Carnegie Speech produces systems to teach people how to speak another language understandably. Some of its products include NativeAccent, SpeakIraqi, SpeakRussian, and ClimbLevel4. You can find out more at
www.carnegiespeech.com. You can also read about Forbes.com awarding it a Best Breakout Idea of 2009 at:
The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) offers a 10-week summer research program for undergraduates in interactive virtual experiences. A multidisciplinary research institute affiliated with the University of Southern California, the ICT was established in 1999 to combine leading academic researchers in computing with the creative talents of Hollywood and the video game industry. Having grown to encompass a total of 170 faculty, staff, and students in a diverse array of fields, the ICT represents a unique interdisciplinary community brought together with a core unifying mission: advancing the state-of-the-art for creating virtual reality experiences so compelling that people will react as if they were real.
Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of ICT research, we welcome applications from students in computer science, as well as many other fields, such as psychology, art/animation, interactive media, linguistics, and communications. Undergraduates will join a team of students, research staff, and faculty in one of several labs focusing on different aspects of interactive virtual experiences. In addition to participating in seminars and social events, students will also prepare a final written report and present their projects to the rest of the institute at the end of summer research fair.
Students will receive $5000 over ten weeks, plus an additional $2800 stipend for housing and living expenses. Non-local students can also be reimbursed for travel up to $600. The ICT is located in West Los Angeles, just north of LAX and only 10 minutes from the beach.
This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The site is expected to begin summer 2013, pending final award issuance.
Students can apply online at: http://ict.usc.edu/reu/
Application deadline: March 31, 2013
For more information, please contact Evan Suma at reu@ict.usc.edu.
Announcing the Master of Science in Intelligent Information Systems
Carnegie Mellon University
degree designed for students who want to rapidly masteradvanced content-analysis, mining, and intelligent informationtechnologies prior to beginning or resuming leadership careers inindustry and government.Just over half of the curriculum consists of graduate courses. Theremainder provides direct, hands-on, project-oriented experienceworking closely with CMU faculty to build systems and solve problemsusing state-of-the-art algorithms, techniques, tools, and datasets.A typical MIIS student completes the program in one year (12 months)of full-time study at the Pittsburgh campus. Part-time and distanceeducation options are available to students employed at affiliatedcompanies.The application deadline for the Fall 2013 term is December 14, 2012.For more information about the program, please visithttp://www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/education/msiis/overview.shtml
Master's in Linguistics (Aix-Marseille Université): Linguistic Theories, Field Linguistics and ExperimentationTheLiTEx offers advanced training in Linguistics. This specialty focuses Linguistics is aimed at presenting in an original way the links between corpus linguistics and scientific experimentation on the one hand and laboratory and field methodologies on the other. On the basis of a common set of courses (offered within the first year), TheLiTEx offers two paths: Experimental Linguistics (LEx) and Language Contact & Typology (LCT)The goal of LEx is the study of language, speech and discourse on the basis of scientific experimentation, quantitative modeling of linguistic phenomena and behavior. It focuses on a multidisciplinary approach which borrows its methodologies to human physical and biological sciences and its tools to computer science, clinical approaches, engineering etc.. Among the courses offered: semantics, phonetics / phonology, morphology, syntax or pragmatics, prosody and intonation, and the interfaces between these linguistic levels, in their interactions with the real world and the individual, in a biological, cognitive and social perspective. Within the second year, a set of more specialized courses is offered such as Language and the Brain and Laboratory Phonology.LCT aims at understanding the world's linguistic diversity, focusing on language contact, language change and variation (European, Asian and African languages, Creoles, sign language, etc.).. This specialty focuses, from a a linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective, on issues of field linguistics and taking into account both the human and socio-cultural dimension of language (speakers, communities). It also focuses on documenting rare and endangered languages and to engage a reflection on linguistic minorities. This path also provides expertise and intervention models (language policy and planning) in order to train students in the management of contact phenomena and their impact on the speakers, languages and societiesMore info at: http://thelitex.hypotheses.org/678
NEW MASTER IN BRAIN AND COGNITION AT UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA, BARCELONA
NEW MASTER IN BRAIN AND COGNITION AT UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA, BARCELONA
A new, one-year Master in Brain and Cognition will begin its activities in the Academic Year 2014-15 in Barcelona, Spain, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (http://www.upf.edu/mbc/).
The core of the master's programme is composed of the research groups at UPF's Center for Brain and Cognition (http://cbc.upf.edu). These groups are directed by renowned scientists in areas such as computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, vision, multisensory perception, human development and comparative cognition. Students will be exposed to the ongoing research projects at the Center for Brain and Cognition and will be integrated in one of its main research lines, where they will conduct original research for their final project.
