking - Francois Fleuret (Idiap Research Institute) - Alberto del Bimbo and Federico Pernici (Università di Firenze) - Cyril Carincotte (Multitel) - Jean-Marc Odobez (Idiap research Institute) * Crowd analysis and Simulation - Mubarak Shah (University of Central Florida) - Paola Goatin (INRIA) - Cyril Carincotte (Multitel) * Action and behavior recognition - Ivan Laptev (INRIA) - Ben Krose (University of Amsterdam) - Francois Bremond (INRIA) * Social Behavior Analysis - Elisabeth Oberzaucher (University of Vienna) - Hayley Hung (University of Amsterdam) * Unsupervised activity discovery and active learning - Tao Xiang (University of Queen Mary) - Jean-Marc Odobez and Remi Emonet (IDIAP) * Body and head Pose estimation - Cheng Chen (Idiap Research Institute) - Guillaume Charpiat (INRIA) * Audio processing - Maurizio Omologo (Foundation Bruno Kessler) - Bertrand Ravera (Thales Communication France) Jean-Marc Odobez, IDIAP Senior Researcher, EPFL Maitre d'Enseignement et de Recherche (MER) IDIAP Research Institute (http://www.idiap.ch) Tel: +41 (0)27 721 77 26 Web:http://www.idiap.ch/~odobez 

Top

2nd International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2012)

in conjunction with ACM ICMI 2012, October 22, Santa Monica, California, USA

http://sspnet.eu/avec2012/
http://www.acm.org/icmi/2012/ 

Register and download data and features:
http://avec-db.sspnet.eu/accounts/register/ 

_____________________________________________________________

Scope

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2012) will be the second competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. The goal of the Challenge is to provide a common benchmark test set for individual multimodal information processing and to bring together the audio and video emotion recognition communities, to compare the relative merits of the two approaches to emotion recognition under well-defined and strictly comparable conditions and establish to what extent fusion of the approaches is possible and beneficial. A second motivation is the need to advance emotion recognition systems to be able to deal with naturalistic behavior in large volumes of un-segmented, non-prototypical and non-preselected data as this is exactly the type of data that both multimedia retrieval and human-machine/human-robot communication interfaces have to face in the real world.

We are calling for teams to participate in emotion recognition from acoustic audio analysis, linguistic audio analysis, video analysis, or any combination of these. As benchmarking database the SEMAINE database of naturalistic video and audio of human-agent interactions, along with labels for four affect dimensions will be used. Emotion will have to be recognized in terms of continuous time, continuous valued dimensional affect in the dimensions arousal, expectation, power and valence. Two Sub-Challenges are addressed: The Word-Level Sub-Challenge requires participants to predict the level of affect at word-level and only when the user is speaking. The Fully Continuous Sub-Challenge involves fully continuous affect recognition, where the level of affect has to be predicted for every moment of the recording.

Besides participation in the Challenge we are calling for papers addressing the overall topics of this workshop, in particular works that address the differences between audio and video processing of emotive data, and the issues concerning combined audio-visual emotion recognition

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition:
. Audio-based Emotion Recognition
. Linguistics-based Emotion Recognition
. Video-based Emotion Recognition
. Social Signals in Emotion Recognition
. Multi-task learning of Multiple Dimensions 
. Novel Fusion Techniques as by Prediction 
. Cross-corpus Feature Relevance 
. Agglomeration of Learning Data 
. Semi- and Unsupervised Learning 
. Synthesized Training Material 
. Context in Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition 
. Multiple Rater Ambiguity

Application:
. Multimedia Coding and Retrieval
. Usability of Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition 
. Real-time Issues


Important Dates
___________________________________________

Paper submission
July 31, 2012

Notification of acceptance
August 14, 2012

Camera ready paper and final challenge result submission 
August 18, 2012

Workshop
October 22, 2012

Organisers
___________________________________________

Björn Schuller (Tech. Univ. Munich, Germany) 
Michel Valstar University of Nottingham, UK) 
Roddy Cowie (Queen's University Belfast, UK) 
Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK)


Program Committee
___________________________________________

Elisabeth André, Universität Augsburg, Germany
Anton Batliner, Universität Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Felix Burkhardt, Deutsche Telekom, Germany
Rama Chellappa, University of Maryland, USA
Fang Chen, NICTA, Australia
Mohamed Chetouani, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Fance
Laurence Devillers, Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI), France
Julien Epps, University of New South Wales, Australia
Anna Esposito, International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, Italy
Raul Fernandez, IBM, USA
Roland Göcke, Australian National University, Australia
Hatice Gunes, Queen Mary University London, UK
Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, USA
Aleix Martinez, Ohio State University, USA
Marc Méhu, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Marcello Mortillaro, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Matti Pietikainen, University of Oulu, Finland
Ioannis Pitas, University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Peter Robinson, University of Cambridge, UK
Stefan  Steidl, Uinversität Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Jianhua Tao, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Fernando de la Torre, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Mohan Trivedi, University of California San Diego, USA
Matthew Turk, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow, UK
Stefanos Zafeiriou, Imperial College London, UK


Please regularly visit our website http://sspnet.eu/avec2012 for more information.

