ISCApad number 74

July 23, 2004
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Dear ISCA members,

This is our July/August issue of ISCApad.

As usual, the regular date of issue is the first week of each month and we will try to recover synchronization bty sending a new issue early September.

Do not forget to send the information you want to display for members in time to be included (last week of each month).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. ISCA News
2. Courses, internships, data bases, softwares
3. Job openings
4. Journals and Books
5. Future Interspeech Conferences
6. Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW)
7. Forthcoming Events supported (but not organized) by ISCA
8. Future Speech Science and technology events

ISCA NEWS

-ISCA Board Election: 177 ballots were received. S.Furui, C.J.Wellekens, J.Hirshberg , H.Hermansky, H.Fujisaki, M.Wagner have been reelected. The elected candidates thank the members for their trust.

-New development on membership services :
It is now possible to apply forISCA membership and renew online. Members benefit a discounted rate for Speech Communication subscription.
The online subscription gives members access not only to the current year's Speech Communication volumes but also to the Speech Communication archive dating back to 1995.
If you are interested in subscribing either to the paper version alone or to the paper version+online access, please indicate this on the renewal form (http://www.isca-speech.org/index_VIP.html) ) and it will be billed directly by Elsevier.
Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version only: 85 EUR
Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version + online access*: 95 EUR
Institutional Member, paper version only : 600 EUR

- A full list of members (including membership numbers and subcription expiry dates) is available online at: http://www.isca-speech.org/member_list.html

-ISCApad publishes now a list of accepted papers for publication in Speech Communication. These papers can be also viewed on the website of ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) if your institution has subscribed to Speech Communication.

-ISCA Grants are available for students attending meetings. Even if no information on the grants is advertised on the conference announcement,students may apply.
For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org/grants

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COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

- German-French Summerschool on Cognitive and physical models of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction
sponsored by the German French University (DFH) Saarbrucken. 19th-24th of September 2004 in Lubmin, Germany (Baltic Sea).
Contact(see ISCApad 69)

Multi-modal corpora at BAS : SKP 2.0, SKM 1.0, SKH 1.0 The three SmartKom multi-modal corpora are now available to research and industry. The corpora contain synchronized recordings in several modalities (speech, video, gesture) of human-machine interactions primed by Wizard-of-Oz experiments conducted during the German SmartKom project (1999-2003). A high-density transliteration, three different user state labelings and a gesture labeling, turn segmentation, canonical transcript, prosodic labeling, MAUS segmentation are part of the the distribution. The language is German; total amount is 1,3 TeraByte. Details can be found in:
http://www.bas.uni-muenchen.de/Bas/BasMultiModaleng.html
Contact: Florian Schiel +49-89-2180-2758

-Information on on-going theses could be very useful for thesis supervisors, researchers as well as PhD students. A list of speech theses is available under the section HLTheses at http://www.elsnet.org

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JOB OPENINGS

(also have a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs as well as http://www.elsnet.org > Jobs)

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE AMI TRAINING PROGRAMME AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction, www.amiproject.org) is an integrated project funded by the EC Framework 6 programme from January 2004 for 3 years.
AMI is concerned with multimodal technologies to support human interaction, in the context of smart meeting rooms and remote meeting assistants. The project aims to develop new tools for understanding, searching and browsing meetings data captured from a wide range of devices, as part of an integrated multimodal group communication. AMI will thus address a range of multidisciplinary research including natural speech recognition, speaker tracking and segmentation, visual shape tracking, gesture recognition, multimodal dialogue modelling, meeting dynamics, summarisation, browsing and retrieval.
AMI supports a training programme whose objective is to provide opportunites for undergraduates, masters students, Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers to take part in AMI.
* The training programme funds internships and exchanges.
* Visits typically occupy at least 3 months for undergraduates and masters students and at least 6 months for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers.
* Funding covers travel and living expenses, but not salary. Living expenses will typically be 1250 Euro/month.
* The programme is open to all, but priority is given to researchers who are members of AMI teams, researchers who intend to visit AMI teams, researchers who can demonstrate close connections with AMI research, proposals with an industrial component,.
* A specific programme funds visits of 6 months or more to the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA.
In this case typical living expenses are 2000 Euro/Month. For Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers, visits to ICSI will typically be at least 6 months. Senior scientists are also encouraged to apply, in which case proposals for shorter visits will also be entertained.

