ISCApad number 80

February 10th, 2005

This year seems to be quite productive. You will discover plenty of speech activities, courses, calls for papers, conferences in this eightieth ISCApad. In the following I remind some impotant informations concerning ISCA life..

From 2005, ISCApad is simultaneously accessible on our website and sent to the members as an attached HTML file.

A revised membership scheme with differential fee levels has been implemented from 1 January 2005. See details below or on our Website.

Members whose membership expired in December 2004 (see membership list ) have been contacted by email. Please do not forget to renew, either online or by sending a renewal form to the ISCA Secretariat.

Almost all previous publications by ISCA (ICSLP,Eurospeech,ITRW,...) are accessible on our and the password has been sent to ISCA members. If you have Website. Access to full papers is retricted not received the password or if you do not remember it, contact me .

In order to enlarge the number of reviewers for our conference paper evaluation, we ask all members experienced in a given area who are willing to act as reviewers, to fill a form on our Website (details below).

Do not forget to send the information you want to display for members in time to be included in IscaPad (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

-Revised Membership fees
Memberwship fees have been revised to in order to further broaden membership in speech research communities worldwide, and in order to ensure that fee level is not a barrier to ISCA membership. Details can be found on our Website.

- 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 papers
accepted for publication in Speech Communication (under heading Journals,...). 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

top

COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

CROSS-LANGUAGE EVALUATION FORUM CLEF 2005
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The CLEF series of system evaluation campaigns aims at promoting research into the design and development of user-friendly, multilingual, multimodal retrieval systems.
Registration opens for CLEF 2005 on 31 January.
The objective of CLEF 2005 will be to test different aspects of mono- and cross-language information retrieval system performance. There will be eight tracks this year:
1. Multilingual Document Retrieval on News Collections (Ad-Hoc)
2. Mono- and Cross-Language Information Retrieval on Structured Scientific Data (Domain-Specific)
3. Interactive Cross-Language Information Retrieval (iCLEF)
4. Multiple Language Question Answering (QAatCLEF)
5. Cross-language Retrieval in Image Collections (ImageCLEF)
6. Cross-Language Spoken Document Retrieval (CL-SR)
7. Multilingual Web Track (WebCLEF)
8. Cross-Language Geographical Retrieval (GeoCLEF)
Important dates:
Data Release - from 15 February 2005
Topic Release - from 15 March 2005
Submission of Runs by Participants - from 15 May 2005
Release of relevance assessments and individual results - from 15 July 2005
Submission of paper for Working Notes - 15 August 2005
Workshop - 21-23 September (in conjunction with ECDL 2005)
Test collections
The CLEF 2005 multilingual corpora include:
- news documents in 12 European languages
- social science databases in German and Russian
- historical photographs and medical image collections with text and/or annotations in English, French and German
- spontaneous conversational speech
- multilingual collection of web documents from European governmental sites
For full details on the CLEF Agenda and Task Description for 2005 and instructions on How to Participate, see the conference website For further information, contact:
Carol Peters - ISTI-CNR
Tel: +39 050 315 2987
Fax: +39 050 315 2810

SUMMER SCHOOL: VARIATION IN SPEECH PRODUCTION AND SPEECH PERCEPTION
On August 10-15, 2005, the Nordic Network on Variation in Speech Production and Speech Perception (VISPP) will organize an international summer school on speech variation in Palmse, Estonia.
Course list:

Fiona Gibbon (Queen Margaret University College, UK): Speech production and pathologies: normal and disordered EPG data

Valerie Hazan (University College London, UK): Issues of individual variability in speech production and/or perception in various populations (L1 and L2 speakers, children with dyslexia, children with hearing impairment)

Anne-Marie Öster (KTH, Sweden): Pronunciation training in relation to variation in phonological capabilities for prelingually hearing-impaired children and L2 speakers using several computer-based systems

Martin Russell (University of Birmingham, UK): Engineering approaches to modelling variability in speech signals

YOUNG RESEARCHERS' ROUNDTABLE ON SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEMS
an ISCA event in conjunction with
INTERSPEECH/EUROSPEECH 2005
9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology
Lisbon, Portugal
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
Website
Contact
Workshop Overview

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems will bring together students, post docs, and junior researchers from different countries, different research institutions, and different disciplines who share an interest in applied dialog systems research. It will provide a setting in which participants can discuss their own research and work and obtain feedback from others who are at a similar level and who are working on similar problems. It will also provide a forum for discussing recent papers and talks with an eye toward (1) solving the problems participants currently face in their work and (2) identifying issues that are likely to be important in the coming years. Perhaps most importantly, the event will help to create a more permanent international network of young researchers working in spoken dialog systems.

This workshop will be a full-day event consisting of multiple small-group discussions of topics that will be chosen based on suggestions submitted by the participants themselves.

After the small-group discussions, each of the groups will present a summary to the rest of the participants. We hope that the discussion format will foster creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialog systems research, setting the stage for the colocated conferences SIGdial and INTERSPEECH.

We invite participation from students, post docs, and junior researchers who are currently working in applied spoken dialog systems research. We also invite participation from those who are working in related fields such as human factors, speech recognition, artificial intelligence, or speech synthesis, as applied to spoken dialog systems. Potential participants should submit a 2-page paper following the template provided at www.cs.cmu.edu/~dod/roundtable/cfp.html. The paper will include a statement of research interests, an overview of past, current and future work, a discussion of what you consider to be the most compelling issues in spoken dialog systems, and a short biographical sketch. Accepted papers will be collated and distributed to participants in CD-ROM and/or paper format. We also plan to publish the position papers and presentations from the workshop on the web, subject to sponsor or publisher constraints.