Top

Call for Papers for the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Laughter and other Non-Verbal Vocalisations in Speech
26-27 October 2012, Dublin, Ireland
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Following the previous workshops on laughter held in Saarbruecken (2007) and Berlin (2009), we have the pleasure to announce a forthcoming workshop in Dublin in October 2012.

The studies of non-verbal vocal interaction is proving to be important in many research areas such as phonetics and discourse analysis, and also in more technology-oriented fields such as social signal processing and human behaviour understanding. Previous research has shown that laughter and other nonverbal vocalisations (e.g., breath sounds, yawning, sighing) have important functions in social interaction, for example, giving feedback, signaling engagement, and regulating turn-taking. However, much of the phonetic characteristics of non-verbal vocalisations, and the relationship between social functions and non-verbal vocalisations is still unknown.

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

The keynote speakers are Marc Mehu (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences) and Jens Edlund (KTH Stockholm).

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

* Multimodality: visual aspects of non-verbal vocalisations, incl. smiles
* Entrainment and alignment: `timing together' of non-verbal vocalisations
* Emotion/affect and social behaviour: decoding and encoding of emotion/socio-related states in non-verbal vocalisations
* Interjections and grammaticalization: relation between non-verbal vocalisations and grammaticalization
* Computational models: automatic processing of non-verbal vocalisations

The workshop is supported by SSPnet (http://sspnet.eu/).

Submission procedure
--------------------
Researchers are invited to submit an abstract of their work, including work in progress. Please send your abstract of max. 2 pages (plain text) in PDF format to trouvain (at) coli.uni-saarland.de specifying `Dublin workshop' in the subject line and providing
1. For each author: name, title, affiliation in the body of the mail
2. Title of abstract

Registration
------------
Attendees are asked to register by email trouvain (at) coli.uni-saarland.de before 1 October 2012. A registration fee of 30 Euros has to be paid on site (in cash).

Important dates
---------------
* Abstract submission deadline: 31 August 2012
* Notification of acceptance/rejection: 7 September 2012
* Registration deadline by email: 1 October 2012
* Workshop date: 26-27 October 2012

Venue
-----
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Website
-------
http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/conf/laughter-12

Organizers
----------
Nick Campbell, Trinity College Dublin
Juergen Trouvain, Saarland University
Khiet Truong, University of Twente

Contact information
-------------------
Juergen Trouvain
Saarland University
FR 4.7 Computational Linguistics and Phonetics
Campus C7.2

Top

Audio and Multimedia Methods for Large‐Scale Video Analysis
http://amva2012.icsi.berkeley.edu

First ACM International Workshop at ACM Multimedia 2012
29 October ‐ 2 November in Nara, Japan

***Extended submission deadline: July 15th  2012 ***

Media  sharing sites on the Internet and the one‐click upload ca‐
pability of smartphones have led to a deluge of online multimedia
content.  Everyday, thousands of videos are uploaded into the web
creating an ever‐growing demand for methods to make  them  easier
to  retrieve,  search,  and  index. While visual information is a
very important part of a video, acoustic information  often  com‐
plements  it.  This  is  especially true for the analysis of con‐
sumer‐produced, unconstrained videos from social media  networks,
such as YouTube uploads or Flickr content.

The diversity in content, recording equipment, environment, qual‐
ity, etc. poses significant challenges to the  current  state  of
the  art in multimedia analytics. The fact that this data is from
non‐professional and consumer sources means  that  it  often  has
little or no manual labeling. Large‐scale multi‐modal analysis of
audio‐visual material can help overcome this problem, and provide
training  and testing material across modalities for language un‐
derstanding, human action recognition, and  scene  identification
algorithms,  with  applications  in robotics, interactive agents,
etc. Speech and audio provide a natural modality to summarize and
interact  with the content of videos. Therefore, speech and audio
processing is critical for multimedia analysis that  goes  beyond
traditional classification and retrieval applications.

The  goal of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Audio and Mul‐
timedia Methods for Large‐Scale Video Analysis (AMVA) is to bring
together  researchers  and  practitioners  in this newly emerging
field, and to foster discussion on future directions of the topic
by providing a forum for focused exchanges on new ideas, develop‐
ments, and results. The aim is to build a strong community and  a
venue that at some point can become its own conference.

Topics include novel acoustic and multimedia methods for
  * video retrieval, search, and organization
  * video navigation and interactive services
  * information extraction and summarization
  * combination, fusion, and integration of the audio,
    visual, and other streams
  * feature extraction and machine learning on 'wild' data

Submissions: Workshop submissions of 4‐6 pages should be  format‐
ted  according to the ACM Multimedia author kit. Submission  sys-
tem link: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ACMMMWS2012

Important dates:
Workshop paper submission: July 1st, 2012 
Notification of acceptance: August 7th, 2012
Camera ready submission to Sheridan: August 15, 2012

Organizers:
Gerald Friedland, ICSI Berkeley (USA)
Daniel P. W. Ellis, Columbia University (USA)
Florian  Metze,  Carnegie‐Mellon  University (USA)