Application period is now open. Please visit the Master web page or contact luca.bonatti@upf.edu for further information.
Les masters d'Ingénierie de la langue de Paris-Sorbonne, ILGII (R) et IILGI (P), sont maintenant regroupés dans une seule spécialité de la mention Littérature, Philosophie, Linguistique. Les deux années du master Langue et Informatique apportent des connaissances fondamentales sur la langue et son traitement automatique, sur les interactions langagières et la modélisation des phénomènes paralangagiers, ainsi que sur l'ingénierie des connaissances. Les enseignements de spécialité développent également des savoirs et des savoir-faire : analyse et compréhension de textes ; reconnaissance et synthèse de la parole ; sciences affectives et systèmes de dialogue ; résumé et traduction assistés par ordinateur; extraction et construction des connaissances ; intelligence économique. Les enseignements méthodologiques du tronc commun de la mention permettent d'articuler ces enseignements spécialisés avec ce qui relève de l'épistémologie de la littérature, de la philologie et de la linguistique. Ce master comporte deux parcours : un parcours professionnel « Ingénierie de la Langue pour la Société Numérique (ILSN) » et un parcours recherche « Informatique, Langue et Interactions (ILI) ». La différenciation entre les deux parcours se fait au semestre 4.
The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN)
JRC, the EC?s Joint Research Centre, an important LR player: First to adopt the ISLRN initiative
The Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in house science service, is the first organisation to use the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) initiative and has requested ISLRN 13-digit unique identifiers to its Language Resources (LR). Thus, anyone who is using JRC LRs may now refer to this number in their own publications.
The International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN) aims to provide unique identifiers using a standardised nomenclature, thus ensuring that LRs are correctly identified, and consequently, recognised with proper references for their usage in applications within R&D projects, product evaluation and benchmarking, as well as in documents and scientific papers. Moreover, this is a major step in the networked and shared world that Human Language Technologies (HLT) has become: unique resources must be identified as such and meta-catalogues need a common identification format to manage data correctly. The ISLRN portal can be accessed from http://www.islrn.org,
*** About the JRC ***
As the Commission's in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre's mission is to provide EU policies with independent, evidence-based scientific and technical support throughout the whole policy cycle. Within its research in the field of global security and crisis management, the JRC develops open source intelligence and analysis systems that can automatically harvest and analyse a huge amount of multi-lingual information from the internet-based sources. In this context, the JRC has developed Language Technology resources and tools that can be used for highly multilingual text analysis and cross-lingual applications. To find out more about JRC's research in open source information monitoring, please visit https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance-systems. To access media monitoring applications directly, go to http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html.
*** About ELRA *** The European Language Resources Association (ELRA) is a non-profit making organisation founded by the European Commission in 1995, with the mission of providing a clearing house for language resources and promoting Human Language Technologies (HLT). To find out more about ELRA, please visit our web site: http://www.elra.info
New Masters in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Processing at Cambridge University, UK
New Masters in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Processing
This is a new twelve-month full-time MPhil programme offered by the Computational and Biological Learning Group (CBL) and the Speech Group in the Cambridge University Department of Engineering, with a unique, joint emphasis on both machine learning and on speech and language technology. The course aims: to teach the state of the art in machine learning, speech and language processing; to give students the skills and expertise necessary to take leading roles in industry; to equip students with the research skills necessary for doctoral study.
UK and EU students applications should be completed by 9 January 2015 for admission in October 2015. A limited number of studentships may be available for exceptional UK and eligible EU applicants.
Self-funding students who do not wish to be considered for support from the Cambridge Trusts have until 30 June 2015 to submit their complete applications.
Call for Participation MediaEval 2015 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation http://www.multimediaeval.org Early registration deadline: 1 May 2015 --------------------------------------------------
MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2015 focuses on aspects of multimedia including and going beyond visual content, such as language, speech, music, 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 2015 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. To sign up, please click the ?MediaEval 2015 Registration? link at:
The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2015:
*QUESST: Query by Example Search on Speech Task* The task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. This task is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection or low-resource/zero-resource speech processing. The primary performance metric will be the normalized cross entropy cost (Cnxe).
*Multimodal Person Discovery in Broadcast TV (New in 2015!)* Given raw TV broadcasts, each shot must be automatically tagged with the name(s) of people who can be both seen as well as heard in the shot. The list of people is not known a priori and their names must be discovered in an unsupervised way from provided text overlay or speech transcripts. The task will be evaluated on a new French corpus (provided by INA) and the AGORA Catalan corpus, using standard information retrieval metrics based on a posteriori collaborative annotation of the corpus.
