ISCApad number 99

September 11th, 2006

MESSAGE from : Lin Shan Lee, Board Member in charge of International Affairs.
Dear ISCA Members,
In this month it is my turn to explain to you my area of responsibilities on the ISCA Board, the International Affairs. Starting Autumn 2005 ISCA Board has initiated new efforts to promote the international activities. An International Affairs Committee has been organized. The purpose of this committee is to extend the services of ISCA to different parts of the world, especially those regions where many speech researchers may not be able to attend Interspeech conferences and participate in the many speech research activities easily. Currently the work of the International Affairs Committee is focused on four regions where the speech researchers are under-represented in most ISCA programs, and the first step is to have a sub-committee for each of these regions to make region-specific efforts. These sub-committees are:
(a) Sub-committee on Eastern Europe
(b) Sub-committee on West Asia and North Africa
(c) Sub-committee on South Asia
(d) Sub-committee on Sub-Saharan Africa.
Examples of actions which may be taken by the Committee include: disseminating information about research activities in the regions to the global research community via ISCA channels, distributing ISCA services information to the researchers in the regions, co-sponsoring events held in the regions, recommending students or young researchers in the regions to apply for grants to attend events sponsored by ISCA, establishing Regional Branches or Special Interest Groups of ISCA in the regions, arranging Distinguished Lecturers Tours to give lectures in the regions, etc.. More details about these plans can be found at the ISCA website .
Another important program I am working on is the Distinguished Lecturers Program, which is highly related to International Affairs. This program is to send Distinguished Lecturers to travel to different parts of the world to give lectures to promote research activities. The current plan is to select no more than 3 Distinguished Lecturers by the end of 2006, and to realize the first Distinguished Lecturer Tour in 2007. More details of this program can also be found at the ISCA website . An announcement is also included in this issue of ISCApad.
I look forward to seeing many of you in Interspeech in Pittsburgh soon.
Sincerely
Lin-shan Lee
National Taiwan University
ISCA Board Member

Editorial

Dear Members,
This month, Lin Shan Lee who is responsible for our international activities reveals the great expectations of ISCA for better helping speech scientists and laboratories in wider and wider world areas. His message appears at the top of this issue.
Also you will find below a call for bids for Interspeech 2010.
I remind you of two important and permanent requests:
First, SIG leaders are urged to submit brief activity reports to ISCApad.
Second, if you are aware of new books devoted to speech science and/or technology, please draw my attention to them, so that I can advertise these books in ISCApad.
See you in Pittsburgh

Christian Wellekens

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

ISCA NEWS


ISCA General Assembly - INVITATION
Tuesday, September 19, at 18:30 at room Allegheny II.
INTERSPEECH 2006 -- ICSLP
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
All INTERSPEECH 2006 -- ICSLP delegates are ISCA members and are warmly invited to attend the General Assembly.
Agenda :
1. Opening remarks and approval of the Minutes of the 2005 General Assembly (Lisbon)
2. President's report
3. Treasurer's report
4. Approval of the reports
5. Announcement of 2007 General Assembly at INTERSPEECH 2007 -- Eurospeech Antwerp, Belgium
6. Any Other Business

ISCA DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS PROGRAM
Announcement and Call for Nominations
PURPOSE and PLAN
ISCA has just started a new Distinguished Lecturers Program to send Distinguished Lecturers to travel to different parts of the world to give lectures to help promote research activities on speech science and technologies. No more than 3 Distinguished Lecturers will be selected by the end of 2006, with 2-year terms of 2007-2008. The first Distinguished Lecturer Tour is planned for the first half of 2007.

NOMINATIONS and SELECTION
A Distinguished Lecturers Committee has been organized. The members of the Committee for the year 2006 are: Sadaoki Furui (chair), Louis Pols, Renato DeMori, Nelson Morgan, and Lin-shan Lee (secretary). Nominations of candidates are called. Each nomination should include information (short biography, selected publications, website, etc. plus topics/titles of up to 3 possible lectures) of no more than 2 pages to be sent to the Committee Chair ). Only those who receive the highest votes by the Committee, exceeding a minimum threshold of 2/3, are selected. Nominations for this year should be received before the deadline of Nov 15 2006.

COMMITMENTS of the LECTURERS
The candidates selected by the Committee will be contacted and asked for the commitment of making time available for Lecture Tours, including the possibility of traveling to some regions specially identified as under-represented in ISCA programs (China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South and West Asia, Africa). Those who agree are announced as ISCA Distinguished Lecturers.

DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS TOURS
Distinguished Lecturers Tours are arranged by ISCA upon invitation only. The local hosts should be responsible for making and funding the local arrangements including accommodation and meals, and ISCA will pay travel costs. A Distinguished Lecturer Tour is realizable when at least three locations are included, and at least two lectures will be given at each location.

MORE DETAILS
More details of this Program can be found at ISCA website
.

Call for Bids for Interspeech 2010
Organization of INTERSPEECH 2010
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Individuals or organizations interested in organizing: INTERSPEECH 2010 should submit by 15 December 2006 a brief preliminary proposal, including:
* The name and position of the proposed general chair and other principal organizers.
* The proposed period in September/October 2010 when the conference would be held
* The institution assuming financial responsibility for the conference and any other cooperating institutions
* The city and conference center proposed (with information on that center's capacity)
* Information on transportation and housing for conference participants
* Likely support from local bodies (e.g. governmental) The commercial conference organizer (if any)
* A preliminary budget
Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur in the same continent in two consecutive years. (IS2009 will be held in Brighton, UK.) Guidelines for the preparation of the proposal are available on our website. Additional information can be provided by Isabel Trancoso.
Those who plan to put in a bid are asked to inform ISCA of their intentions as soon as possible. They should also consider attending Interspeech 2006 in Pittsburgh to discuss their bids, if possible.
Proposals should be submitted by email to the above address. Candidates fulfilling basic requirements will be asked to submit a detailed proposal by 28 February 2007.

From ISCA Student activity committee (SAC)
Sign-up for the Student Panel Discussion at Interspeech
ISCA Student Advisory Committee will be organizing a panel discussion - "How to get your dream job? What are they looking for?" - during Interspeech 2006 conference. It will take place at the conference hotel on Sunday evening, September 17 from 18:30 to 20:00. To get more information and sign-up for this event, please visit ISCA Student Section website. In the sign-up form, you will be able to post questions that you would like to see being addressed during this panel discussion.
Panelist will be research group managers from companies, and they will answer students' questions regarding career planning and job/internship applications. This is a great oppurtunity to learn about what big research companies are looking for during their hiring process, and how you can improve yourself during your graduate study to get ready for your dream job.
Panelists: Mazin Gilbert (AT&T), Michiel Bacchiani (Google), Michael Picheny (IBM), Fil Alleva (Microsoft), Jeff Adams (Nuance), Elizabeth Schriberg (SRI)
Date: September 17, 2006 - Sunday (same day as the tutorials)
Time: 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Place: Allegheny Room at the conference hotel
Organizer: ISCA Student Advisory Committee
Sponsor: ISCA (International Speech Communication Association)

Do you want to become a board member in ISCA Student Advisory Committee?
ISCA-SAC is looking for new motivated members (PhD students early in their degrees are preferred). There are available positions on ISCA-SAC board. If you want to volunteer for ISCA and contribute to ISCA-SAC efforts (to get an idea please visit our website), get into contact with us by sending email to . There are exciting projects that current board members and volunteering students are working on. Join us!
Murat Akbacak
ISCA-SAC President
PhD Student, University of Colorado at Boulder
Research Intern, University of Texas at Dallas
ISCA student branch

ISCA GRANTS
are available for students and young scientists attending meetings.
For more information: http://www.isca-speech.org/grants

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SIG's activities


A list of Speech Interest Groups can be found on our web.

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COURSES, INTERNSHIPS


AVIOS Speech Application Development Contest
Demonstrate your creativity and programming skills by entering the AVIOS Speech Application Development Contest organized by the Applied Voice Input Output Society. Develop a speech application using either = VoiceXML or "X+V" by December 15 and win cash prizes of up to $2000 per student team plus world-wide recognition on the AVIOS web site and other public announcements.
More details

2nd INTERNATIONAL PhD SCHOOL IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES 2006-2008
Rovira i Virgili University,br> Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Tarragona Spain
Programme, registration conditions can be found on the Website

Studentships available for 2006/7 at the Department of Computer Science
The University of Sheffield - UK
One-Year MSc in HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY
The Sheffield MSc in Human Language Technology has been carefully tailored to meet the demand for graduates with the highly-specialised multi-disciplinary skills that are required in HLT, both as practitioners in the development of HLT applications and as researchers into the advanced capabilities required for next-generation HLT systems. The course provides a balanced programme of instruction across a range of relevant disciplines including speech technology, natural language processing and dialogue systems.
The programme is taught in a research-led environment. This means that you will study the most advanced theories and techniques in the field, and also have the opportunity to use state- of-the-art software tools. You will also have opportunities to engage in research-level activity through in-depth exploration of chosen topics and through your dissertation.
Graduates from this course are highly valued in industry, commerce and academia. The programme is also an excellent introduction to the substantial research opportunities for doctoral-level study in HLT.
A number of studentships are available, on a competitive basis, to suitably qualified applicants. These awards pay a stipend in addition to the course fees.
See further details of the course
Information on how to apply