Panel Chair:
Ajay Divakarian, SRI/Sarnoff (USA)

Top

International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2012 (IALP 2012)
Hanoi, Vietnam, Nov 13-15, 2012
http://www.mica.edu.vn/IALP-2012
Paper Submission deadline: Jul 1,2012

The International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP) is a series
of conferences with unique focus on Asian Language Processing. The
conference aims to advance the science and technology of all the aspects of
Asian Language Processing by providing a forum for researchers in the
different fields of language study all over the world to meet. The first
meeting of the series was held in Singapore in 1986 and was called the
'International Conference on Chinese Computing (ICCC)' then. This meeting
initiated the study of Chinese and oriental languages processing in
Singapore and resulted in the formation of COLIPS in Singapore in 1988, as
well as the publication of the journal 'Communications of COLIPS' in 1991,
which is known as 'International Journal on Asian Language Processing'
today.

Over the years, IALP has developed into one of important anaual events on
nature language processing in Asia. IALP 2008 was held in Chiang Mai
University, Thailand and the proceedings were indexed by ISTP/ISI. IALP 2009
was held in Singapore and was co-organized by COLIPS and IEEE Singapore
Computer Chapter. IALP 2010 was held in Harbin and was co-organized by
COLIPS and IEEE Singapore Computer Chapter, Chinese Information Processing
Society of China and Heilongjiang Institute of Technology (HIT). IALP 2011
was held in Penang, Malaisia and jointly organized by Chinese and Oriental
Languages Information Processing Society (COLIPS) of Singapore, IEEE
Singapore Computer Chapter, and Universiti Sains Malaysia. The proceedings
of IALP 2009,2010 and 2011 were published by CPS (Conference Publication
Services) and submitted for indexing in EI, ISTP/ISI and Current Contents on
Diskette.

This year, the International Conference on Asian Language Processing 2012
(IALP 2012) will be jointly organized by Chinese and Oriental Languages
Information Processing Society (COLIPS) of Singapore, IEEE Vietnam Computer
Chapter, and Hanoi University of Science and Technology (and MICA
Institute). The conference will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam on Nov 13-15,
2012. The 2012 edition (IALP 2012) will focus on under-resourced languages
studies. We will continue to work with CPS to publish the conference
proceesings. They will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library and
submitted for indexing in INSPEC, EI, ISTP/ISI and Current Contents on
Diskette.

Hanoi (Vietnamese: Hà Noi, 'River Interior') is the capital and
second-largest city of Vietnam. As the capital of Vietnam for almost a
thousand years. Hanoi hosts more cultural sites than any city in Vietnam,
including over 600 pagodas and temples.Hanoi is is the social, cultural and
economic center of the country.The Old Quarter, near Hoan Kiem lake, has the
original street layout and architecture of old Hanoi. At the beginning of
the 20th century the city consisted of only about 36 streets, most of which
are now part of the old quarter. Each street then had merchants and
households specialized in a particular trade, such as silk traders,
jewellery, etc. The street names nowadays still reflect these
specializations, although few of them remain exclusively in their original
commerce. The area is famous for its small artisans and merchants, including
many silk shops. Local cuisine specialties as well as several clubs and bars
can be found here also. A night market (near Ðong Xuân market) in the heart
of the district opens for business every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
evening with a variety of clothing, souvenirs and food.

We welcome you to Vietnam to experience the nature, history, and cultural in
one of best countries in South-East Asia.

CONFERENCE TOPICS

Paper submissions are invited on substantial, original and unpublished
research in all aspects of Asian Language Processing, including, but not
limited to:

 - Under-resourced language studies
 - Input and output of large character sets of Asian languages
 - Typesetting and font designs of Asian languages
 - Asian character encoding and compression
 - Multimodal representations and processing
 - Voice input and output
 - Phonology and morphology
 - Lexical semantics and word sense
 - Grammars, syntax, semantics and discourse
 - Word segmentation, chunking, tagging and syntactic parsing
 - Word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling and semantic parsing
 - Discourse analysis
 - Language, linguistic and speech resource development
 - Evaluation methods and user studies
 - Machine learning for natural language
 - Text analysis, understanding, summarization and generation
 - Text mining and information extraction, summarization and retrieval
 - Text entailment and paraphrasing
 - Text Sentiment analysis, opinion mining and question answering
 - Machine translation and multilingual processing
 - Linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language,
computational psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and mathematical
linguistics
 - Language modeling, statistical methods in natural language processing and
speech processing
 - Spoken language processing, understanding, generation and translation
 - Rich transcription and spoken information retrieval
 - Speech recognition and synthesis
 - Natural language applications, tools and resources, system evaluation
 - Asian language learning, teaching and computer-aided language learning
 - NLP in vertical domains, such as biomedical, chemical and legal text
 - NLP on noisy unstructured text, such as email, blogs, and SMS
 - Special hardware and software for Asian language computing

PAPER SUBMISSION

Submissions must describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished
work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be
included. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical
strength, significance, relevance to the conference, and interest to the
attendees. Each submission will be reviewed by three program committee
members. Accepted papers will be presented in one of the oral sessions or
poster sessions as determined by the program committee.
As the reviewing will be blind, manuscripts must not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Authors should ensure that their identities are not
revealed in any way in the paper. Self-references that reveal the author's
identity, e.g., 'We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...', must be avoided.
Instead, use citations such as 'Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...'.
Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without
review.