HOSTING SITES AMI's 15 partners and associated companies and institutions (details on http://www.amiproject.org) will act as hosts for the training programme. The project is jointly managed by IDIAP (CH) and The University of Edinburgh (UK). The training programme is managed by the University of Sheffield (UK).

HOW TO APPLY
The application form can be downloaded from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~linda/AMI/training.htm.
You will need the written support of your home institution and the host institution. You will also need an academic reference.
Enquiries may be addressed to Linda Perna, AMI training programme administrator.

WHEN TO APPLY You can apply at any time but applications will be considered on a quarterly basis, with deadlines of 15th September and 15th December.
Professor Phil Green
AMI Training Manager
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court 211 Portobello St., Sheffield S1 4DP UK phone: (44) 114 22 21828 fax: (44) 114 22 21810
Contact person: Phil Green
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/P.Green/
 

Positions at the University of Edinburgh
Post1
Job Reference:3002274
Department: Informatics
Job Title: Research Associate
Job Function :Research
Job Type : Fixed Term
Live Date: 13 July 2004
Expiry Date: 2 August 2004
Salary Scale: £19,460 - £ 29,128 p.a.
Further Information http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/
Job description
A research associate is needed for JAST (Joint Action Science and Technology) which is a European Sixth Framework Integrated Project to help develop, run and analyze the experiments. Applicants should hold a PhD in experimental psychology or cognitive science or have equivalent research experience. They should have a good grasp of statistics used in psycholinguistic research. The ideal candidate will have experience with eye-tracking, the experimental study of dialogue, psycholinguistics, or the design of dialogue annotation systems. UNIX programming skills are highly desirable.
This appointment is for a fixed term of up to 4 years (47months) full-time, starting between 1 October, 2004 and 1 January, 2005.

Post 2:
Lectureship in Speech Technology
Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics / Centre for Speech Technology Research
Following the appointment of Simon King to an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship at Edinburgh, applications are invited for a fixed term Lectureship in Speech Technology in the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR). The successful applicant will be highly qualified, have expertise in spoken language processing, particularly speech recognition, speech synthesis or speech signal processing, and will demonstrate an excellent research record as well as interest and ability in teaching. He or she will be expected to develop and participate in research activities at CSTR, which is a collaborative activity of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (TAAL) and the School of Informatics.
Informal enquiries to Steve Renals, Director of CSTR, tel: +44 131 650 4589) or https://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/jobs/index.cfm?action=jobdet&jobid=3002230
The appointment is tenable from 1 January 2005 for a fixed term of five years, salary scale: £ 22,954 - £ 34,838.
Presentations and interviews will be held on 7th and 8th September 2004. Closing date for applications: 31st July 2004.

JOURNAL & BOOKS

Call for papers:
Special Issue on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems
Speech Communication http://www.research.att.com/~dtur/NAACL04-Workshop and will address related topics such as:
* Approaches to building an SLU system
* Rule-based, data-driven, or hybrid * Automatic adaptation
* Approaches to robustness in SLU system
* Handling uncertain and erroneous input
* Handling dysfluencies and language variations
* Output representation of SLU systems
* Customizable domain independent representations based on task knowledge
* Tighter integration of ASR and SLU systems
* Evaluation of SLU systems
* SLU in multilingual systems
* SLU in multimodal systems
* Question answering based SLU systems
* Machine learning algorithms for SLU
* Information retrieval and extraction for/from spoken dialogs
Guest Editors: Dr. Srinivas Bangalore, AT&T Labs - Research http://www.research.att.com/info/srini
Dr. Dilek Hakkani, AT&T Labs - Research,
Dr. Gokhan Tur,AT&T Labs - Research, http://www.research.att.com/info/gtur

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: December 1st, 2004 (early submission is encouraged)

-Papers accepted for future publication in Speech Communication
Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Click on Publications, then on Speech Communication and on Articles in press. The list of papers in press appear and a .pdf file for each paper is available.