-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

top

JOB OPENINGS

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

GERMAN FEDERAL FORENSIC SCIENCE LAB (Kriminaltechnisches Institut im Bundeskriminalamt) : speaker identification and audio analysis

We are looking for a specialist in speech signal processing to work in the department of speaker identification and audio analysis at the German federal forensic science laboratory (Kriminaltechnisches Institut im Bundeskriminalamt). Duties are to plan and carry out research and development projects and to team-work on expert witness reports in speaker identification and tape analysis. The duration of the contract is for 1 year (but it is not ruled out that it turns into a permanent position).

Required qualifications or expertise:
a. MSc, MA etc. in electrical engineering, computer science, computational linguistics/phonetics, or related;
b. in-depth knowledge of/experience in digital speech signal processing/analysis (e.g. LPC, cepstrum, f0-tracking, filters), in language and speech database structures, and in statistics (e.g. Bayes);
c. some knowledge/experience in automatic speaker- or speech recognition;
d. preferably, knowledge in phonetics or experience working in a phonetics lab;
e. competence in German and English;
f. unimpaired hearing.
The position is located at the Bundeskriminalamt, Department of Speaker Identification and Audio Analysis, in Wiesbaden, Germany
Closing date for applications is February 21, 2005.
Please send your application to Bundeskriminalamt, Referat ZV 11-3 Personalgewinnung, 65173 Wiesbaden, Germany.
Original job ad (written in German) at the BKA website (go to "Ausbildung und Stellen", then "Aktuelle Stellenangebote").
Dr. Michael Jessen
Bundeskriminalamt
Sprecher-Erkennung und Tonträgeranalyse, KT54
D-65173 Wiesbaden
Tel: ++49-611-55-18044
Fax: ++49-611-55-18091

Research positions in SPEECH SYNTHESIS and AUDIO PROCESSING at the VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT -BRUSSELS

The Laboratory for Speech and Audio Processing of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels is looking for two junior researchers for its text-to-speech research as well as a senior researcher and a research engineer for its audio R&D.

The successful candidates will work in a young and dynamic research team in a stimulating environment on the university campus.

The junior researchers will work on a new approach for the development = of speech synthesis engines in the context of the inter-university research project SPACE . If successful, this research can earn them the PhD degree.

Requirements:
University degree in a relevant subject
Good English and communication skills
Knowledge of Digital Signal Processing
Preferred: Electrical Engineer, Master in Computer Science, or related discipline, Knowledge of Advanced Signal Processing and Speech Technology

The senior researcher and the research engineer will work on several projects in audio coding, audio analysis and related topics in the context of the Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology .

Requirements:
University degree in a relevant subject
Strong background in at least one field of audio processing
Good English and communication skills

Preferences senior researcher:
PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline
Experience of supervising technical work of others
Background in more than one field of Digital Audio Processing
Background in Audio Coding and/or Audio Analysis

Preferences research engineer:
Good software skills using Matlab, C and/or C++, Windows
Knowledge of Speech Technology

Applicants should send a CV and a covering letter to Werner Verhelst.Questions or requests for further details can be sent to the same email address.

Prof. Werner Verhelst, Laboratory for Speech and Audio Processing,
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, department Electronics and Informatics ETRO-DSSP,
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

Research positions for experienced scholars in the Research Group on MATHEMATICAL LINGUISTICS at ROVIRA i VERGILI UNIVERSITY (Tarragona, Spain).
Eligible topics
The eligible topics are the group's current or future research directions:
- Formal language theory and its applications.
- Bioinformatics.
- Biomolecular computing and nanotechnology.
- Language and speech technologies.
- Formal theories of language acquisition.
- Computational neuroscience.
Other related fields might still be eligible provided there exist strong enough candidates for them.
Job profile
- The positions are intended to develop a training + research project in two phases starting in the academic year 2005-2006 : 1st phase) 1-2 years staying in an organization in a third country (i.e. neither in any of the 25 European Union member states nor in any of the 4 European Union candidate states); 2nd phase) half of that time approximately staying in the host institute.
- They will be filled in under the form of a work contract with the host institute.
- There is no restriction on the candidate's age.
- Only experienced (top-class) researchers have a real chance to succeed.
Eligibility conditions
- PhD holder.
- National of either any of the 25 European Union member states or of any of the 4 European Union candidate states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Turkey).
Economic conditions
- The size of the projects will approximately vary between euros 120,000 and 240,000, including all the concepts: researcher's salary, travel support, health insurance, etc.
- The particular conditions for each contract will be the matter of an agreement by the researcher and the host institute within the format suggested by the funding agency. This will be done before the researcher's departure to the third country organization.
Evaluation procedure
It will consist of 3 successive stages:
- a pre-selection based on CV and carried out by the host institute,
- a short proposal, to be evaluated by the funding agency,
- a full proposal, to be evaluated by the funding agency.
Schedule
Expressions of interest are welcome until January 11, 2005. They should include the researcher's full CV and mention "track B" in the subject box. The outcome of the preselection will be reported immediately after. For the preselected candidates, the deadline for the submission of the short proposal will be January 19, 2005. Directions, advice and support will be given to them by the host institute.
Contact
Carlos Martin-Vide
Web site of the group
or host institute

-Postdocs at DEUTSCHE TELEKOM LABORATORIES, Berlin Deutsche Telekom, in collaboration with the Technical University of Berlin, is setting up a new corporate research and development center under the name of "Deutsche Telekom Laboratories". Several postdoc positions are open each in the broad areas of Human Interface, Multimedia, Security, and Networking ( please refer to http://www.deutsche-telekom-laboratories. de ). Outstanding applicants will be invited to interview and speak at one of three symposia which we will hold in Berlin in January, April and June 2005.

