People interested in speaker and language characterization have various origins: computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, speech science, phonetics, linguistics, etc.

SpLC proposes to academic researchers, industrials and forensic experts a place for exchanges.

The aims of SpLC are:

• to facilitate exchanges between members;
• to provide information on the area of speaker and language characterization;
• to promote speaker and language characterization activities;
• to provide members of ISCA interested in speaker and language characterization with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other related matters;
• to sponsor meetings and workshops in speaker and language characterization that appear to be timely and worthwhile, within the framework of ISCA's by-lhwhile, within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs;
• to provide and make available ressources relevant to speaker and language characterization, including text and speech corpora, analysis tools, analysis and generation softwares, research papers and generated data.

SpLC organizes its activities around four main areas:

• Academic research on Speaker Characterization and Recognition;
• Forensic aspects of Speaker Characterization and Recognition;
• Language Characterization and Recognition;
• Commercial Applications for Speaker and Language Recognition.

Each main activity has (or will have) its own group leader(s) and its electronic communication tools (at the beginning, one electronic mailing list). Each activity organizes the work, the meetings, etc.

In addition, several transversal activities will be proposed. For the moment, three are already defined:

• Evaluation group: this group will work on the evaluation paradigm, for all the various axes of the SpLC domain. Particularly, the group will highlight evaluation tasks for commercial applications and for speaker segmentation and speaker tracking tasks. This group will work if possible in collaboration with other evaluation projects (like NIST/NSA and AUPELF).
• Meetings and Workshops group: this group concerns the oup: this group concerns the organization of SpLC events, like workshops, meetings, summer schools, exhibitions, etc. A first workshop, following the Martigny ETRW (94) and the RLA2C (98) workshops, is being organized in 2001. (See the SpLC Events for more information.)
• Speaker segmentation group: this group will work on the novel task of speaker segmentation. The group will discuss about the possible algorithms, implement them, and compare them. The group will also investigate on the available databases for this task.

We are open to any new proposals. Please send email to: ivan@ieee.org