*C@merata: Querying Musical Scores* The input is a natural language phrase referring to a musical feature (e.g., ?consecutive fifths?) together with a classical music score, and the required output is a list of passages in the score which contain that feature. Scores are in the MusicXML format, which can capture most aspects of Western music notation. Evaluation is via versions of Precision and Recall relative to a Gold Standard produced by the organisers.
*Affective Impact of Movies (including Violent Scenes Detection)* In this task participating teams are expected to classify short movie scenes by their affective content according to two use cases: (1) the presence of depicted violence, and (2) their emotional impact (valence, arousal). The training data consists of short Creative Commons-licensed movie scenes (both professional and amateur) together with human annotations of violence and valence-arousal ratings. The results will be evaluated using standard retrieval and classification metrics.
*Emotion in Music (An Affect Task)* We aim at detecting emotional dynamics of music using its content. Given a set of songs, participants are asked to automatically generate continuous emotional representations in arousal and valence.
*Retrieving Diverse Social Images* This task requires participants to refine a ranked list of Flickr photos with location related information using provided visual, textual and user credibility information. Results are evaluated with respect to their relevance to the query and the diverse representation of it.
*Placing: Multimodal Geo-location Prediction* The Placing Task requires participants to estimate the locations where multimedia items (photos or videos) were captured solely by inspecting the content and metadata of these items, and optionally exploiting additional knowledge sources such as gazetteers. Performance is evaluated using the distance to the ground truth coordinates of the multimedia items.
*Verifying Multimedia Use (New in 2015!)* For this task, the input is a tweet about an event that has the profile to be of interest in the international news, and the accompanying multimedia item (image or video). Participants must build systems that output a binary decision representing a verification of whether the multimedia item reflects the reality of the event in the way purported by the tweet. The task is evaluated using the F1 score. Participants are also requested to return a short explanation or evidence for the verification decision.
*Context of Experience: Recommending Videos Suiting a Watching Situation (New in 2015!)* This task develops multimodal techniques for automatic prediction of multimedia in a specific consumption context. In particular, we focus on the context of predicting movies that are suitable to watch on airplanes. Input to the prediction methods are movie trailers, and metadata from IMDb. Output is evaluated using the Weighted F1 score, with expert labels as ground truth.
*Reliability of Social Multimedia Annotations (New in 2015!)* Input is a set of underwater photos with user-generated annotations and other addition social information taken from a social scuba divers website, and output is a ranked list of the least reliable user-generated annotations. Systems will be evaluated using a labeling of fish species created by expert annotators.
*Synchronization of Multi-User Event Media* This task addresses the challenge of automatically creating a chronologically-ordered outline of multiple multimedia collections corresponding to the same event. Given N media collections (galleries) taken by different users/devices at the same event, the goal is to find the best (relative) time alignment among them and detect the significant sub-events over the whole gallery. Performance is evaluated using ground truth time codes and actual event schedules.
*DroneProtect: Mini-drone Video Privacy Task (New in 2015!)* Recent popularity of mini-drones and their rapidly increasing adoption in various areas, including photography, news reporting, cinema, mail delivery, cartography, agriculture, and military, raises concerns for privacy protection and personal safety. Input to the task is drone video, and output is version of the video which protects privacy while retaining key information about the event or situation recorded.
*Search and Anchoring in Video Archives* The 2015 Search and Anchoring in Video Archives task consists of two sub-tasks: search for multimedia content and automatic anchor selection. In the ?search for multimedia content? sub-task, participants use multimodal textual and visual descriptions of content of interest to retrieve potentially relevant video segments from within a collection. In the ?automatic anchor selection? sub-task, participants automatically predict key elements of videos as anchor points for the formation of hyperlinks to relevant content within the collection. The video collection consists of professional broadcasts from BBC or semi-professional user generated content. Participant submissions will be assessed using professionally-created anchors, and crowdsourcing-based evaluation.
Mid?March-May: Registration and return usage agreements. May-June: Release of development/training data. June-July: Release of test data. Mid-Aug.: Participants submit their completed runs, and receive results. End Aug: Participants submit their 2-page working notes papers. 14-15 September: MediaEval 2015 Workshop, Wurzen, Germany. Workshop as a satellite event of Interspeech 2015, held nearby in Dresden the previous week.
We ask you to register by 1 May (because of the timing of the first wave of data releases). After that point, late registration will be possible, but we encourage teams to register as early as they can.