All submissions must be electronic and in Portable Document Format (PDF)
only. Paper submissions should follow the IEEE Proceedings' two-column
format without exceeding four (4) pages including references. We strongly
recommend the use of the LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files
according to IEEE Proceedings' format. Submissions must conform to the
official style guidelines.

The official language of the conference is English. Papers submitted should
be written in English.

Papers may be submitted until July 1, 2012, in PDF format via the START
system:
https://www.softconf.com/d/ialp2012/

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline         Jul 1, 2012
Notification of acceptance  Aug 3, 2012
Final manuscript due        Aug 17, 2012
Earlybird registration due  Aug 19, 2012
Regular registration due    Oct 31, 2012
Conference date             Nov 13-15, 2012

MORE INFORMATION

To get other details and the latest information about the conference, please
visit the conference website at http://www.mica.edu.vn/IALP-2012.

Pham Thi Ngoc Yen and Deyi Xiong
Program Co-chairs, IALP 2012

Top

Albayzin 2012 Language Recognition Evaluation

The Albayzin 2012 Language Recognition Evaluation (Albayzin 2012 LRE) is supported by the Spanish Thematic Network on Speech Technology (RTTH) and organized by the Software Technologies Working Group (GTTS) of the University of the Basque Country, with the key collaboration of Niko Brümmer, from Agnitio Research, South Africa, for defining the evaluation criterion and coding the script used to measure system performance. The evaluation workshop will be part of IberSpeech 2012, to be held in Madrid, Spain from 21 to 23 November 2012. 
As in previous Albayzin LRE editions, the goal of this evaluation is to promote the exchange of ideas, to foster creativity and to encourage collaboration among research groups worldwide working on language recognition technology. To this end, we propose a language recognition evaluation similar to those carried out in 2008 and 2010, but under more difficult conditions. This time the application domain moves from TV Broadcast speech to any kind of speech found in the Internet, and no training data will be available for some of the target languages (aiming to reflect a common situation for low-resource languages). 
The change in the application domain pursues two objectives: first, the task should reflect a practical application (in this case, indexing of multimedia content in the Internet); and second, the task should be challenging enough for state-of-the-art systems to yield a relatively poor performance. 
Audio signals for development and evaluation will be extracted from YouTube videos, which will be heterogeneous regarding duration, number of speakers, ambient noise/music, channel conditions, etc. Besides speech, signals may contain music, noise and any kind of non-human sounds. In any case, each signal will contain a minimum amount of speech. As for previous evaluations, each signal will contain speech in a single language, except for signals corresponding to Out-Of-Set (OOS) languages, which might contain speech in two or more languages, provided that none of them are target languages. 
Overall, the Albayzin 2012 LRE introduces some interesting novelties with regard to previous Albayzin LRE editions and NIST Language Recognition Evaluations. The most remarkable novelties are the type of signals used for development and test and the evaluation criterion. All the details can be found in the Albayzin 2012 LRE Plan.

Registration

Deadline: July 16th 2012 Procedure: Submit an e-mail to the organization contact: luisjavier.rodriguez@ehu.es, with copy to the Chairs of the Albayzin 2012 Evaluations: javier.gonzalez@uam.es and javier.tejedor@uam.es, providing the following information:

• Group name
• Group ID
• Institution
• Contact person
• Email address
• Postal address

Data delivery

Starting from June 15th 2012, and once registration data are validated, the training (108 hours of broadcast speech for 6 target languages) and development (around 2000 audio segments including 10 target languages and Out-Of-Set languages) datasets will be released via web (only to registered participants).

Schedule

• May 18 2012: The evaluation plan is released and registration is open.
• June 15 2012: Training and development data are released via web.
• July 16 2012: Registration deadline.
• September 3 2012: Evaluation data are released via web and system submission is open.
• September 24 2012: Deadline for submitting system results and system descriptions.
• October 15 2012: Preliminary results and evaluation keyfile are released via web.
• November 21-23 2012: Albayzin 2012 LRE Workshop at IberSpeech 2012, Madrid, Spain.

Contact

Luis Javier Rodríguez Fuentes Software Technologies Working Group (GTTS) Department of Electricity and Electronics (ZTF-FCT) University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) Barrio Sarriena s/n 48940 Leioa - SPAIN
web: http://gtts.ehu.es e-mail: luisjavier.rodriguez@ehu.es phone: +34 946012716 fax: +34 946013071

Top

International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012)

Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones.

Paris, France, November 28-30, 2012

http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iwsds2012

Second Announcement

Following the success of IWSDS'2009 (Irsee, Germany), IWSDS'2010
(Gotemba Kogen Resort, Japan) and IWSDS'2011 (Granada, Spain),the
Fourth International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems (IWSDS 2012)
will be held in Paris (France) on November 28-30, 2012.