Julia Hirschberg, Diane Litman and Marc Swerts, Prosodic and other cues to speech recognition failures,

Andrew Pargellis, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Chin-Hui Lee, Alexandros Potamianos and Augustine Tsai, Auto-induced semantic classes,

Tarun Pruthi and Carol Y. Espy-Wilson, Acoustic parameters for automatic detection of nasal manner,

Gaël Mahé, André Gilloire and Lætitia Gros, Correction of the voice timbre distortions in telephone networks: method and evaluation,

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FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

(see also http://www.isca-speech.org/conferences)

-Interspeech (ICSLP)-2004 , Jeju, KOREA, OCTOBER 5-9, 2004 (see CFP in ISCApad 71)

-Interspeech (Eurospeech)-2005, Lisbon, Portugal,September 4-8, 2005

-Interspeech (ICSLP)-2006, Pittsburg, PA, USA

Interspeech (Eurospeech)-2007, Antwerp, Belgium

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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

(see also http://www.isca-speech.org/workshops)

Publication policy: Hereunder, you will find very short announcements of future events. The full call for participation can be accessed on the conference websites
See also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops.

- COST278 Workshop on Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction
30th and 31st August 2004 University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Further details are available on http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/robust2004
>Click for Email enquiries Participation to the workshop will be restricted to around 50 people.

-Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing
October 2-3, 2004 Jeju, Korea
Extended deadline: April 21st, 2004 (see ISCApad 71)

- NOLISP'05: Non linear speech processing
April 19-22 April 2005, Barcelona, Spain
organized by Cost 277 Contact person: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy(see ISCApad 66)

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) BY ISCA

- Workshop on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Algorithms and Analysis September 13-18 2004 Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), ITALY Supported by: The Management Committee (MC) Members of COST ACTION 277: Non linear speech processing. Additional information are available on the web site: http://www.iiass.it/school2004/index.htm� 

- German-French Summerschool on "Cognitive and physical models of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction"
September 19-24, 2004,Lubmin, Germany http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/events/sommer_org/

- International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation Evaluation campaign on spoken language translation
A satellite event of Interspeech-ICSLP 2004 September 30 - October 1, 2004, Kyoto, Japan (see ISCApad 71)

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FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS

- Inter-Noise 2004
33rd International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering,
Prague, Czech Republic, 2004, August 22 - 25.
Abstract submission with the deadline January 31, 2004. (see ISCApad 68)

- EUSIPCO 2004
12th European Signal Processing Conference. September 7-10, 2004 Vienna, Austria http://www.nt.tuwien.ac.at/eusipco2004/
Chair: Prof. Wolfgang Mecklenbrauker, Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering Vienna University of Technology Gusshausstrasse 25/389 A-1040 Vienna (see ISCApad 63)

-Third International Workshop on DICTIONARY WRITING SYSTEMS (DWS 2004)
THIRD ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Brno, Czech Republic, 6-7 September 2004 http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/dws2004/

- Seventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2004)
http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/tsd2004/ (see ISCApad71) Brno, Czech Republic, 8-11 September 2004 - CLEF 2004 Workshop 16-17 september 2004 (see ISCApad 68) Evaluation campaign.

- Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference
22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt
The main organizer of the conference is the NEMLAR consortium. The local organizer is RDI Egypt. Venue: Hotel Helnan Shepheard, Cairo, Egypt Project and conference web site: http://www.nemlar.org

- 2004 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP 04)
September 29-October 1 2004 Sienna Italy
http://mmsp.unisi.it

- ACM Multimedia 2004
October 10-15, New York, NY USA
http://www.mm2004.org (see ISCApad68)

-6th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces(ICMI'04)
October 13-15, 2004 The Atherton Hotel/State College, PA, USA http://www.icmiplace.org (see ISCApad70)

-Workshop MIDL 2004, Language and dialectal variety identification by humans and machines
organised by the MIDL consortium of the Modelling for the Identification of Languages project supported by the interdisciplinary STIC-SHS program of CNRS.
Partners are LIMSI-CNRS, ILPGA/LPP Paris3, TELECOM PARIS (ENST) and DGA, with the support of AFCP.
Place and date: Paris, 29-30 November 2004
http://www.limsi.fr/MIDL

Tenth Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology
Macquarie University, Sydney, 8th-10th December, 2004
For details: http://www.assta.org/sst/2004
100ans at icp.inpg.fr

-ICASSP 2005
Philadelphia, PA, USA, March 19-23, 2005
http://www.icassp2005.com

-NODALIDA 2005
the 15th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics
Joensuu, Finland, May 20-21, 2005
1000 word abstract before January 31,2005 to be mailed to nodalida2005
Registration before March 31,2005
Contact: Stefan Werner

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