The ISCA SIG SLIM: Speech and Language in Multimedia (http://slim-sig.irisa.fr) is a key supporter of MediaEval. This year, the MediaEval workshop will be held as a satellite event of Interspeech (http://interspeech2015.org).
Three years after its launch, the AASP TC Challenges series has achieved its goal of stimulating ground-breaking approaches to hot topics in Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. The challenges run so far have been great successes, leading to unprecedented participation, new publicly available datasets, and highly attended special sessions and workshops: - the CHiME Challenge on speech separation and recognition in domestic environments (http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/chime2013/) - the D-Case Challenge on detection and classification of acoustic scenes and events (http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/sceneseventschallenge/) - the REVERB Challenge on single- and multichannel speech dereverberation (http://reverb2014.dereverberation.com/)
The coming year will see the unravelling of the ACE Challenge on acoustic characterization of environments (http://www.ace-challenge.org/), and future challenges are now eagerly awaited by academics and industrials.
In order to pursue this endeavor, we are issuing a call for expressions of interest in organizing new challenges. This is an open call with no deadline. Prospective organizers should provide a brief description of the challenge, the planned test data and evaluation methodology, and their value to the community. Challenges at the crossroads of other communities such as speech processing or machine learning are especially welcome. For more details, see
The AASP TC Challenges Subcommittee will help organizers run a successful Challenge by providing scientific and organizational feedback, sharing industrial sponsorship contacts, and awarding official prizes to the most reproducible challenges entries.
We are looking forward to your proposals!
On behalf of the AASP TC Challenges Subcommittee Emmanuel Vincent, Chair
La campagne d'évaluation Multiling sur le résumé automatique s'interesse cette année au résumé de conversations orales à travers la tâche CCCS (Call-Center Conversation Summarization). Les systèmes participant seront évalués sur leur capacité à générer un résumé par abstraction d'une conversation téléphonique qui raconte les problèmes rencontrés par l'appelant et les solutions apportées par l'agent.
La deadline pour les soumissions est le 24 avril, ce qui vous laisse juste le temps de participer.
Les données d'apprentissage proviennent des corpus DECODA (français), LUNA (italien), et traductions manuelles de ces corpus en anglais. 100 conversations de chaque corpus sont annotées avec plusieurs résumés de référence et 1000 conversations supplémentaires sont fournies pour l'apprentissage non supervisé. Le corpus contient les transcriptions manuelles de chaque conversation.
Questionnaire sur une éthique pour la communauté de parole
Pendant l'atelier Ethique et TRaitemeNt Automatique des Langues (ETeRNAL http://eternal.loria.fr/) à TALN, a été proposé un questionnaire afin de connaître les usages et les attentes de la communauté en matière d'éthique.
Le résultat de ce questionnaire ne sera significatif que s'il est rempli par beaucoup de monde, y compris par ceux qui ne se sentent pas a priori concernés par le sujet ou ceux qui pensent que l'éthique n'est pas un problème.
Le résultat de l'enquête sera diffusé largement, sur le site de l'atelier, mais également sur le blog créé à la suite de l'atelier (http://www.ethique-et-tal.org/)
Invitation to host the 8th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
Invitation to hostthe ACM ICMR2018 conference ICMR Steering Committee www.acmICMR.org<http://www.acmICMR.org>
The ICMR Steering Committee invites interested parties to submit proposals to host and organize the 8th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, ICMR2018 (sponsored by the ACM SIGMM).
ACM ICMR is the premier scientific conference for multimedia retrieval. Its mission is to provide a forum to discuss, promote and advance the state-of-the-arts in multimedia retrieval by bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. It is thus essential to ensure that the conference includes sessions for presenting high-quality research papers and for sharing practitioner experience.
We expect ICMR2018 to be held in Asia / Australasia regions.
Parties interested in hosting ICMR2018 are invited to submit their proposals (20 pages or less) by Friday, 16 October 2015 by email with the subject line: ICMR2018 to the steering committee chair, Prof Tat-Seng CHUA, chuats@gmail.com<mailto:chuats@gmail.com>
Guidelines for potential conference hosts =========================================
The ICMR steering committee will evaluate all bids using the guidelines set out below. Anyone interested in bidding is welcome to make informal contact with the steering committee chair prior to the deadline for the proposals. Proposals will be judged on the strength of the organizing committee (track records in multimedia retrieval, diversity and experience of international members), the plan for the conference (vision, ideas, etc.), and location (appeal, accessibility, etc.). Decisions are made by majority vote within the steering committee. Only one proposal from all the submissions will be selected by the steering committee.