The IWSDS Workshop series provides an international forum for the
presentation of research and applications and for lively discussions
among researchers as well as industrialists, with a special interest
to the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems in everyday
applications. Scientific achievements in language processing now
results in the development of successful applications such as IBM
Watson, Evi, Apple Siri or Google Assistant for access to knowledge
and interaction with smartphones, while the coming of domestic
robots advocates for the development of powerful communication means
with their human users and fellow robots.

We therefore put this year workshop under the theme
'Towards a Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones',
which covers:

-Dialog for robot interaction (including ethics),
-Dialog for Open Domain knowledge access,
-Dialog for interacting with smartphones,
-Mediated dialog (including multilingual dialog involving Speech
Translation),
-Dialog quality evaluation.

We would also like to encourage the discussion of common issues of
theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and
techniques, and therefore also invite the submission of original
papers in any related area, including but not limited to:

-Speech recognition and semantic analysis,
-Dialog management, Adaptive dialog modeling,
-Recognition of emotions from speech, gestures, facial expressions
and physiological data,
-Emotional and interactional dynamic profile of the speaker during
dialog, User modeling,
-Planning and reasoning capabilities for coordination and conflict
description,
-Conflict resolution in complex multi-level decisions,
-Multi-modality such as graphics, gesture and speech for input and output,
-Fusion, fission and information management, Learning and adaptability
-Visual processing and recognition for advanced human-computer interaction,
-Spoken Dialog databases and corpora, including methodologies and ethics,
-Objective and subjective Spoken Dialog evaluation methodologies,
strategies and paradigms,
-Spoken Dialog prototypes and products, etc.

We particularly welcome papers that can be illustrated by a
demonstration, and we will organize the conference in order to best
accommodate these papers, whatever their category.

*PAPER SUBMISSION*

We distinguish between the following categories of submissions:

Long Research Papers are reserved for reports on mature research
results. The expected length of a long paper should be in the range
of 8-12 pages.

Short Research Papers should not exceed 6 pages in total. Authors
may choose this category if they wish to report on smaller case
studies or ongoing but interesting and original research efforts

Demo - System Papers: Authors who wish to demonstrate their system
may choose this category and provide a description of their system
and demo. System papers should not exceed 6 pages in total.

As usual, it is planned that a selection of accepted papers will be
published in a book by Springer following the conference.

*IMPORTANT DATES*

Deadline for submission: July 16, 2012
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2012
Deadline for final submission of accepted paper: October 8, 2012
Deadline for Early Bird registration: October 8, 2012
Final program available online: November 5, 2012
Workshop: November 28-30, 2012

VENUE: IWSDS 2012 will be held as a two-day residential seminar in
the wonderful Castle of Ermenonville near Paris, France, where all
attendees will be accommodated.

IWSDS Steering Committee: Gary Geunbae Lee(POSTECH, Pohang,
Korea), Ramón López-Cózar (Univ. of Granada, Spain), Joseph Mariani
(LIMSI and IMMI-CNRS, Orsay, France), Wolfgang Minker (Ulm Univ.,
Germany), Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and
Technology, Japan)

IWSDS 2012 Program Committee: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI & IMMI-CNRS,
Chair), Laurence Devillers (LIMSI-CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sorbonne 4),
Martine Garnier-Rizet (IMMI-CNRS), Sophie Rosset (LIMSI-CNRS)

Organization Committee: Martine Garnier-Rizet (Chair), Lynn
Barreteau, Joseph Mariani (IMMI-CNRS)

Supporting organizations (to be completed): IMMI-CNRS and
LIMSI-CNRS (France), Postech (Korea), University of Granada (Spain),
Nara Institute of Science and Technology and NICT (Japan), Ulm
University (Germany)

Scientific Committee: To be announced

Sponsors: To be announced

Please contact iwsds2012@immi-labs.org
<mailto:iwsds2012@immi-labs.org>
or visit
http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/iwsds2012
to get more information.

Top

SLT 2012: IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Miami Florida, December 2-5, 2012

http://www.slt2012.org

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Fourth IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT) will be held between December 2-5, 2012 in Miami, FL. The goal of this workshop is to allow the speech/language processing community to share and present recent advances in various areas of spoken language technology. SLT will include oral and poster presentations. In addition, there will be three keynote addresses by well-known experts on topics such as machine learning and speech/language processing. The workshop will also include free pre-workshop tutorials on introduction or recent advances in spoken language technology.

Submission of papers in all areas of spoken language technology is encouraged, with emphasis on the following topics:

• Speech recognition and synthesis
• Spoken language understanding
• Spoken dialog systems
• Spoken document summarization
• Machine translation for speech
• Question answering from speech
• Speech data mining
• Spoken document retrieval
• Spoken language databases
• Multimodal processing
• Human/computer interaction
• Educational and healthcare applications
• Assistive technologies
• Natural Language Processing

Important Deadlines

Submission Procedure

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to the SLT 2012 website. All papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.