POSTDOC or RESEARCH ENGINEER POSITION at Institut Eurecom-Sophia Antipolis-France
Department: Multimedia Communications
Eurecom (http://www.eurecom.fr ) is an international teaching and research institute , founded in 1991 as a joint initiative by Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST- Paris). It welcomes students from several engineering schools and universities ENST Paris, ENST Brittany, INT Evry, EPFL, ETHZ (Zurich), Helsinki University of Technology, Politecnico di Torino...They receive an education in Communications Systems (Networking, Multimedia, Security, Mobile Communications, Web services...) Professors, lecturers and PhD students conduct research in these domains. Speech processing is under the responsibility of Professor Chris Wellekens in the Dpt Multimedia Communications.
Spoken languages at the Institute are French end English for the lectures. English is the usual language for research exchanges. Speech research involves speaker identification using speaker clustering or eigenvoices, phonemic variabilities of lexicons, optimal feature extraction, Bayesian networks and variational techniques, navigation in audio databases (segmentation in speakers, wordspotting,...).
Job description: Post-doc or Research engineer
The European project DIVINES, a STREP/6th FP has been accepted by the Commission and will start in January 2004. Eight labs and companies are partners: Multitel (B), Eurecom (F), France Telecom R/D (F), University of Oldenburg (D), Babeltechnologies (B), Loquendo (I), Politecnico di Torino (I), LIA (F). A collaboration with Mac Gill University (Montreal) has also be negotiated. The aim of the project is to analyse the reasons why recognizers are unable to reach the human recognition rates even in the case of lack of semantic content. All weaknesses will be analyzed at the level of feature extraction, phone and lexical models. Focus will be put on intrinsic variabilities of speech in quiet and noisy environment as well as in read and spontaneous speech. The analysis will not be restricted to tests on several databases with different features and models but will go into the detailed behavior of the algorithms and models. Suggestions of new solutions will arise and be experimented. The duration of the project is for 3 years.
The Speech group is looking for a Post-doc or research engineer who acquired a hands-on practice of speech processing. He/she must have an excellent practice of signal and speech analysis as well as a good knowledge of optimal classification using Bayesian criteria. He/she must be open-minded to original solutions proposed after a rigorous analysis of the low level phenomena in speech processing. Fluency in english is mandatory (write, understand and speak). He/she should be able to represent Eurecom at the periodical meetings. Ability to work in a small team is also required.
Application.
-send a detailed resume (give details on your activity since your PhD graduation)
-send a copy of your thesis report (either as a a printed document or as a CDROM) DO NOT attach your thesis in an e-mail!)
-send a copy of your diploma)
-send the names and email addresses of two referees.)
-send the list of your publications (you must have several))
to Professor Chris J. Wellekens, Dpt of Multimedia Communications, 2229 route des Cretes, BP 193, F-06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France.
Additional informations
Contact Professor Chris Wellekens (http://www.eurecom.fr/~welleken )

JOURNALS and BOOKS

Call for Papers for a
Special issue of Speech Communication Journal on ROBUSTNESS ISSUES IN CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION
Following the ISCA Tutorial and COST 278 Research Workshop (ITRW) on Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction (Robust2004) held at the University of East Anglia (Norwich) in August 2004 a special edition of the Speech Communication Journal is planned along the same theme of robustness. This special edition will focus on methods of developing robustness against effects that are known to degrade the performance of components within conversational interaction systems. Degradation can arise from many different sources (acoustic noise, packet loss, speaker variability, etc) and compensation against these may come from a variety of different techniques; from signal processing, model adaptation, confidence measures, dialogue strategies and inclusion of additional modalities. In particular the special edition will focus on the following areas:
*Robustness against environmental noise
-Model adaptation
-Feature extraction
-Filtering and transformations
-Enhancement
*Robustness against unreliable transmission channels
-Distributed approaches to ASR
-Channel protection
-Error concealment – reconstruction or adaptation
*Robust conversational system design
-Utterance verification
-Confidence measures
-Error handling
-Dialogue strategies
-User modelling and adaptation
*Non-speech modalities to improve robustness
-Multi-modal interaction
-Modality fusion and synchronisation
-Non-speech audio
-Non-acoustic features
*Robustness to speaker variability
-Spontaneous speech
-Dialects and non-native speakers
-Speaker adaptation
Submission of papers is open to both participants of Robust2004 (through submission of an extended workshop paper) and non-participants alike.
Guest Editors

Dr. Ben Milner, University of East Anglia, UK
Prof. Borge Lindberg, Aalborg University, Denmark
Prof. Christian Wellekens, EURECOM, France

Important Dates
Submission deadline 30th April 2005 (extended deadline)

Submission Procedure:
Electronic submission http://ees.elsevier.com/specom. During submission authors must select the Section as "Special Issue Paper", not "Regular Paper", and the title of the special issue should be referenced in the "Comments" page along with any other information.

Special Issue of Signal Processing (Elsevier) on MULTIMODAL HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACES
Closely linked with the actions of the Network of Excellence on Multimodal Interfaces SIMILAR (www.similar.cc) we are seeking for original manuscripts for a Special Issue of Signal Processing scheduled to appear in January 2006.
Multimodal Interfaces represent an emerging interdisciplinary research direction, involving speech and language, vision, gesture, haptics and other senses.

The topics of interest are (but not limited to):
· Multimodal-multisensor input and output interfaces
· Multimodal interface design and evaluation
· Architecture, Tools and System Infrastructure for multimodal interfaces
· Fusion techniques
· Processing of speech, language and action patterns
· Gaze, gesture and vision-based interfaces
· Speech & conversational interfaces
· Musical interfaces
· Haptics interfaces
· Adaptive multimodal interfaces
· Multimodal interfaces for Mobile, Wearable, Tangible, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality systems
· Applications of multimodal interfaces

Papers for this special issue will be chosen from the submissions whether they are unpublished results or those previously included in conference publications. The submissions that are revised or extended versions of previous conference publications should contain at least 30% new material. Copies of any previous published work affiliated with the new submission must also be included as supportive documentation upon submission.

For omplete submission guidelines at: authors.elsevier.com The paper submission should be by e-mail, in PDF format, to multimodal@imag.fr
Prospective authors are invited to announce as early as possible the tentative title and the list of authors to the following address: multimodal@imag.fr

For any questions
Thierry Dutoit - Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium
Laurence Nigay - University Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1, France,
Michael Schnaider - Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung e.V. , Germany,

Important dates:
Special Issue Submission Deadline: May 31, 2005
Notification of Final Acceptance: September 30, 2005
Complete Publication Materials Due: November 30, 2005
Publication: January 2006

-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 is displayed and a .pdf file for each paper is available.

F. Torres, L.F. Hurtado, F. García, E. Sanchis and E. Segarra, Error handling in a stochastic dialog system through confidence measures, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2005, )

Janienke Sturm and Lou Boves, Effective error recovery strategies for multimodal form-filling applications, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Slim Ouni, Michael M. Cohen and Dominic W. Massaro, Training Baldi to be multilingual: A case study for an Arabic Badr, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Gabriel Skantze, Exploring human error recovery strategies: Implications for spoken dialogue systems, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Katsuhito Sudoh and Mikio Nakano, Post-dialogue confidence scoring for unsupervised statistical language model training, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Plamen Prodanov and Andrzej Drygajlo, Bayesian networks based multi-modality fusion for error handling in human-robot dialogues under noisy conditions, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Laurent Karsenty and Valérie Botherel, Transparency strategies to help users handle system errors, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Michael McTear, Ian O'Neill, Philip Hanna and Xingkun Liu, Handling errors and determining confirmation strategies--An object-based approach, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 February 2005,

Jean-Luc Schwartz, Christian Abry, Louis-Jean Boë, Lucie Ménard and Nathalie Vallée, Asymmetries in vowel perception, in the context of the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 24 January 2005,

Panikos Heracleous and Tohru Shimizu, A novel approach for modeling non-keyword intervals in a keyword spotter exploiting acoustic similarities of languages, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 19 January 2005,

Jason J. Sroka and Louis D. Braida, Human and machine consonant recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 13 January 2005,

Rolf Carlson, Julia Hirschberg and Marc Swerts, Error handling in spoken dialogue systems, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 23 December 2004,

Julie Baca and Joseph Picone, Effects of displayless navigational interfaces on user prosodics, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 December 2004,

I. Bulyko, K. Kirchhoff, M. Ostendorf and J. Goldberg, Error-correction detection and response generation in a spoken dialogue system, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 December 2004,

Pashiera Barkhuysen, Emiel Krahmer and Marc Swerts, Problem detection in human-machine interactions based on facial expressions of users, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 10 December 2004.

top

FUTURE CONFERENCES

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 (www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops.

FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

INTERSPEECH 2005 / EUROSPEECH
September 4--8, 2005
Lisbon, Portugal
www.interspeech2005.org
info@interspeech2005.org
Theme: Ubiquitous Speech Processing
CALL FOR PAPERS/TUTORIALS/SPECIAL SESSIONS
Topics of interest:
Phonetics and Phonology
Discourse and Dialogue
Prosody
Paralinguistic and Nonlinguistic Information
Speech Production
Speech Perception
Physiology and Pathology
Spoken Language Acquisition, Development and Learning
Signal Analysis, Processing and Feature Estimation
Single- and Multi-channel Speech Enhancement
Speech Coding and Transmission
Spoken Language Generation and Synthesis
Speech Recognition: Acoustic processing for ASR, language and pronunciation modeling, adaptation and general robustness issues, engineering issues in ASR (e.g. searches, large vocabulary), etc.
Spoken Language Understanding
Speaker Characterization and Recognition
Language/Dialect Identification
Multi-modal/Multi-media Processing
Spoken Language Resources and Annotation
Spoken/Multi-modal Dialogue Systems
Spoken Language Extraction/Retrieval
Spoken Language Translation
Spoken Language Technology for the Aged and Disabled (e-inclusion)
Spoken Language Technology for Education (e-learning)
New Applications
Evaluation and Standardization
Ubiquitous Speech Processing
Others
Paper submission
Full paper submission (4 pages) by April 8, 2005 exclusively via the conference website.
No previously published papers should be submitted.
Notification of acceptance by June 10, 2005.
Minor updates allowed during June 10 - June 17.
Proposals for Tutorials and Special Sessions
Proposals (one-page description) for pre-conference tutorials to be held on September 4, 2005 should bde sent to tutorials@interspeech2005.org by January 14, 2005.
INTERSPEECH'2005 also welcomes proposals for special sessions (normally 6 invited papers). The topics of the special sessions should be important, new, emerging areas of interest to the speech processing community, yet have little overlap with the regular sessions. They could also be interdisciplinary topics that encourage cross -fertilization of fields or topics investigated by members of other societies that are becoming of keen interest to the speech and language community. Special session papers follow the same submission format as regular papers. Send proposals to special_sessions@interspeech2005.org by January 14, 2005.
Important dates:
Proposals for Tutorials and Special Sessions due by: January 14, 2005
Full paper submission deadline: April 8, 2005
Notification of paper acceptance/rejection June 10, 2005
Early registration deadline: June 25, 2005
Organizer:
L2F - Spoken Language Systems Laboratory, INESC ID Lisboa
Rua Alves Redol, 9 - 1000-029 Lisbon - Portugal
Phone:+351 213100268 Fax: +351 213145843 http://www.l2f.inesc-id.pt

-INTERSPEECH (ICSLP)-2006, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Chair: Richard M.Stern, Carnegie Mellon University,USA http://www.interspeech2006.org

-INTERSPEECH (EUROSPEECH)-2007, Antwerp, Belgium , August 27-31,2007
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves, K.U.Nijmegen Website

top

FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

- NOLISP'05: Non linear speech processing
April 19-22 April 2005, Barcelona, Spain
organized by Cost 277
http://www.nolisp2005.org
Contact person: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy(see ISCApad 66)

-ISCA Workshop on PLASTICITY in SPEECH PERCEPTION (PSP 2005)
Organized by: UCL Centre for Human Communication, UCL, London, UK
co-sponsored by the Acoustical Society of America and ISCA
Senate House (heart of London)
15-17 June 2005, London, UK
This 3-day workshop will bring togehter researchers who examine changes in speech perception during infancy and adulthood, from clinical and non-clinical perspectives and will also include selected speakers who study plasticity in other domains and modalities.
Invited speakers:
Anne Cutler, Max Planck Institute, Netherlands
James Flege, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Patricia Kuhl, University of Washington, USA
David Moore, MRC Institute of Hearing Research, UK
Christophe Pallier, Inserm Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, France
David Pisoni, Indiana University, USA
Franck Ramus, CNRS Cognitive and Psycholinguistic Sciences Laboratory, France
Stuart Rosen, UCL, UK
Jenny Saffran, University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA
Glenn Schellenberg, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada
Sophie Scott, UCL, UK
Submission
Submit abstracts (max 400 words in English)electronically on our website
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission 1 Feb 2005
Notification of acceptance, intructions to authors 28 Feb 2005
Deadline of early registration: 1 April 2005
Deadline forf final papers (optional): 1 May 2005
Workshop dates 15-17 June 2005
Contact: Valerie Hazan

-6th SIGdial Workshop on DISCOURSE and DIALOGUE
Lisbon, Portugal, 2-3 September 2005
(held in conjunction with Eurospeech/Interspeech 2005)
http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/ workshop6/
Topics of interest:
1. Dialogue Systems
Spoken, multi-modal, and text/web based dialogue systems
2. Corpora, Coding Schemes and Tools
Corpus-based work on discourse and spoken, text-based and multi-modal dialogue including its support.
3. Pragmatic and/or Semantic Modelling
The pragmatics and/or semantics of discourse and dialogue (i.e. beyond a single sentence).
Submission of papers and abstracts
Long papers (10 pages max) for full plenary presentation as well as short papers (5 pages max) and demonstrations.
Deadline: April 25,2005 at workshop6@sigdial.org
Style files are available at http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop6/ style/

Workshop website
Sigdial website
Eurospeech website

-DISFLUENCY IN SPONTANEOUS SPEECH 2005
Aix-en-Provence, France, September 10-12,2005
organised by the DELIC team of the University of Provence.
The meeting is timed to allow participants at INTERSPEECH (Lisbon, September 4-8) to attend. Previous meetings (Berkeley, 1999; Edinburgh, 2001; Gothenburg, 2003) have seen papers addressing normal disfluency from a wide range of disciplines, from automatic speech recognition and computational linguistics to linguistic analysis, psycholinguistics (production and comprehension), and beyond. Papers comparing normal disfluencies to those occurring in communication disorders are also welcome. 4-page papers by April 8 2005 to papers@disfluency.org
Once accepted, papers may be revised and extended to 6 pages.
Website
Additional infos diss05@disfluency.org
The DiSS Planning team
Jean Veronis, DELIC, Université de Provence, France.
Robert Eklund, Teliasonera, Sweden.
Robin Lickley, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh, UK.
Liz Shriberg, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, USA.
Åsa Wengelin, Lund University, Sweden.

-ITRW 2005 Workshop on DSP for IN-VEHICLE and MOBILE SYSTEMS
Saturday, September 3, 2005 at Hotel do Mar, Sesimbra, Portugal
(Satelite event of Interspeech 2005)
Organized by The International Alliance for Advanced Studies on In-Car Human Behavioral Signals in cooperation with the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
This biennial is sponsored in part by: National Science Foundation (USA), 21st Century Center of Excellence at Nagoya University (Japan) and International Speech Communication Association
The topics include but not limited to:
· DSP technologies for personalization of vehicle
· DSP technologies in vehicle and traffic control
· DSP technologies in fatigue and DUI detection
· Audio & video processing in mobile & cellular applications
· Multi-sensor applications and fusion
· Deployment of multimedia devices in vehicles
· Human interface in mobile environment
· Applications
Submission:
Prospective authors are invited to submit a photo-ready paper electronically (normally four pages, but up to six pages can be permitted with prior approval.)
Important dates:
Brief Summary of the paper and a letter of intent to participate is due on March 20, 2005
Notification of acceptance mailed out by April 20, 2005
Full paper submission to be received by June 20, 2005
Advance registration before August 1, 2005
Workshop Date September 3, 2005
Chairs
Honorary Chair: Fumitada Itakura, Meijo University, Japan.
Co-Chair: Hüseyin Abut, SDSU. Huseyin Abut
Co-Chair: Kazuya Takeda, Nagoya Uni., Japan. Kazuya Takeda
Program Chair: John Hansen, Univ. Colorado John Hansen
Website

top

FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA

-The Second Baltic Conference on HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES
Tallinn, Estonia, April 4 - 5, 2005
and
Tutorials Day:April 6, 2005
ioc.ee/hlt2005/
Organised in co-operation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology and the Institute of the Estonian Language.
Aims and Scope
The main aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the sharing of new ideas and recent advances in human language processing and promote interdisciplinary co-operation between the research communities of computer science and linguistics from the Baltic countries and the rest of the world.
The Tutorials Day provides seven presentations on different topics in written and spoken language processing given by well-known scholars.
Topics
Original contributions dealing with both theory and/or applications of human language processing are invited. Contributions on HLT policy, programs and supported activities in Baltic countries and EU are also welcome.
The conference topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- HLT in Baltic countries - overview, policy, opportunities
- co-operation in HLT in the Baltic Sea area and in the EU
- speech analysis and synthesis
- speech and speaker recognition
- written and spoken language resources and standards
- machine translation
- discourse and dialogue
- information retrieval systems
- multi-modal dialogue systems
- language technology for education, learning and rehabilitation
- new applications of HLT-systems including Internet and mobile devices
Submission
An abstract (150-400 words) should be submitted electronically via submission form available on http://ioc.ee/hlt2005/
or sent by January 17, 2005 to hlt2005@phon.ioc.ee
Acceptance notification will be by February 1, 2005.

Full papers in English (not exceeding four pages) should be submitted electronically before February 28, 2005.
Registration
Only electronic registration on the conference web-site http://ioc.ee/hlt2005/ is available.
Important dates
Submission of abstracts: January 17, 2005
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2005
Final paper submission: February 28, 2005
Early registration deadline: March 4, 2005
Regular registration deadline: March 30, 2005
Conference: April 4-5, 2005
Tutorials Day: April 6, 2005
Contact address
Einar Meister, Ph.D.
Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology
Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn Technical University
Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn Estonia
www.ioc.ee/hlt2005
hlt2005@phon.ioc.ee
phone: +372 620 4200 fax:+372 620 4151

-Pan European Voice Conference (PEVOC 6) http://www.pevoc6.com/home.htm
August 31 - September 3, 2005, London, UK

-SPECOM 2005
10th International Conference on Speech and Computer
October 17-19 2005, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

Topics
Topics of interest for paper submission include but are not limited to:
a.. Speech production and perception
b.. Speech analysis and processing
c.. Natural language processing
d.. Speech coding and transmission
e.. Speech recognition and understanding
f.. Speech synthesis
g.. Spoken dialog systems
h.. Speaker recognition
i.. Multi-modal processing
j.. Speech and language resources
k.. Applied systems for Human-Computer Interaction

Submission of papers
Four page papers in english will be accepted only by electronic submission through e-mail in ASCII format

Important dates
Submission of full paper: June 27, 2005
Notification of acceptance: July 18, 2005
Early registration: July 29, 2005
Late registration: September 10, 2005

General Chair
George Kokkinakis, WCL, University of Patras, Greece
For further information:www.wcl.ee.upatras.gr/ SPECOM2005 or e-mail to our secretary

-4th International Workshop on
Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications
MAVEBA 2005
Firenze, 29-31 October 2005
Claudia Manfredi
http://maveba.det.unifi.it

top

FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS

-Conference on A CENTURY OF EXPERIMENTAL PHONETICS: Its History and Development from Theodore Rosset to John Ohala
Universite Stendhal, Grenoble, France on February 24-25, 2005.
Conference room Jacques Cartier, Maison des Langues et de la Culture.
Contributions of 20 minutes or posters are welcome
Send a 200 word abstract at 100ans at icp.inpg.fr

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

-2nd LANGUAGE and TECHNOLOGY Conference:
Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics
April 21-23, April 2005, Poznan, Poland
Conference website

-DEAF and HEARING IMPAIRED CHILDREN Europe 2005
London 13-14 May 2005
Promoting joined-up working for Europe’s professionals with deaf children and their families.
The meeting is designed to bring together the wide range of professionals and voluntary organisations throughout Europe with an interest in childhood hearing impairment. There is a growing awareness of the need to work collaboratively across organisations and professional boundaries and with the users themselves if the goal of delivering high quality hearing services to all of Europe’s children who need them is to be achieved. This meeting will provide exciting opportunities to explore these challenges. It will also raise the profile of hearing impairment and an awareness of the needs of our children across Europe.
The meeting will be held under the auspices of NDCS (National Deaf Children’s Society) and RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People) and will be organised by The Ear Foundation. The meeting will be held in central London on 13/14 May 2005..
Registration form and further details from:
Brian Archbold
http://www.dhice.org

-NODALIDA 2005
the 15th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics
Joensuu, Finland, May 20-21, 2005
ling.joensuu.fi/nodalida2005/
1000 word abstract before January 31,2005 (extended deadline) to be mailed to nodalida2005
Registration before March 31,2005
Contact: Stefan Werner In connection with NODALIDA, the following events will be organized on May 18-19 (and possibly May 22):
* Seminar of the NorFA Language Technology research program, May 18-19
* Special Session on Treebanks for Spoken Language and Discourse, organized by the Nordic Treebank Network, May 19 (please visit our website)
* Workshop on reference (to be confirmed)

47th International Symposium ELMAR-2005 focused on MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS and APPLICATIONS
08-10 June 2005
Zadar, Croatia
Conference website
Submission deadline: February 11, 2005
The aim of the symposium is to promote the interface of researchers involved in the development, design and application of methods and techniques within the framework of multimedia systems and technologies, multimedia applications, image and video processing, digital video broadcasting (DVB), navigation systems, marine electronics, etc.

Mini-exhibition facilities will be available for companies wishing to display their products, services, hardware & software and literature relating to the symposium topics. The companies wishing to participate in the exhibition are kindly requested to contact Asst.Prof. Mislav Grgic.

Fourth International Workshop on
CONTENT-BASED MULTIMEDIA INDEXING (CBMI 2005)
June 21-23, 2005
Conference website
Reval Hotel Latvija, Riga, Latvia
Selected papers will appear (after extension and peer-review) in a Special Issue of the journal Multimedia Tools and Applications.
Topics of interest for submissions include, but are not limited to:
* Multimedia indexing and retrieval (image, audio, video, text)
* Multimedia content extraction
* Matching and similarity search
* Construction of high level indices
* Multi-modal and cross-modal indexing
* Representation models
* Content-based search techniques
* Multimedia data mining
* Presentation tools
* Meta-data compression and transformation
* Handling of very large scale multimedia database
* Organisation, summarisation and browsing of multimedia documents
* Applications
Paper Submission
Submit full papers of not more than eight (8) pages including results, figures and references. Papers will be accepted only by electronic submission through the . conference web site. Style files (Latex and Word) are provided for the convenience of the authors.
Important dates
Submission of full paper (to be received by): February 18, 2005
Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2005
Submission of camera-ready papers: April 29, 2005

The 5th EURASIP conference focused on SPEECH and IMAGE PROCESSING, MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS and SERVICES
EC-SIP-M 2005
June 29 - July 2, 2005
Smolenice, Slovak Republic

Important deadlines
Full paper proposals February 28, 2005
Notification of acceptance April 16, 2005
Camera ready papers April 30, 2005

SLU 2005
AAAI Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding
Held in conjunction with The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence - AAAI 2005
July 9 or 10, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Call for Papers
Accepted papers
Workshop Program
Instructions for Authors
Program Committee
Workshop Topics
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
* Approaches to building an SLU
* rule-based, data-driven, or hybrid
* automatic adaptation across domains
* Approaches to robustness in SLU
* Handling uncertain and erroneous input
* Handling dysfluencies and language variations
* Tighter integration of Speech Recognition and SLU
* Exploiting weighted packed representation of hypotheses
* Exploiting prosodic and emotional cues from speech
* Approaches to semantic representations provided by SLU
* Combining shallow and deep representations
* Representations permitting robust inference mechanisms
* Tools and Data Resources
* Issues and metrics for evaluation of SLU
* SLU in the context of Applications
* multilingual systems
* multimodal systems
* tutoring systems
* speech mining systems
* spoken dialog systems
Paper Submission
All submissions must be sent by e-mail, with the subject line "AAAI-05 SLU Workshop paper submission". Please use the AAAI prescribed formatting instructions. Papers must be 5 to 8 pages long, including all references and figures. All papers must be submitted in either PDF (preferred) or postscript format. If any special fonts are used, they must be included in the submission. The papers must be original, and have not been published. Note that reviewing will NOT be blind, the paper submissions may include the authors' names and affiliations. Important Dates
* April 20, 2005: Deadline for electronic submission
* May 11, 2005: Notification of acceptance or rejection
* May 18, 2005: Submission of camera-ready papers
Workshop Co-Chairs
* Srinivas Bangalore , AT&T Labs-Research, NJ, USA. e-mail: e-mail.
* Dilek Hakkani-Tur , AT&T Labs-Research, NJ, USA. e-mail.
* Gokhan Tur , AT&T Labs - Research, NJ, USA. e-mail.

-Eighth International Symposium
on SIGNAL PROCESSING and its APPLICATIONS, (ISSPA 2005),
22-25 August 2005, Sydney, AUSTRALIA, University of Wollongong

Topics
1. Digital Filter Design & Structures
2. Signal Processing for Communications
3. Multirate Filtering & Wavelets
4. Image and Video Coding
5. Adaptive Signal Processing
6. Image Enhancement and Restoration
7. Time-Frequency/Time-Scale Analysis
8. Biomedical Signal and Image Processing
9. Security Signal Processing & Digital Watermarking
10. Neural Networks & Pattern Recognition
11. Statistical Signal & Array Processing
12. Blind Source Separation
13. Radar & Sonar Processing
14. Signal Processing Education
15. Speech Processing & Recognition
16. Multimedia Signal Processing
17. Image & Multidimensional Signal Processing
18. Image Sequence Analysis & Processing
19. Machine Learning
20. Photonic & Optical Signal Processing
21. VLSI for Signal and Image Processing
22. Other Signal Processing Applications

Schedule
Full paper submission: March 15, 2005
Tutorial & special session proposals: March 15, 2005
Notification of acceptance: May 16, 2005
Camera ready paper: June 10, 2005

conference website

-Forum Acusticum 2005
29 August- 2 September 2005
Eotvos Lorand University of Sciences, Budapest
www.fa2005.org

-European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design (ECCTD)
University College Cork, Ireland
29 August - 1 September, 2005
"Innovation through Understanding"

Topics
*Circuits
*Signals
*Systems
*Mathematical Methods
*Computational Methods
*Industrial Applications

Authors are invited to submit a Full 4-page Paper according to posted guidelines. Only electronic submissions will be accepted via the Web at: http://ecctd05.ucc.ie

-EUSIPCO-2005
The 13th European Conference on Signal Processing
Antalya, Turkey, September 4-8, 2005
Conference website
The main conference themes are:
- Statistical Signal Processing
- Sensor Array and Multichannel Processing
- Biosignal Processing
- Signal Processing for Communications
- Speech Processing
- Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing
- Multimedia Signal Processing
- Nonlinear Signal Processing
- Audio and Electroacoustics
- DSP Implementations and Embedded Systems
- Rapid Prototyping and Tools for DSP Design
- Industrial Applications of Signal Processing
- Signal Processing Education
- Emerging Technologies in Signal Processing
Invited lectures and plenary talks are now announced on the website

-10th MACHINE TRANSLATION SUMMIT
September 12-16, 2005
The Hilton Phuket Arcadia Resort and Spa
Phuket, Thailand
Conference Schedule

12 September 2005 Tutorials
13-15 September 2005 Papers, panels and exhibitions
16 September 2005 Workshops

- MT for the Web
- Practical MT systems (MT for professionals, MT for multilingual eCommerce, MT for localization, etc.)
- Translation aids (translation memory, terminology databases, etc.)
- Translation environments (workflow, support tools, conversion tools for lexica etc.)
- Methodologies for MT
- Human factors in MT and user interfaces
- Speech and dialogue translation
- Natural language analysis and generation techniques geared towards MT
- Dictionaries and lexicons for MT systems
- Text and speech corpora for MT and knowledge extraction from corpora
- MT evaluation techniques and evaluation results
- Standards in text and lexicon encoding for MT
- Cross-lingual information retrieval
- MT and related technologies (information retrieval, text categorization, text summarization, information extraction, etc.)

Call for Exhibitions
Kunio Matsui by April 15, 2005.

Call for Panel / Special Session / Invited Speaker Proposals
Program Chair by January 31, 2005.

Call for Tutorial and Workshop Proposals
We would like proposals for workshops and tutorials that are to be co-located with MT Summit X. We will provide the required facilities. If you are willing to take an initiative in organizing satellite events, please submit a brief description of the events to Eiichiro Sumita by December 15, 2004.

Important Dates
15 Dec. 2004 Proposals for tutorials and workshops
31 Jan. 2005 Proposals for panels etc.
Notification for tutorials and workshops
15 Apr. 2005 Paper submission deadline
Exhibition registration deadline
31 May 2005 Paper acceptance notifications
29 Jul. 2005 Final camera-ready copy deadline

- ISPA 2005
4th Int'l Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis
Zagreb, Croatia, September 15-17, 2005
Conference website

Topics of interest
A. Image and Video Processing
B. Image and Video Analysis
C. Image Formation and Reproduction
D. Signal Processing
E. Signal Analysis
F. Applications

Important dates
Electronic submission of full paper: February 1, 2005
Notification of acceptance/rejection: April 15, 2005
Submission of camera-ready papers and registration: May 15, 2005

HLT/EMNLP-05
Human Language Technology Conference/Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Oct. 6-8, 2005
Website
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: June 3, 2005
Notification of acceptance: July 29, 2005
Submission of camera-ready papers: August 12, 2005

The 2nd International Joint Conference on NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (IJCNLP-05)
October 11-13, 2005, Jeju Island, Korea
organized by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing .
+++Submission deadline: Friday 15th April 2005 +++
Scope
IJCNLP-05 invites the submission of original papers in all areas of natural language processing, including, but not limited to:
- the lexicon, phonology and morphology
- word segmentation
- part-of-speech tagging
- syntax and parsing
- semantics and pragmatics
- discourse and dialogue processing
- machine translation and multilingual processing
- question answering
- information extraction and text mining
- text summarisation
- natural language generation
- natural language applications, tools and resources
- linguistic, psychological and mathematical models of language

In addition to the above, we are particularly keen to include within the scope of the conference work in speech technology and information retrieval.

CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference on SMART OBJECTS & AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE
sOc-EUSAI-2005
October 12-14, 2005, Grenoble - France
Conference website

The Smart Objects and Ambient Intelligence conference will explore tools and techniques for augmenting environments with smart, networked, interacting objects.

-2005 IEEE Workshop on
Applications of SIGNAL PROCESSING to AUDIO and ACOUSTICS
Mohonk Mountain House
New Paltz, New York
October 16-19, 2005
www.LNT.de/~WASPAA05/
Infos
Topics of interest
Acoustic Scenes
- Scene Analysis: Source Localization, Source Separation, Room Acoustics
- Signal Enhancement: Echo Cancellation, Dereverberation, Noise Reduction, Restoration
- Multichannel Signal Processing for Audio Acquisition and Reproduction
- Virtual Acoustics via Loudspeakers or Headphones
Audio Coding
- Waveform Coding and Parameter Coding
- Spatial Audio Coding
- Internet Audio
- Musical Signal Analysis: Segmentation, Classification, Transcription
- Digital Rights
- Mobile Devices
Hearing and Perception
- Auditory Perception, Spatial Hearing, Quality Assessment
- Hearing Aids
Music
- Signal Analysis and Synthesis Tools
- Creation of Musical Sounds: Waveforms, Instrument Models, Singing
Important dates
Submission of four-page paper: April 15, 2005
Notification of acceptance: June 27, 2005
Early registration until: September 1, 2005
General Chair:
Walter Kellermann
Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Professor Walter Kellermann

-IEEE ASRU 2005
Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop
Cancun, Mexico
November 27 - December 1, 2005
http://www.asru2005.org
Papers in all areas of human language technology are encouraged to be submitted, with emphasis placed on automatic speech recognition and understanding technology, speech to text systems, spoken dialog systems, multilingual language processing, robustness in ASR, spoken document retrieval, and speech-to-speech translation.
Paper submission:
Submit full-length, 4-6 page papers, including figures and references, to www.asru2005.org
Special sessions:
Special session proposals should be submitted by June 15 ,2005, to asru05-tc@lists.csail.mit.edu and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a description of how the session will be organized.
Tentative dates:
May 1, 2005 Workshop registration opens
July 1, 2005 Camera-ready paper submission deadline
August 15, 2005 Paper Acceptance / Rejection notices mailed
Sept. 15, 2005 Revised Papers Due and Author Registration Deadline
Oct. 1, 2005 Hotel Reservation and Workshop Registration
Nov. 27 - Dec.1, 2005 Workshop

top