The steering committee will aim to review proposals and make its decision within four weeks of the submission.
ICMR should facilitate interactions between multimedia retrieval community members which includes both researchers and practitioners. Specific objectives of ICMR are as follows:
1. To provide a setting for the presentation and discussion of high-quality original research papers in all aspects of multimedia retrieval.
2. To provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners in the field, ideally by maintaining a separate 'industry' track.
3. To provide a range of complementary events such as panel sessions, system demonstrations, exhibitions, workshops, and large-scale media evaluations and challenges.
4. To provide suitable facilities for informal networking and exchange of ideas between delegates.
The host organization is therefore expected to arrange for refereeing of all submitted papers to international standards, using ICMR's existing international program committees as their primary source of referees, and to liase with ACM over the publication of conference proceedings.
Timing and location ===================
The date for ICMR should be around June each year. In particular, in order to improve the interactions between SIGMM meetings, the timing of ICMR should be coordinated with the ACM MM Organizers of that year so that the Technical Program Committee (TPC) meeting of ACM MM (usually held in June) can be co-located with ICMR (see Section on Checklist below).
The conference location should be easily accessible by people from around the world, with good air, rail and road links. The bid should include a short description of the locality and any remarkable or outstanding features that would make it particularly attractive to potential delegates.
The venue of the conference should preferably be in an education/research Institute or a hotel, with space for about 180 delegates.
Accommodation and social events ===============================
Proposers should demonstrate that they have suitable accommodation for delegates (e.g. en-suite rooms in student halls and/or local hotels), for a meeting of at least three days duration. The availability of low-cost accommodation for student delegates such as youth hostels or inexpensive student halls would also be an advantage. The Organizer is expected to organize a drink reception (possibly externally sponsored) and a relatively formal conference dinner. Other types of activities such as sightseeing visits would also be appreciated.
Conference web site ===================
Proposers are expected to organize and maintain a web site (typically www.icmr2018.org<http://www.icmr2018.org>) for the conference, at least providing links for paper submission, delegate registration, organizing, program, and steering committees.
Budget preparation and costs ============================
The ACM SIGMM has agreed to full sponsorship of ICMR. Proposers must produce a budget for the conference. Costs should be estimated based on 140 attendees, inclusive of organizers and volunteer helpers. It is expected that the conference should break even at a minimum, and should preferably show a small surplus. Various projections of income and expenditure, with different price bands for members of any collaborating or sponsoring bodies (normally a 10% discount on the standard rate), non-members and student delegates, with corresponding break even points, should be provided. Registration fees for students should be kept as low as possible in order to encourage young researchers to participate. Incentives for early registration are advisable.
The proposal should include the following information, and in 20 pages or less in PDF:
* names, affiliations, and email contact information of the main organizers.
* a copy of the first call for papers for the conference including dates. To facilitate close interactions among SIGMM sponsored conferences, and in particular ACM Multimedia, proposers of ICMR should coordinate with ACMMM organizers of the same year and propose a conference schedule that allows the ACMMM TPC meeting (typically held in the first two weeks of June - you can ask the steering committee chair about this too) to be co-located with ICMR.
* highlights of the conference and justification/support of the conference dates, location, and venue.
* a draft of the organizing and program committees (please specify if a member is tentative; also if an ICMR steering committee member's name is used without making it very clear he agreed, the name will be marked over (erased) to ensure fairness in the voting)
* a draft programme for the conference
* a draft of the conference budget including the ACM contingency fee and the VAT if applicable
* a schedule of activities
* plans for publicizing the conference
Tat-Seng Chua ACM ICMR Steering Committee Chair July 2015
I'm planning to organise a workshop on 'Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots' (VIHAR). The idea is to bring together people from a range of different areas - HHI, AAI, RRI, HAI, HRI and ARI - in order to compare and contrast our current level of understanding and to attempt to identify any common principles that underpin vocally coordinated behaviour.
I have in mind proposing a Dagstuhl Seminar/Workshop (https://www.dagstuhl.de) and the next deadline for applications is 1st November 2015. So, please can you let me know if (a) you would be interested in participating in such an event or (b) you would be keen to get involved in the organisation in some capacity.
Thanks
Roger
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof ROGER K MOORE BA(Hons) MSc PhD FIOA FISCA MIET
Chair of Spoken Language Processing Vocal Interactivity Lab (VILab), Sheffield Robotics Speech & Hearing Research Group (SPandH) Department of Computer Science, UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD* Regent Court, 211 Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK
