Manuscript due: Dec. 1, 2014 Journal: Speech Communication Description: Sparse and low-rank modeling aim to incorporate the low-dimensional structures pertained to the geometry of the underlying problems to achieve the optimal solution. These concepts have been proven to be very effective for a wide range of applications at the intersection of multiple fields, including machine learning, signal processing and statistics. In the context of audio and speech processing, and more particularly multiparty communications in reverberant and overlapping conditions, the integration of sparse and low-rank modeling concepts has lead to several interesting new directions and promising results in speech communication problems, ranging from denoising to deconvolution and from separation to recognition. Several other exciting developments include sparse linear prediction, missing data recovery, audio content analysis and inpainting. Addressing such real applications is particularly challenging due to the complex acoustic and speech characteristics, and the need to develop new modeling strategies that meet the foundational theoretical hypotheses. In addition, speech recognition performance seems to degrade in these complex acoustic conditions, and thus research in this direction is critical from both a theoretical and industry perspective. The goal of the proposed special issue is to consolidate the research in these diverse fields in a coherent framework and overview the recent advances and trends where sparse and low-rank modeling and applications are converging to new fundamental and practical paradigms that could also lead to the emergence of new speech technologies. Topics of interest include: * Manifold learning in speech processing: single and multi-microphone speech enhancement * Sparse modeling and low-rank modeling for separation and denoising * Sparse regression and classification * Sparse dimensionality reduction for feature extraction * Structured sparsity models underlying audio and speech representation * Auditory-inspired sparse modeling * Sparse modeling and low-rank modeling for source localization * Sparse representation and low-rank representation for reverberant acoustic modeling * Sparse data processing and modeling in low-resourced languages * Applications in speech recognition, privacy-preserving speech processing, speaker recognition and authentication, speaker diarization, microphone array calibration, audio information retrieval, speech synthesis and coding Lead Guest Editors: * Prof. Hervé Bourlard, herve.bourlard@idiap.ch * Dr. Afsaneh Asaei, afsaneh.asaei@idiap.ch * Dr. Tara N. Sainath, tsainath@us.ibm.com * Prof. Sharon Gannot, sharon.gannot@biu.ac.il For more information about this special issue, please visit: http://si.eurasip.org/issues/36/advances-in-sparse-modeling-and-low-rank-modeling/ _______________________________________________

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Manuscript due: Dec. 15, 2014

Journal: EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing

Description:

Deep learning techniques have enjoyed enormous success in the speech and
language processing community over the past few years, beating previous
state-of-the-art approaches to acoustic modeling, language modeling, and
natural language processing. A common theme across different tasks is
that that the depth of the network allows useful representations to be
learned. For example, in acoustic modeling, the ability of deep
architectures to disentangle multiple factors of variation in the input,
such as various speaker-dependent effects on speech acoustics, has led
to excellent improvements in speech recognition performance on a wide
variety of tasks. In addition, in natural language processing and
language modeling tasks, integrating learned vector space models of
words, which perform smoothing and clustering based on semantic and
syntactic information contained in word contexts, with recurrent or
recursive architectures has led to significant advances.
 
We as a community should continue to understand what makes deep learning
successful for speech and language, and how further improvements can be
achieved. For example, just as deep networks made us re-think the input
feature representation pipeline used for speech recognition, we should
continue to push deep learning into other areas of the speech
recognition pipeline.
 
In addition, new architectures, such as convolutional neural networks
and recurrent networks using long short-term memory cells, have improved
performance, and we believe alternative architectures can improve
performance further. Secondly, optimization of large neural network
models remains a huge challenge, both because of computational cost and
amount of data, which could possibly be unsupervised.


Topics of interest include:

* New deep-learning architectures and algorithms
* Optimization strategies for deep learning
* Improved adaptation methods for deep learning
* Unsupervised and semi-supervised training for deep learning
* Novel applications of deep learning for speech and language tasks
* Theoretical and empirical understanding of deep learning for speech and 
 language
* Deep-learning toolkits and/or platforms for big data

Lead Guest Editor:

* Tara Sainath, Google Inc., USA

Guest Editors:

* Michiel Bacchiani, Google Inc., USA
* Hui Jiang, York University, Canada
* Brian Kingsbury, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA
* Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen, Germany
* Frank Seide, Microsoft Research Asia, China
* Andrew Senior, Google Inc., USA

For more information about this special issue, please visit:

http://si.eurasip.org/issues/38/deep-learning-for-speech-and-language-processing/
_______________________________________________

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CALL FOR PAPERS  
DIALOGUE & DISCOURSE 
SPECIAL ISSUE ON DIALOGUE STATE TRACKING 

GUEST EDITORS 

Jason D. Williams, Microsoft Research
Antoine Raux, Lenovo
Matthew Henderson, Cambridge University

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 15 April 2015 Notification:                           26 June 2015
Final version of accepted papers due:   28 August 2015
Anticipated publication:                16 October 2015

INTRODUCTION 

Conversational systems are increasingly becoming a part of daily life, with examples including Apple's Siri, Google Now, 

Nuance Dragon Go, Xbox and Cortana from Microsoft, and numerous new entrants.  Many conversational systems include 

a dialogue state tracking function, which estimates relevant aspects of the interaction such as the user's goal, level of 

frustration, trust towards the system, etc, given all of the dialogue history so far.  For example, in a tourist information system,

 the dialogue state might indicate the type of business the user is searching for (pub, restaurant, coffee shop), their desired 

price range and type of food served.  Dialogue state tracking is difficult because automatic speech recognition (ASR) and 

spoken language understanding (SLU) errors are common, and can cause the system to misunderstand the user.  

At the same time, state tracking is crucial because the system relies on the estimated dialogue state to choose actions -- for 

example, which restaurants to suggest.

Most commercial systems use hand-crafted heuristics for state tracking, selecting the SLU result with the highest confidence score,

 and discarding alternatives. In contrast, statistical approaches consider many hypotheses for the dialogue state.  By exploiting 

correlations between turns and information from external data sources -- such as maps, knowledge bases, or models of past 

dialogues -- statistical approaches can overcome some SLU errors.

Although dialogue state tracking has been an active area of study for more than a decade, there has been a flurry of new work 

in the past 2 years.  This has been driven in part by the availability of common corpora and evaluation measures provided by a 

series of three research community challenge tasks called the Dialogue State Tracking Challenge.  With these resources, 

researchers are able to study dialogue state tracking without investing the time and effort required to build and operate a spoken 

dialogue system.  Shared resources also allow direct comparison of methods across research groups.  Results from the Dialogue 

State Tracking Challenge have been presented at special sessions in SIGDIAL 2013, SIGDIAL 2014, and IEEE SLT 2014.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The aim of this special issue is to provide a forum for in-depth, journal-level work on dialogue state tracking.  

This issue welcomes papers covering any topic relevant to dialogue state tracking.  Specific examples include (but are not

 limited to):

- Algorithms for dialogue state tracking, including those based on machine learning or novel heuristics
- Adaptation and learning in dialogue state tracking, for example across domains, users, usage environments, etc.
- Analyses of dialogue state tracking methods, or analyses of characteristics of dialogue that affect dialogue state tracking
- Investigations of metrics used for dialogue state tracking, including the impact of dialogue state tracking on end-to-end 

dialogue systems
- Descriptions and analyses of resources for dialogue state tracking, including corpora 
- Applications of dialogue state tracking to new domains or new settings, such as multi-modal systems

Submissions should report on new work, or substantially expand on previously published work with additional experiments, 

analysis, or important detail.  Previously-published aspects may be included but should be clearly indicated.

RELEVANT RESOURCES

All data from the dialogue state tracking challenge series continues to be available for use, including the dialogue data itself,

 scripts for evaluation and baseline trackers, raw output from trackers entered in the challenges, and performance summaries. 

If your work is on dialogue state tracking for information-seeking dialogues and/or you think the data is appropriate, you are 

strongly encouraged to report results on these data, to enable comparison.

The dialogue state tracking challenge data is available here:

- Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 1:    http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/dstc/
- Dialogue State Tracking Challenge 2&3:  http://camdial.org/~mh521/dstc/

SUBMISSIONS

Papers should be submitted on the Dialogue & Discourse journal website, following instructions and formatting guidelines given

 there:

http://www.dialogue-and-discourse.org/submission.shtml

Submitted papers will be reviewed according to the Dialogue & Discourse reviewing criteria and appropriateness to the topic of 

the special issue.

CONTACT

Contact Jason Williams (jason.williams@microsoft.com) for further information about this call for papers.

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'Silencing the Echoes' - Processing of Reverberant Speech

Submission Instructions

asp.eurasipjournals.com

Manuscript Due

Feb. 1, 2015 (in 3 months, 3 weeks)

Description

The reverberation contained in speech signals captured by distant microphones reduces both the perceptual speech quality and the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, hampering both human-human communication and human-machine interaction. Thus, for applications that depend on distant sound capture, processing of the speech signal to mitigate the reverberation problem is essential. Such applications include voice control of consumer products, e.g. smart phones, wearable devices, interactive TVs, and appliances in smart homes; hearing aids; voice communication with robots and avatars; automatic meeting transcription; speech recognition in call centers; automatic annotation of videos; speech-to-speech translation.

To enable researchers in the field of reverberant speech processing to carry out comprehensive evaluations of their methods based on a common database and common evaluation metrics, recently the Reverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark (REVERB) challenge has been organized. Inspired by the great interest induced by this challenge, we invite contributions on processing of reverberant speech signals both for signal enhancement to increase perceptual speech quality and for robust recognition of reverberant speech.

We strongly encourage the evaluation of the proposed approaches on the data provided by the REVERB challenge. Alternatively or additionally, well-documented and publicly available, databases can be used. We invite challenge participants to submit extended descriptions of their (enhanced) systems. Participation in the challenge is however not a prerequisite for submitting a contribution to this special issue.

Topics of interest include:

• Single-channel and multichannel speech dereverberation algorithms
• ASR robust to reverberation
• Interconnection of dereverberation and ASR systems
• Objective measures for evaluating the perceptual speech quality of dereverberated signals
• Estimation of reverberation parameters (e.g. reverberation time, direct-to-reverberation ratio)
• Dereverberation in dynamic scenarios
• Highly reverberant scenarios (reverberation times exceeding one second, e.g., concert halls, museums, terminal halls, houses of worship)
• System design for handling reverberant speech

---

Guest Editors

• Sharon Gannot, Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
• Armin Sehr, Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin
• Emanuël Habets, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
• Keisuke Kinoshita, NTT Communication Science Laboratories
• Walter Kellermann, University Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany
• Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, Department of Communications Engineering, University of Paderborn, Germany

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Manuscript due: Jan. 10, 2015

Journal: Speech Communication

Description:

Sparse and low-rank modeling aim to incorporate the low-dimensional
structures pertained to the geometry of the underlying problems to
achieve the optimal solution. These concepts have been proven to be very
effective for a wide range of applications at the intersection of
multiple fields, including machine learning, signal processing and
statistics.

In the context of audio and speech processing, and more particularly
multiparty communications in reverberant and overlapping conditions, the
integration of sparse and low-rank modeling concepts has lead to several
interesting new directions and promising results in speech communication
problems, ranging from denoising to deconvolution and from separation to
recognition. Several other exciting developments include sparse linear
prediction, missing data recovery, audio content analysis and
inpainting. Addressing such real applications is particularly
challenging due to the complex acoustic and speech characteristics, and
the need to develop new modeling strategies that meet the foundational
theoretical hypotheses. In addition, speech recognition performance
seems to degrade in these complex acoustic conditions, and thus research
in this direction is critical from both a theoretical and industry
perspective.

The goal of the proposed special issue is to consolidate the research in
these diverse fields in a coherent framework and overview the recent
advances and trends where sparse and low-rank modeling and applications
are converging to new fundamental and practical paradigms that could
also lead to the emergence of new speech technologies.


Topics of interest include:

* Manifold learning in speech processing: single and multi-microphone
speech enhancement
* Sparse modeling and low-rank modeling for separation and denoising
* Sparse regression and classification
* Sparse dimensionality reduction for feature extraction
* Structured sparsity models underlying audio and speech representation
* Auditory-inspired sparse modeling
* Sparse modeling and low-rank modeling for source localization
* Sparse representation and low-rank representation for reverberant
acoustic modeling
* Sparse data processing and modeling in low-resourced languages
* Applications in speech recognition, privacy-preserving speech
processing, speaker recognition and authentication, speaker diarization,
microphone array calibration, audio information retrieval, speech
synthesis and coding

Guest Editors:

* Prof. Hervé Bourlard, herve.bourlard@idiap.ch
* Dr. Afsaneh Asaei, afsaneh.asaei@idiap.ch
* Dr. Tara N. Sainath, tsainath@google.com
* Prof. Sharon Gannot, sharon.gannot@biu.ac.il

For more information about this special issue, please visit:

http://si.eurasip.org/issues/48/advances-in-sparse-modeling-and-low-rank-modeling/

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Special issue of Speech Communication on 'Phase-Aware Signal Processing in
Speech Communication'
http://si.eurasip.org/issues/46/phase-aware-signal-processing-in-speech/

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 Second Call for Papers
Special issue of the journal Traitement automatique des Langues (TAL)

   COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Guest editors: T. Poibeau  (Lattice, France)
           & S. Vasishth (Univ. of Postdam, Germany)

Submission deadline : March 31st, 2015

Natural language understanding is one of the key problems both in
cognitive science and in computational linguistics. If both fields do
share common methods, the scientific goals are actually different.

In computational linguistics, the last decade has seen the rise of
quantitative and statistical methods leading to significative advances
in applied sub-fields such as speech recognition, machine translation or
information retrieval among others. This line of research has greatly
taken advantage of its ability to process very large amounts of data
that can be considered close to truly natural data.

Even if this new generation of models is sometimes inspired by
linguistic or psycholinguistic theories, it generally brings little or
no explanation to the broader question of understanding the natural
language competence.

On the other hand, language studies in cognitive science and in
psycholinguistics try to better understand the mechanisms underlying
natural language (including their neural basis) and more specifically
its acquisition by means of experimental investigations. One of the
novel aspects in several recent works is to use computational models
similar to those used in computational linguistics.

This special issue is dedicated to get a better picture of the
relationships between these two research environments. It specifically
raises two questions: 'what is the potential contribution of
computational-linguistics-inspired language modeling to cognitive
science' and conversely: 'what is the influence of cognitive science in
contemporary computational linguistics' ?

The call targets specifically contributions on actual applications of
methods from computational linguistics to the modelling of cognitive
phenomena and on the other hand on application of cognitive theories to
the computational modeling of language. The call addresses all aspects
of language modeling from speech to discourse.

Topics include, but are not limited to :

- Computational models of natural language acquisition, word clustering
and word segmentation
- Psycholinguistically motivated phonetic, phonological, morphological
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic studies of language
- Statistical and probabilistic modeling of factors encouraging one
production or interpretation over its competitors
- Models of language emergence, change and evolution
- Models of language processing and surprisal
- Experimental or corpus driven modeling and analysis of language

The call seeks for original papers gathering modeling aspects with
empirical or experimental aspects. It also targets theoretical or
methodological questions that would allow us to build bridges between
the two fields.

CONTACT

Thierry Poibeau     (thierry.poibeau@ens.fr)
Shravan Vasishth    (vasishth@rz.uni-potsdam.de)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE (to be completed)

F. Alario (LPC, Univ. Aix-Marseille, France)
A. Alishahi (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
M. Amblard (LORIA, Univ. de Lorraine, France)
P. Blache (LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France)
A. Christophe (LSCP, Paris, France)
S. Colonna (SFL, Univ. Paris 8, France)
I. Dautriche (LSCP, Paris, France)
E. Dupoux (LSCP, Paris, France)
T. François (Cental, UCL, Belgium)
B. Gaume (CLLE-ERSS, Toulouse, France)
J. Ginzburg (CLILLAC, Univ. Paris 7, France)
M. Grant (McGill University, Canada)
J. Hale (Cornell University, USA)
B. Hemforth (LLF, Univ. Paris 7, Paris)
P. Logacev (Potsdam University, Germany)
F. Pellegrino (DDL, Lyon, France)
D. Reitter (Penn State University, USA)
E. Shutova (U. Berkeley, USA)
J. Thuilier (ALC, Univ. Rennes 2, France)
A. Villavicencio (UFRGS, Brazil)
T. von der Malsburg (UC San Diego, USA)
M. Zock (LIF, Marseille, France)

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues / Natural Language Processing)
is a forty year old international journal published by ATALA (French
Association for Natural Language Processing) with the support of CNRS
(National Centre for Scientific Research). It has moved to an electronic
mode of publication, with printing on demand. This affects in no way its
reviewing and selection process.

IMPORTANT DATES 

- submission of contributions:   March 31st 2015
- first notification to authors: June 15th 2015
- revised versions:              July 30th 2015
- final decision:                September 15th 2015
- final versions:                October 15th 2015
- publication:                   Winter 2015

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking
authors are requested to submit their contributions in French.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers must describe original, completed, and unpublished work. Each
submission will be reviewed by two programme committee members.

Papers must be submitted on Sciencesconf platform
     http://tal-55-3.sciencesconf.org/
To upload a paper, you will need to have an account on the
sciencesconf platform.

*** TAL has adopted double-blind review. The submitted papers should
  be anonymized. ***

Accepted papers will be maximum 25 pages long in PDF. Style sheets are
available for download on the Web site of the TAL journal
(http://www.atala.org/IMG/zip/tal-style.zip)

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Advances in Applied Acoustics

Call for papers

Indexing

Scope

Get more information by contacting aiaa@seipub.org or visiting the website.

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 Call for papers, TIPA 31 - 2015
Tipa. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage

 http://tipa.revues.org/

The impact of language contact: from structural interferences to typological convergences

Guest editor: Cyril Aslanov

              The 31st issue of TIPA will be dedicated to the study of the impact of language contact on the hard core of grammatical systems. In order to counterbalance the strictly internalist approaches to diachronic evolution, we will adopt the theoretical perspective provided by the studies on contact-induced linguistic changes.

            The contributors are requested to cast a new light on the results of language contact, either as an occasional interference at the level of social or individual speech or as a structural convergence deeply rooted in the grammatical structure. The contact-induced linguistic changes may be considered in the dynamic perspective of the diachrony of language contact or through the study of a given state of language examined synchronically as the present result of a previous contact.

            Besides the impact of language contact on the inner system of languages, it is important to involve also a sociolinguistic dimension in order to grasp the continuity or the reccursivity that unite the empirical modalities of language contacts (code-switching; code-mixing; hybridization) with considerations more centered on the study of the linguistic systems themselves, especially as far as fusion languages like Yiddish, Romani or Swahili are concerned. Indeed, the very existence of such languages is due to language contact and multilingualism.

            Lastly, the scientific debate on the impact of language contact on the systems should also take into account the individual dimension. Psycholinguists interested in interference, convergence and mimetism, specialists of individual bilingualism and didacticians dealing with Interlingua are invited to enrich this issue on the results of language contact.

The language of publication will be either English or French. Each article should contain a detailed two-page abstract in the other language, in order to make papers in French more accessible to English-speaking readers, and vice versa, thus insuring a larger audience for all the articles.

Important dates
June 30:  deadline for submission of articles
September 15: notification of acceptance
October 30:  receipt of final version
December: publication.

Submission guidelines
Please send your proposal in 3 files to: tipa@lpl-aix.fr
- one in .doc containing the title, name and affiliation of the author(s).
 - the other anonymous in .doc  and .pdf
 Instructions for authors can be found at http://www.lpl-aix.fr/index.php?id=27

-- 

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Manuscript due: June 30, 2015

Journal: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing

Description:

Adaptive systems in communications are omnipresent today. Whether we
find them in hands-free telephones, adaptive hybrids for telephony, echo
cancellers in modern ADSL lines or equalizers in radio, TV and cellular
transmission systems, they all follow certain learning rules to optimize
their behavior based on observations. While basic foundation in terms of
applied adaptive filters have been laid in the past decades , there is
still space for further improvements, for example in distributed
algorithms for adaptive systems.

This special issue is to honor Eberhard Hänsler?s achievements in
adaptive systems that made many of today?s communication equipment
possible. Submissions along the lines of adaptive systems for
communications are solicited. Authors are requested to show how the work
of Hänsler influenced their approaches.


Topics of interest include:

* Adaptive Filter Theory
* Distributed, Adaptive Algorithms for Sensor Networks
* Adaptive Filter Applications in Acoustics and Speech Communications
* Adaptive Equalizer Techniques
* Hands free telephony
* Echo cancellers
* Adaptive equalizers
* Distributed algorithms

Lead Guest Editor:

* Markus Rupp, TU Wien, Austria

Guest Editors:

* Walter Kellermann, University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
* Abdelhak Zoubir, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
* Gerhard Schmidt, Kiel University, Germany

For more information about this special issue, please visit:

http://si.eurasip.org/issues/68/advances-in-adaptive-filtering-theory-and/
_______________________________________________

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******* TIPA 31 - Deadline Extended : july 25, 2015 *******

Call for papers, TIPA 31 - 2015
Tipa. Travaux interdisciplinairessur la parole et le langage

 http://tipa.revues.org/

The impact of language contact: from structural interferences to typological convergences

Guest editor: Cyril Aslanov

              The 31st issue of TIPA will be dedicated to the study of the impact of language contact on the hard core of grammatical systems. In order to counterbalance the strictly internalist approaches to diachronic evolution, we will adopt the theoretical perspective provided by the studies on contact-induced linguistic changes.

            The contributors are requested to cast a new light on the results of language contact, either as an occasional interference at the level of social or individual speech or as a structural convergence deeply rooted in the grammatical structure. The contact-induced linguistic changes may be considered in the dynamic perspective of the diachrony of language contact or through the study of a given state of language examined synchronically as the present result of a previous contact.

            Besides the impact of language contact on the inner system of languages, it is important to involve also a sociolinguistic dimension in order to grasp the continuity or the reccursivity that unite the empirical modalities of language contacts (code-switching; code-mixing; hybridization) with considerations more centered on the study of the linguistic systems themselves, especially as far as fusion languages like Yiddish, Romani or Swahili are concerned. Indeed, the very existence of such languages is due to language contact and multilingualism.

            Lastly, the scientific debate on the impact of language contact on the systems should also take into account the individual dimension. Psycholinguists interested in interference, convergence and mimetism, specialists of individual bilingualism and didacticians dealing with Interlingua are invited to enrich this issue on the results of language contact.

The language of publication will be either English or French. Each article should contain a detailed two-page abstract in the other language, in order to make papers in French more accessible to English-speaking readers, and vice versa, thus insuring a larger audience for all the articles.

Important dates
July 25, 2015  (Extension):  deadline for submission of articles
September 15: notification of acceptance
October 30:  receipt of final version
December: publication.

Submission guidelines
Please send your proposal in 3 files to: tipa@lpl-aix.fr
- one in .doc containing the title, name and affiliation of the author(s).
 - the other anonymous in .doc  and .pdf
 Instructions for authors can be found at http://www.lpl-aix.fr/index.php?id=27

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CALL FOR PAPERS
IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems
Special Issue on Design and Applications of Neuromorphic Computing System

GUEST EDITORS:
Hai (Helen) Li, hal66@pitt.edu, University of Pittsburgh
Qinru Qiu, qiqiu@syr.edu, Syracuse University
Yu Wang, yu-wang@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn, Tsinghua University

TOPIC SUMMARY:
As artificial intelligence technology becomes pervasive in society and ubiquitous in our lives, the desire for embedded-everywhere and human-centric computational intelligence systems calls for an intelligent computation paradigm. However, the applications of machine learning and neural networks involve large, noisy, incomplete, natural data sets that do not lend themselves to convenient solutions from current systems. Neuromorphic systems that are inspired by the working mechanism of human brains possess a massively parallel architecture with closely coupled memory and computing. This special issue aims at the computing methodology and systems across multiple technology scales to accelerate the development the neuromorphic hardware systems and the adoption for machine learning applications. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Neuromorphic circuit, architectures, and systems
- Hardware-software co-design and optimization
- Computing system for neural network applications (machine vision, machine learning, sensor network, big data, signal processing & coding, pattern recognition, nature language processing, etc.)
- Software and hardware architecture for deep learning
- Bio-inspired computing model and/or hardware design

IMPORTANT DATES:
Open for submissions in ScholarOne Manuscripts: November 1, 2015
Closed for submissions: January 15, 2016
Results of first round of reviews: April 30, 2016
Submission of revised manuscripts: May 31, 2016
Results of second round of reviews: July 31, 2016
Publication materials due: August 31, 2016

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically after the ?open for submissions? date, adhering to the IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems guidelines (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tmscs/author). Please submit your papers through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tmscs-cs) and be sure to select the special issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by e-mail to the Guest Editors directly.

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Special Issue on Language and Interaction Technologies for Children
The link:
goo.gl/CFSjTR

Description:
The purpose of this special edition of CSL is to publish the results of new research in the area of speech, text and language technology applied specifically to children?s voices, texts and applications. Children are different to adults both at the acoustic and linguistic level as well as in the way that they interact with people and technology. To address these issues appropriately, it is necessary to work across many disciplines, including cognitive science, robotics, speech processing, phonetics and linguistics, health and education.

Linguistic characteristics of children's speech are widely different from those of adults. This is manifested in their interactions, their writings and their speech. The processing of queries, texts and spoken interactions therefore opens challenging research issues on how to develop effective interaction, language, pronunciation and acoustic models for reliable processing of children?s input. The behavior of children interacting with a computer or a mobile device is also different from that of adults. When using a conversational interface for example, children have a different language strategy for initiating and guiding conversational exchanges, and may adopt different linguistic registers than adults. The aim of the special edition is to provide a platform for collecting mature research in this area.

Technical Scope:
The special issue will focus on how children use text and speech in all aspects of communication, including human-human and human-computer interaction. We invite the submission of original, unpublished papers on topics including but 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
- Text Analysis: Analysis of complexity and accuracy in children?s text productions, understanding progression and development in orthography and syntax skills, use of vocabulary and registers or handwriting skills.
- Multi-modality, Robotics and Avatars: 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 Modeling: user modeling 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: training systems, educational software, gaming interfaces, medical conditions, such as autism or speech disorders, diagnostic tools and (speech) therapy

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: March 1, 2016
Target publication date: January 1, 2017

Guest Editors:
Berkling Kay, Cooperative State University, Berkling@dhbw-karlsruhe.de
Russell Martin, University of Birmingham, m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk
Evanini Keelan, ETS, kevanini@ets.org

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