Top

UNSW Forensic Speech Science Conference, Sydney, 2012 

The Forensic Voice Comparison Laboratory at the School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, University of New South Wales will host a Forensic Speech Science Conference on 3 December 2012 as a satellite event to the 14th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST-12).  

We welcome submissions related to all aspects of forensic speech science.  

Abstract submission deadline: 5 October 2012 

For more infomation see: http://sydney2012.forensic-voice-comparison.net/ 

Contact: sydney2012@forensic-voice-comparison.net

Top

The 9th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation will take
place in Hong Kong on December 6-7, 2012.
http://iwslt2012.org/

The International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is a
yearly scientific workshop, associated with an open evaluation campaign on
spoken language translation, where both scientific papers and system
descriptions are presented. 

Details can be found on the conference website http://iwslt2012.org/

Top

Tralogy is back: http://www.tralogy.eu

Tralogy II: The quest for meaning: where are our weak points and what do we need?

Dates and venue of the Conference: January 17-18, 2013 - CNRS Headquarters Auditorium, Paris (France)

The conclusions of the first Tralogy Conference (3-4 March 2011 at the CNRS in Paris) were clear: none of the specialist branches of the language industry can individually hope to offer all the intellectual and professional tools needed to function effectively in the sector. They all need each other: translation has always been interdisciplinary and the translation profession even more so. Accordingly, on the occasion of the second Tralogy Conference, we would like to ask each of our prospective participants not only to present specific contributions from their specialist fields and research into the question of meaning, but also, and in particular, to highlight the limits they face in their specialist fields and research within the wider context of the potential applications of their work. What we would like to find out by the end of Tralogy II is what each of us does not know how to do. We are therefore hoping that, as we map out our respective weak points, these will coincide with the points of contact made at the Conference and with the areas in which there is room for improvement. We will therefore give priority to concise presentations (the published articles will of course be longer) in order to leave time for discussions. And the key question that emerged from Tralogy I will remain at the heart of this analysis: how to measure the quality of a translation with regard to its use.

Canada was the country invited to participate in Tralogy I. This time we would like to honour languages that are very much alive but with lower numbers of users. We have therefore decided to organise this conference under the joint patronage of the Baltic States, Member States of the European Union: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Call for papers: http://www.tralogy.eu/spip.php?article55&lang=en

To submit a paper: http://www.tralogy.eu/spip.php?article10&lang=en

Top

CALL FOR PAPERS 

International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing BIOSIGNALS 

website: http://www.biosignals.biostec.org February 11 - 14, 2013 Barcelona, Spain In 

Collaboration with: UVIC Sponsored by: INSTICC INSTICC is Member of: WfMC 

IMPORTANT DATES: Regular Paper Submission: September 3, 2012 (deadline extended) 

Authors Notification (regular papers): October 23, 2012 

Final Regular Paper Submission and Registration: November 13, 2012

The conference will be sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, 

Control and Communication (INSTICC) and held In Collaboration with the Universitat 

de Vic (UVIC). INSTICC is Member of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). 

We would like to highlight the presence of the following keynote speakers:

 - Pedro Gomez Vilda, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain 

- Christian Jutten, GIPSA-lab, France 

- Adam Kampff, Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal 

- Richard Reilly, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland 

- Vladimir Devyatkov, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russian Federation 

Details of which can be found on the Keynotes webpage available at: 

http://www.biostec.org/KeynoteSpeakers.aspx 

Submitted papers will be subject to a double-blind review process. All accepted papers

 (full, short and posters) will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN 

reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support. JHPZ A short list of presented papers 

will be selected so that revised and extended versions of these papers will be published 

by Springer-Verlag in a CCIS Series book. The proceedings will be submitted for indexation 

by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (ISI), INSPEC, DBLP and 

EI (Elsevier Index). All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the 

SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). 

SciTePress is member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/). 

We also would like to highlight the possibility to submit to the following Special Session: 

- 3rd International Special Session on Multivariable Processing for 

Biometric Systems - MPBS (http://www.biosignals.biostec.org/MPBS.aspx) 

Please check further details at the BIOSIGNALS conference website

 (http://www.biosignals.biostec.org). 

Top

 2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge
          Supported by IEEE Technical Committees

                Deadline: January 15, 2013
        Workshop: June 1, 2013, Vancouver, Canada

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

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


Following the success of the 1st PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and
Recognition Challenge, we are happy to announce a new challenge
dedicated to speech recognition in real-world reverberant, noisy conditions,
that will culminate in a dedicated satellite workshop of ICASSP 2013.

The challenge is supported by several IEEE Technical Committees and by
an Industrial Board.


FEATURED TASKS

The challenge consists of recognising distant-microphone speech mixed in
two-channel nonstationary noise recorded over a period of several weeks
in a real family house. Entrants may address either one or both of the
following tracks:

Medium vocabulary track: WSJ 5k sentences uttered by a static speaker

Small vocabulary track: simpler commands but small head movements


TO ENTER

You will find everything you need to get started (and even more) on the
challenge website:
- a full description of the challenge,
- clean, reverberated and multi-condition training and development data,
- baseline training, decoding and scoring software tools based on HTK.

Submission consists of a 2- to 8-page paper describing your system and
reporting its performance on the development and the test set. In
addition, you are welcome to submit an earlier paper to ICASSP 2013,
which will tentatively be grouped with other papers into a dedicated
session.

Any approach is welcome, whether emerging or established.

If you are interested in participating, please email us so we can
monitor interest and send you further updates about the challenge.


BEST CHALLENGE PAPER AWARD

The best challenge paper will distinguished by an award from the
Industrial Board.


IMPORTANT DATES

July 2012          Launch
October 2012       Test set release
January 15, 2013   Challenge & workshop submission deadline
February 18, 2013  Paper notification & release of the challenge results
June 1, 2013       ICASSP satellite workshop


INDUSTRIAL BOARD

Masami Akamine, Toshiba
Carlos Avendano, Audience
Li Deng, Microsoft
Erik McDermott, Google
Gautham Mysore, Adobe
Atsushi Nakamura, NTT
Peder A. Olsen, IBM
Trausti Thormundsson, Conexant
Daniel Willett, Nuance


WORKSHOP SPONSORS

Conexant Systems Inc.
Audience Inc.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories


ORGANISERS

Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe & Jonathan Le Roux, MERL
Francesco Nesta & Marco Matassoni, FBK-IRST

Top

Call for Participation

    NTCIR-10 IR for Spoken Documents Task (SpokenDoc-2)
    http://www.cl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~sdpwg/index.php?ntcir10

== INTRODUCTION

The growth of the internet and the decrease of the storage costs are
resulting in the rapid increase of multimedia contents today. For
retrieving these contents, available text-based tag information is
limited. Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) is a promising technology for
retrieving these contents using the speech data included in them.
Following the NTCIR-9 SpokenDoc task, we will continue to evaluate the
SDR based on a realistic ASR condition, where the target documents are
spontaneous speech data with high word error rate and high
out-of-vocabulary rate.

== TASK OVERVIEW

The new speech data, the recordings of the first to sixth annual
Spoken Document Processing Workshop, are going to be used as the
target document in SpokenDoc-2. The larger speech data, spoken
lectures in Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ), are also used as in
the last SpokenDoc-1. The task organizers are going to provide
reference automatic transcriptions for these speech data. These
enabled researchers interested in SDR, but without access to their own
ASR system to participate in the tasks. They also enabled comparisons
of the IR methods based on the same underlying ASR performance.

Targeting these documents, two subtasks will be conducted.

Spoken Term Detection: 
  Within spoken documents, find the occurrence positions of a queried
  term. The evaluation should be conducted by both the efficiency
  (search time) and the effectiveness (precision and recall).

Spoken Content Retrieval: 
  Among spoken documents, find the segments including the relevant
  information related to the query, where a segment is either a
  document (resulting in document retrieval task) or a passage
  (passage retrieval task). This is like an ad-hoc text retrieval
  task, except that the target documents are speech data.
  
== FOR MORE DETAILS

Please visit
http://www.cl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~sdpwg/index.php?ntcir10
A link to the NTCIR-10 task participants registration page
is now available from this page.

Please note that the registration deadline is Jun 30, 2012 (for
all NTCIR-10 tasks).

== ORGANIZERS

Kiyoaki Aikawa (Tokyo University of Technology)
Tomoyosi Akiba (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Xinhui Hu (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)
Yoshiaki Itoh (Iwate Iwate Prefectural University)
Tatsuya Kawahara (Kyoto University)
Seiichi Nakagawa (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Hiroaki Nanjo (Ryukoku University)
Hiromitsu Nishizaki (University of Yamanashi)
Yoichi Yamashita Ritsumeikan University)

If you have any questions, please send e-mails to the task
organizers mailing list: ntcadm-spokendoc2@nlp.cs.tut.ac.jp

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

Top

Colloque organisé par l’Unité de   Recherche 1339

                                                               Linguistique, Langues, Parole   (LiLPa)

                                                                  Université de Strasbourg – Unistra

                                                                                    3 – 5 juillet 2013

                                                                                 Strasbourg - France

CorpORA and Tools in Linguistics,  Languages and Speech:

                                                                        Status, Uses and Misuse

          Conference  organised by the  Research Unit 1339 Linguistics, Languages and Speech (LiLPa)

                                                              University  of Strasbourg – UNISTRA

                                                                                  3 – 5 July 2013

                                                                            Strasbourg - France

Top

Call for Participation
MediaEval 2012 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation
http://www.multimediaeval.org
Please register by 31 May 2012
--------------------------------------------------

MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2012 focuses on aspects of multimedia including and going beyond visual content, including speech, language, audio and social factors. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2012 workshop.

For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a 'required reading' list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. Please sign up via http://www.multimediaeval.org (regular sign up will remain open until 31 May).

The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2012:

Placing Task
This task involves automatically assigning geo-coordinates to Flickr videos using one or more of: Flickr metadata, visual content, audio content, social information (Data: Creative Commons Flickr data, predominantly English language, extended from the 2011 data set.)

Social Event Detection Task
This task requires participants to discover events and detect media items that are related to either a specific social event or an event-class of interest. By social events we mean that the events are planned by people, attended by people and that the social media are captured by people. (Data: URLs of images and videos available on Flickr and other internet archives together with metadata).

Spoken Web Search Task
This task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. It is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection. (Data: Audio from four different Indian languages and four South African languages. Each of the ca. 2000 data item is an 8 KHz audio file 4-30 secs in length.)

Tagging Task
Given a set of tags and a video collection, participants are required to automatically assign the tags to each video based on a combination of modalities, i.e., speech, metadata, audio and visual. (Data: Creative Commons internet video, nearly exclusively English, extended from the 2011 collection.)

Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection
This task requires participants to deploy multimodal features to automatically detect portions of movies containing violent material. Any features automatically extracted from the video, including the subtitles, can be used by participants. (Data: A set of ca. 18 Hollywood movies that must be purchased by the participants.)

Visual Privacy Task
For this task, participants propose methods whereby human faces occurring in digital imagery can be obscured so as to render them unrecognizable.  An optimal balance should be struck between obscuring identity and maintaining the quality of the viewing experience from the user perspective. (Data: about 100 high resolution video files of ca 1m30s each and containing one or more persons in an indoor environment.)

Brave New Tasks
This year, MediaEval will also run three new tasks in the areas of social media, spoken content search and hyperlinking, and music tagging. These tasks are 'by invitation only' and are not included in the general registration form. In order to receive an invitation, please contact the task organizers.

MediaEval 2012 Timeline (dates vary slight from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2012)

31 May: Last day for regular sign up
1 June: Latest day for development data release
1 July: Latest day for test data release
ca. 10 September: Run submission deadline
28 September: Working notes papers due
4-5 October: MediaEval 2012 Workshop, Pisa, Italy*
*The workshop is timed so that it is possible to attend the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2012 (http://eccv2012.unifi.it/), held 7-13 October in Firenze, Italy, in the same trip.

MediaEval 2012 Coordination
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University

Contact
For questions or additional information please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl or visit visit http://www.multimediaeval.org

MediaEval 2012 Organization Committee:

Robin Aly, University of Twente, Netherlands
Xavier Anguera, Telefonica, Spain
Atta Badii, University of Reading, UK
Etienne Barnard, CSIR, South Africa
Claire-Helene Demarty, Technicolor, France
Maria Eskevich, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gerald Friedland, ICSI, USA
Isabelle Ferrané, University of Toulouse, France
Guillaume Gravier, IRISA, France
Claudia Hauff, TU Delft, Netherlands
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pascal Kelm, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Christoph Kofler, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Chattun Lallah, University of Reading, UK
Martha Larson, TU Delft, Netherlands
Cynthia Liem, TU Delft, Netherlands
Florian Metze, CMU, USA
Vasileios Mezaris, ITI Certh, Greece
Roeland Ordelman, University of Twente and Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Netherlands
Nicola Orio, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Geoffroy Peeters, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique Paris, France
Cedric Penet, Technicolor, France
Tomas Piatrik, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Adam Rae, Yahoo! Research, Spain
Nitendra Rajput, IBM Research, India
Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria
Sebastian Schmiedeke, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Mohammad Soleymani, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Robin Sommer, ICSI/LBNL, USA
Raphael Troncy, Eurecom, France

A large number of projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including (alphabetically): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), Chorus+ (http://www.ist-chorus.org), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), IISSCoS (http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/IISSCoS/), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu/), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu/), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl/), VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu/) and SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org/).

Top

This Call for Proposal is distributed on behalf of IEEE Signal Processing Society Conference Board for the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to be held in March or April of 2017. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing theory and applications. The series is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and has been held annually since 1976. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. ICASSP is a cooperative effort of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees:

The conference organizing team is advised to incorporate into their proposal the following items.

• Proposed Dates (March or April 2017)
• Organizing Committee Members
  • Name
  • Biographical information
  • Membership in the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• List of scientific and research groups who reside in the local area who are in favor of the proposal and who are committed to attend and participate.
• Proposed budget. (For advice on building an IEEE budget please contact Kartik Patel at kartik.patel@ieee.org.)
• Support that can be anticipated from the local government, universities and or corporations
• Why this location?
  • Airport information
  • Customs and Visa regulations
  • Hotel and convention center information (i.e. space diagrams, maps, etc.)
  • Tourist destinations (i.e. museums, natural wonders, etc.)
  • Average weather conditions for the time of year

Submission of Proposal
Proposals for ICASSP are currently being accepted for 2017. Proposals should be sent no later than 15 August 2012. Notification of acceptance will be made after ICIP 2012 in Orlando, FL. Send the proposal to Lisa Schwarzbek, Manager, Conference Services IEEE Signal Processing Society (l.schwarzbek@ieee.org).

For additional guidelines for ICASSP please contact Lisa Schwarzbek, Manager, Conference Services (l.schwarzbek@ieee.org).

Proposal Presentation
Proposals that are of interest to the Conference Board may be asked to present their proposal at the Conference Board meeting to be held in Orlando, Florida tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 4 October 2012.

Top