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BOOKS, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

Speech Recognition Over Digital Channels
Authors: Antonio M. Peinado and Jose C. Segura
Publisher: Wiley, July 2006
Website

Multilingual Speech Processing
Editors: Tanja Schultz & Katrin Kirchhoff ,
Elsevier Academic Press, April 2006
Website

Reconnaissance automatique de la parole: Du signal a l'interpretation
Authors: Jean-Paul Haton
Christophe Cerisara
Dominique Fohr
Yves Laprie
Kamel Smaili
392 Pages
Publisher: Dunod

CFP Special Issue on Multimodal Audiovisual Content Abstraction
International Journal of Image and Video Processing
The accurate management of large volumes of digital multimodal audiovisual content calls for a proper mapping of this content onto representation spaces with a high-level degree of interpretation. This operation referred to as content abstraction may be supervised, unsupervised, automatic, or semiautomatic. Content abstraction here is considered in the large sense and includes (semi-)automatic annotation, content (e.g., keyframe) selection, or summarization. Typical problems are fusion of heterogeneous streams, learning (structured) semantics from low-level features, interrelating document content parts, and extracting salient multimodal content. Tools used in this context arise from signal processing, machine learning, data mining, and knowledge engineering.
Specifically, this special issue will gather high-quality original contributions on all aspects of audiovisual content abstraction. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
* “Key” feature extraction/characterization (frames, transitions, shots, story, etc.)
* Summarization of video content
* Similarity measures for video content
* Video content processing for indexing
* Multistream processing/fusion
* Interactive video content characterization
* Mosaicing for content representation
Authors should follow the IJIVP manuscript format described on the website. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscripts through the IJIVP manuscript tracking system , according to the following timetable:
Manuscript Due October 1, 2006
Acceptance Notification February 1, 2007
Final Manuscript Due April 1, 2007
Publication Date 2nd Quarter, 2007
Guest Editors:
Stéphane Marchand-Maillet, Viper Group, Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Geneva, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
Bernard Mérialdo, Department of Multimedia Communications, Institut Eurécom, 06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Marcel Worring, Intelligent Sensory Information Systems, Computer Science Institute, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Milind R. Naphade, Pervasive Media Management Group, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, White Plain, NY 10604, USA

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JOB OPENINGS

We invite all laboratories and industrial companies which have job offers to send them to the ISCApad editor: they will appear in the newsletter and on our website for free. (also have a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs.html as well as http://www.elsnet.org/ Jobs)

PhD position in Speech Recognition at ESAT/PSI, Leuven, Belgium

The ESAT/PSI speech group has a vacancy for a junior research working towards a PhD degree in the framework of the TELEX project.
The TELEX project aims at improving our hybrid and template based speech recognition system.
The major research topics are intrinsic improvements in the template based system by long span modeling and distance metrics. We will also aim at introducing pronunciation variation modeling into the template based framework.
This research will be performed in close collaboration with the Computer Science Department (CW/Nines) and the university of Gent. There will also be intense collaboration with the Marie Curie network Sound to Sense.
More information on the project may be found at our website
Candidates ideally have a university degree in engineering or computer science. Candidates with a general science degree and excellent programming skills may apply as well.
Knowledge of or experience in the following areas form an asset:
- speech recognition and speech modelling
- C/C++ programming
- statistical parameter estimation
The position is available as of 01 Jan 2007 though an earlier starting date is possible as well.
Interested applicants should send their CV to Prof. Dirk Van Compernolle
.

PhD position in Template Based Speech Recognition at ESAT/PSI, Leuven,Belgium.

The ESAT/PSI speech group has a vacancy for a junior research working towards a PhD degree in the framework of the TELEX project (TELEX: combining acoustic TEmplate with LEXical modeling). The TELEX project aims at improving our hybrid and template based speech recognition system. The major research topics are intrinsic improvements in the template based system by long span modeling and better distance metrics. We will also aim at introducing pronunciation variation modeling into the template based framework.
This research will be performed in close collaboration with the Computer Science Department (CW/Nines) of the K.U.Leuven and the university of Gent. There will also be intense collaboration with the Marie Curie network Sound to Sense. More information on the project may be found at our website
Candidates ideally have a university degree in engineering or computer science. Candidates with a general science degree and excellent programming skills may apply as well. Knowledge of or experience in the following areas form an asset:
- speech recognition and speech modelling
- C/C++ programming
- statistical parameter estimation
The position is available as of 01 Jan 2007 though an earlier starting date is possible as well.
Interested applicants should send their CV to Prof. Dirk Van Compernolle
.

Research positions (PhDs, Postdocs) in spoken language processing at INESC ID, Lisbon Portugal

The Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) of INESC ID currently has several open positions for PhD students and postdocs in spoken language processing, covering the following topics:
- audio events detection
- voice morphing
- spontaneous speech recognition
- recognition of different varieties of Portuguese
- use of GRID computing for NLP
Most of these research activities take place in the framework of national projects (e.g. "Rich Transcription of Lectures for E-Learning Applications", "Natural Language Engineering on a Computational GRID") and/or European projects ("Education through Characters with Emotional Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social Interaction", "Audiovisual Search Engines") or bilateral cooperation programs.
Applicants are expected to have several years experience in the above areas, with good and practical knowledge of C/C++/Java.
Interested candidates should send a letter of motivation until October 1st, along with their detailed CV and names of 3 references by email For more information, please contact Isabel Trancoso at the same address or visit the website.

Positions available at Acapela Group, Mons, Belgium

R&D engineer TTS
R&D engineer ASR
Computational linguist TTS
Details can be found on our website

Position Available: SRI International Speech Technology and Research Laboratory

The Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory at SRI International seeks a self-motivated, team-oriented researcher in machine translation. Highly qualified postdoctoral fellows may also apply.
The STAR Laboratory is engaged in leading-edge research in speech recognition, automatic spoken language translation, speaker recognition and verification, human-machine interfaces, and other areas of speech/language technology, and offers opportunities for basic research as well as prototyping and collaborative productization. For further details about the SRI STAR Lab please see our Website.
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work on multiple government-funded research projects and to collaborate with other researchers at SRI and partner institutions. S/he will work on high-performance, deployable machine translation systems for multiple language pairs with varying levels of resources. A PhD with machine translation background is desired. The candidate must have strong engineering capability, with skills in C/C++ and scripting languages in a Unix/Linux environment. Strong oral and written communication skills are expected. Experience in previous NIST MT evaluations and knowledge of speech recognition are highly desirable.
Candidates must be able to work both independently and cooperatively across multiple projects with dynamically forming teams. Characteristics of STAR staff are enthusiasm, self-motivation, initiative, and passion for learning. Please apply via Internet

Open positions at the Adaptive Multimodal Interface Research Lab at University of Trento (Italy)

Areas
Automatic Speech Recognition (PhD Research Fellowship)
Natural Language Processing (PhD Research Fellowship)
Machine Learning (PhD Research Fellowship/Senior Researcher)
HCI/User Interface (Junior Researcher)
Multimodal/Spoken Dialog (Senior Researcher)
The Adaptive Multimodal Interface research lab pursues excellence research in next-generation interfaces for human-machine and human-human communication. The research positions will be funded by the prestigious Marie Curie Excellence grant awarded by the European Commission for cutting edge and interdisciplinary research.
The candidates for PhD research fellowships should have background in speech, natural language processing or machine learning. The successful applicants should have EE or CS degree with strong academic records. The students will be part of an interdisciplinary research team working on speech recognition, language understanding, spoken dialog, machine learning and adaptive user interfaces.
Deadline for application submission is July 11, 2006.
The candidates for the junior/senior researcher positions should have a PhD degree either in computer science, cognitive science or related disciplines. They will have an established international research track record in their field of expertise and leadership skills. Deadline for application submission is November 1, 2006.
The applicants should be fluent in English. The Italian language competence is optional and applicants are encouraged to acquire this skill on the job. The applicants should have good programming skills in most of the following C++/Java/JavaScript/Perl/Python. University of Trento is an equal opportunity employer. Interested applicants should send their CV along with their statement of research interest and three reference letters to: Prof. Ing. Giuseppe Riccardi
The University of Trento is constantly ranked as premiere Italian graduate university institution (see ). DIT Department
-DIT has a strong focus on interdisciplinarity with professors from different faculties of the University (Physical Science, Electrical Engineering, Economics, Social Science, Cognitive Science, Computer Science) with international background.
-DIT aims at exploiting the complementary experiences present in the various research areas in order to develop innovative methods and technologies, applications and advanced services. -English is the official language.

Nuance (Burlington MA)_ #1365 Software Engineer (Burlington MA)

Overview
Nuance Communications, Inc, a worldwide leader in speech and imaging solutions, has an opening for a senior software engineer to maintain and improve acoustic model training and testing toolkits in the Dragon R&D department.
The candidate will join a group of talented speech scientists and research engineers to advance acoustic modeling techniques for Dragon dictation solutions and other Nuance speech recognition products. We are looking for a self-motivated, goal-driven individual who has strong programming and software architecture skills.
Responsibilities
• Maintain and improve acoustic modeling toolkit
o Improve efficiency, flexibility and, when appropriate, architecture of training algorithms
o Improve resource utilization of the toolkit in a large grid computing environment
o Implement new training algorithms in cooperation with speech scientists
o Handle toolkit bug reports and feature requests
o Clean up legacy codes, improve code quality and maintainability
o Perform regression tests and release toolkits
o Improve toolkit documentation
• Improve the software implementation of our research testing framework
• Update acoustic modeling and testing toolkits to work with new versions of speech recognizer
Qualifications
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or electrical engineering
• Strong programming skill using C/C++ and scripting languages Perl/Python in UNIX environment
• Significant experience in creating and maintaining a software toolkit. This includes version control, bug reporting, testing, and releasing code to a user community.
• Ability to work with a large existing code base
• Good software design and architecture skill
• Attention to detail: ability and interest in getting lots of details right on a work task
• Desire and ability to be a team player
? Experience with building acoustic models for speech recognition
? Experience with CVS
? Experience coming up to speed on a large existing code base in a short period of time
? Knowledge of speech recognition algorithms, including model training algorithms
Preference will give to candidates who have experience in maintaining a speech recognition toolkit. Previous experience in computer administration and grid software management is a plus.
Please apply on-line

Sr. Research Scientist at Nuance

Nuance, a worldwide leader in imaging, speech and language solutions, has an opening for a research scientist in speech recognition. The candidate will work on improving recognition performance of speech recognition engine and its main application in Nuance's award-winning dictation products. Dragon NaturallySpeaking® is our market-leading desktop dictation product. The recently released version 8 showed substantial accuracy improvements over previous versions. DragonMT is our new medical transcription server, which brings the benefit of ScanSoft’s dictation technology to the problem of machine assisted medical transcription. We are looking for an individual who wants to solve difficult speech recognition problems, and help get those solutions into our products, so that our customers can work more effectively. Responsibilities
Main responsibilities of the candidate will include:
provide experimental and theoretical analysis of speech recognition problems
formulate new algorithms, create research tools, design and carry out experiments to verify new algorithms
work with other members in the team to improve the performance of our products and add new product features to meet business requirements
work with other team members to deliver acoustic models for products
work with development engineers to insure a high quality implementation of algorithms and models in company products
follow developments in speech recognition to keep our research work state-of-the-art patent new algorithms and write scientific papers when appropriate
Qualifications
Requirements: Ph.D. or Master degree in computer science or electrical engineering good analytical and diagnostic skills
experience with C/C++, scripting using Perl, Python and csh in UNIX environment ability to work with a large existing code base
desire and ability to be a team player
strong desire and demonstrated ability to work on and solve engineering problems.
Preference will give to candidates who have strong speech recognition background. Previous envolvement in DARPA EARS project is a plus. New graduates with good GPA from top universities are encouraged to apply.
The position will be located in our new headquarters in Burlington, MA, which is approximated 15 miles west of Boston. Information about Scansoft and its products. can be found in .
Please apply on-line

Research Engineer - Natural Language Understanding- Nuance

Overview
Nuance, a worldwide leader in imaging, speech and language solutions, has an opening for a research engineer in natural language understanding. Core Technology group in NetASR at Nuance builds the technology behind telephone speech applications. The focus is on call routing and other forms of statistical semantics. We currently automate 7 billion phone calls a year and have been moving fairly aggressively towards more open grammars using a combination of SLM for recognition followed by statistical call routing. This is used both for call center types of applications as well as directory assistance, where there may be millions of destinations with limited training data. The Nuance NLU Group is doing exciting research and product development in C/C++ and we are looking for top talent to join our team.
Responsibilities
The candidate will work in the Network NL group, which develops technology, tools and runtime software to enable our customers to build speech applications using natural language. Some of the current problems include Generating language models for new applications with little application-specific training data. Statistical semantics, e.g. training classifiers for call routing. Robust parsing and other techniques to extract richer semantics than a routing destination.
Responsibilities:
The candidate will work on the full product cycle: speak with professional service engineers or customers to identify NL needs and help with solutions, develop new algorithms, conduct experiments, and write product quality software to deliver these new algorithms in the product release cycle.
Qualifications
Strong software skills. C++ required. Perl/python desirable. Needed both for research code and for product quality, unit-tested code that we ship. Advanced degree in computer science or related field. Experience in natural language processing, especially call routing, language modeling and related areas. Ability to take initiative, but also follow a plan and work well in a group environment. A strong desire to make things “really work” in practice.
Please apply on-line

Principal Engineer - Clinical Language Understanding

Overview
Nuance, a worldwide leader in imaging, speech and language solutions, has an opening for a research engineer in clinical language understanding.
The Clinical Language Understanding group at Nuance is a multi-disciplinary team developing a cutting-edge medical fact extraction engine in Java. Important facts about medications, problems, and procedures are identified in clinical reports, classified, and normalized to standard medical vocabularies.
Responsibilities
The person will be responsible for contributing to the on-going engineering of the Medical Fact Extraction engine. The person will research methods and technologies for improving engine functionality, as well as improving accuracy, performance, and reliability. They will have good software architecture/design skills, to balance API requirements for both research and deployment configurations. They will design, code and test new functionality, and will analyze existing code to extend, optimize and refactor it. The person will also help maintain and enhance systems used for corpus management, document annotation, machine learning algorithm development, and accuracy and performance measurement. They will also work closely with colleagues in Research and in Development.
Qualifications
* Bachelor in computer science or equivalent -- advanced degree preferred.
* Minimum 5 years of experience in software development, preferably in the areas of information extraction and retrieval, knowledge management, document management, or natural language processing.
* Excellent software design, development and diagnostic skills, preferably in Java.
* Excellent scripting and prototyping skills, preferably in Perl.
* Excellent knowledge and understanding of XML, XSLT, and related technologies.
* Significant experience with relational databases.
* Demonstrated ability and desire to learn new technologies rapidly.
* Ability to work well in a multi-disciplinary team.
* Good written and verbal communication skills.
In addition, the applicant must have several of the following:
* Experience in designing and implementing complex commercial applications.
* Experience with computational linguistic research and development, especially as applied to Information Extraction and Retrieval.
* Experience with ontologies and controlled medical vocabularies (e.g. SNOMED).
* Familiarity with clinical documentation standards and medical terminology.
* Experience with applying machine learning approaches
* Experience in conducting computational and/or technical research is a plus.
* Experience developing user interfaces is a plus.
* Experience with Eclipse and Perforce is a plus.
* Experience with Tomcat, Web services, Servlets is a plus.
* Knowledge of Windows and UNIX is a plus.
Please apply on-line

Computational Linguist, Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Boston area

Location: Boston area (Position AXG-1005)
The Computational Linguist will work with the company's technical team to develop and integrate linguistic resources and applications for the company's TTS engine.
Areas of Competence
* Computational Linguistics
* Semantics
* Linguistics
* Speech corpus
* Text corpus
Primary Duties
* Produce and maintain speech corpus, audio data, transcripts and phonetic dictionary, data annotation, and component/model configuration management
* Verify existing corpus
* Developing utilities, lexicons, and other language resources for company's unique TTS
* Adapt text language parsing and analysis software for new TTS needs
Required skills/experience
* Thorough grounding in phonology, phonetics, lexicography, orthography, semantics, morphology, syntax, and other branches of linguistics
* Experience with language parsing and analysis software, such as part-of-speech (POS) and syntactic taggers, semantics, and discourse analysis
* Experience with formant or concatenated based speech synthesis
* Experience working on medium-scale, multi-developer software projects
* Experience with development of speech corpus, transcripts, data annotation, and phonetic dictionary
* Programming experience in C/C++/Matlab/Perl
* Self-motivation and ability to work independently
* Familiarity with concepts and techniques from DSP theory, machine learning and statistical modeling is a plus
Must have a Master/PhD. in Engineering, Computer Science or Linguistics with development or research experience in speech synthesis/recognition/technology.
Direct your confidential response to:
Arnold L. Garlick III
President
Pacific Search Consultants
(949) 366-9000 Ext. 2#
Please refer to Position AXG-1005
Website

Doctoral (PhD) Positions in the field of Content-based Multimedia Information Retrieval and Management Department of Computer Science - Faculty of Sciences - University of Geneva - Switzerland

Context:
The Viper group , part of the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory , has a long research experience in Content-based Multimedia Information Retrieval (image, video, text, ...). Its activities have led amongst other results to the development of interactive demo systems for content-based video ( Vicode ) and image ( GIFT) retrieval and multimedia management. We wish to continue these activities.
Description of posts:
Several doctoral positions are open in relation with international and national project funds awarded on the basis of our research activities in the broad field of content-based multimedia information search, retrieval and management. The research performed will form direct contributions in our current and upcoming projects, including ViCode and the Collection Guide (see our main website for details).
The successful applicants should show knowledge and interest in one or many of the following domains:
* Data mining, statistical data analysis
* Statistical learning
* Signal, image, audio processing
* Knowledge engineering
* Indexing, Databases
* Operation research
Starting date: No later than September 2006.
Salary: 48'000CHF per annum (1st year)
Supervision: Dr. S. Marchand-Maillet and Dr. E. Bruno
Application: Applications by email are welcome to:
Dr. Eric Bruno
Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory
Department of Computer Science, University of Geneva
24, rue du General Dufour, CH-1211 Geneva 4
SWITZERLAND
e-mail. This announce (with more info).

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JOURNALS

Papers accepted for FUTURE PUBLICATION in Speech Communication

Full text available on http://www.sciencedirect.com/ for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing in stitutions. Free access for all to the titles and abstracts of all volumes and even by clicking on Articles in press and then Selected papers..

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

FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

INTERSPEECH 2006-ICSLP
INTERSPEECH 2006 - ICSLP, the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of speech science and language technology, will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 17-21, 2006, under the sponsorship of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
The INTERSPEECH meetings are considered to be the top international conference in speech and language technology, with more than 1000 attendees from universities, industry, and government agencies. They are unique in that they bring together faculty and students from universities with researchers and developers from government and industry to discuss the latest research advances, technological innovations, and products. The conference offers the prospect of meeting the future leaders of our field, exchanging ideas, and exploring opportunities for collaboration, employment, and sales through keynote talks, tutorials, technical sessions, exhibits, and poster sessions. In recent years the INTERSPEECH meetings have taken place in a number of exciting venues including most recently Lisbon, Jeju Island (Korea), Geneva, Denver, Aalborg (Denmark), and Beijing.
ISCA, together with the INTERSPEECH 2006 - ICSLP organizing committee, would like to encourage submission of papers for the upcoming conference in the following
TOPICS of INTEREST
Linguistics, Phonetics, and Phonology
Prosody
Discourse and Dialog
Speech Production
Speech Perception
Physiology and Pathology
Paralinguistic and Nonlinguistic Information (e.g. Emotional Speech)
Signal Analysis and Processing
Speech Coding and Transmission
Spoken Language Generation and Synthesis
Speech Recognition and Understanding
Spoken Dialog Systems
Single-channel and Multi-channel Speech Enhancement
Language Modeling
Language and Dialect Identification
Speaker Characterization and Recognition
Acoustic Signal Segmentation and Classification
Spoken Language Acquisition, Development and Learning
Multi-Modal Processing
Multi-Lingual Processing
Spoken Language Information Retrieval
Spoken Language Translation
Resources and Annotation
Assessment and Standards
Education
Spoken Language Processing for the Challenged and Aged
Other Applications
Other Relevant Topics
SPECIAL SESSIONS
In addition to the regular sessions, a series of special sessions has been planned for the meeting. Potential authors are invited to submit papers for special sessions as well as for regular sessions, and all papers in special sessions will undergo the same review process as papers in regular sessions. Confirmed special sessions and their organizers include:
* The Speech Separation Challenge, Martin Cooke (Sheffield) and Te-Won Lee (UCSD)
* Speech Summarization, Jean Carletta (Edinburgh) and Julia Hirschberg (Columbia)
* Articulatory Modeling, Eric Bateson (University of British Columbia)
* Visual Intonation, Marc Swerts (Tilburg)
* Spoken Dialog Technology R&D, Roberto Pieraccini (Tell-Eureka)
* The Prosody of Turn-Taking and Dialog Acts, Nigel Ward (UTEP) and Elizabeth Shriberg (SRI and ICSI)
* Speech and Language in Education, Patti Price (pprice.com) and Abeer Alwan (UCLA)
* From Ideas to Companies, Janet Baker (formerly of Dragon Systems)
IMPORTANT DATES
Notification of paper status: June 9, 2006
Early registration deadline: June 23, 2006
Tutorial Day: September 17, 2006
Main Conference: September 18-21, 2006
Further information via Website or send email
Organizer
Professor Richard M. Stern (General Chair)
Carnegie Mellon University
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Fax: +1 412 268-3890
Email

INTERSPEECH 2007-EUROSPEECH
August 27-31,2007,Antwerp, Belgium
Chair: Dirk van Compernolle, K.U.Leuven and Lou Boves, K.U.Nijmegen
Website
Important dates
Proposals for special sessions: November 1, 2006
Proposals for tutorials: January 8, 2007
Four-page paper deadline: March 23, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance: May 25, 2007
Early registration deadline: June 22, 2007
Tutorial Day: August 27, 2007
Main conference: August 28-31, 2007

INTERSPEECH 2008-ICSLP
September 22-26, 2008, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Chairman: Denis Burnham, MARCS, University of West Sydney.

INTERSPEECH 2009-EUROSPEECH
Brighton, UK,
Chairman: Prof. Roger Moore, University of Sheffield.

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FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRW)

NOLISP'07: Non linear Speech Processing

May 22-25, 2007 , Paris, France

6th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop (SSW-6)

Bonn (Germany), August 22-24, 2007
A satellite of INTERSPEECH 2007 (Antwerp)in collaboration with SynSIG
Details will be posted by early 2007
Contact
Prof. Wolfgang Hess

ITRW on Robustness

November 2007, Santiago, Chile

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS SUPPORTED (but not organized) by ISCA

IV Jornadas en Tecnologia del Habla

Zaragoza, Spain
November 8-10, 2006
Website

Call for papers-International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2006)

Evaluation campaign for language translation
Palulu Plaza Kyoto (right in front of Kyoto Station) (Japan)
November 30-December 1 2006
Website
Spoken language translation technologies attempt to cross the language barriers between people having different native languages who each want to engage in conversation by using their mother-tongue. Spoken language translation has to deal with problems of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT).
One of the prominent research activities in spoken language translation is the work being conducted by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR III), which is an international partnership of research laboratories engaged in automatic translation of spoken language. Current members include ATR (Japan), CAS (China), CLIPS (France), CMU (USA), ETRI (Korea), ITC-irst (Italy), and UKA (Germany).
A multilingual speech corpus comprised of tourism-related sentences (BTEC*) has been created by the C-STAR members and parts of this corpus were already used for previous IWSLT workshops focusing on the evaluation of MT results using text input () and the translation of ASR output (word lattice, NBEST list) using read speech as input (). The full BTEC* corpus consists of 160K of sentence-aligned text data and parts of the corpus will be provided to the participants for training purposes.
In this workshop, we focus on the translation of spontaneous speech which includes ill-formed utterances due to grammatical incorrectness, incomplete sentences, and redundant expressions. The impact of spontaneity aspects on the ASR and MT systems performance as well as the robustness of state-of- the-art MT engines towards speech recognition errors will be investigated in detail.
Two types of submissions are invited:
1) participants in the evaluation campaign of spoken language translation technologies,
2) technical papers on related issues.
Evaluation campaign (see details on our website)
Each participant in the evaluation campaign is requested to submit a paper describing the utilized ASR and MT systems and to report results using the provided test data.
Technical Paper Session
The workshop also invites technical papers related to spoken language translation. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
+ Spontaneous speech translation
+ Domain and language portability
+ MT using comparable and non-parallel corpora
+ Phrase alignment algorithms
+ MT decoding algorithms
+ MT evaluation measures
Important Dates
+ Evaluation Campaign
May 12, 2006 -- Training Corpus Release
August 1, 2006 -- Test Corpus Release [00:01 JST]
August 3, 2006 -- Result Submission Due [23:59 JST]
September 15, 2006 -- Result Feedback to Participants 2006
September 29, 2006 -- Paper Submission Due
October 14, 2006 -- Notification of Acceptance
October 27, 2006 -- Camera-ready Submission Due
- system registrations will be accepted until release of test corpus
- late result submissions will be treated as unofficial result submissions
+ Technical Papers
July 21, 2006 -- Paper Submission Due [23:59 JST]
September 29, 2006 -- Notification of Acceptance
October 27, 2006 -- Camera-ready Submission Due
Contact
Michael Paul
ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories
2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288 Japan

Call for papers International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'2006)

Singapore Dec. 13-16, 2006
Conference website
Topics
ISCSLP'06 will feature world-renowned plenary speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and a number of lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:
* Speech Production and Perception
* Phonetics and Phonology
* Speech Analysis
* Speech Coding
* Speech Enhancement
* Speech Recognition
* Speech Synthesis
* Language Modeling and Spoken Language Understanding
* Spoken Dialog Systems
* Spoken Language Translation
* Speaker and Language Recognition
* Indexing, Retrieval and Authoring of Speech Signals
* Multi-Modal Interface including Spoken Language Processing
* Spoken Language Resources and Technology Evaluation
* Applications of Spoken Language Processing Technology
* Others
The official language of ISCSLP is English. The regular papers will be published as a volume in the Springer LNAI series, and the poster papers will be published in a companion volume. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work on all the aspects of Chinese spoken language processing.
The conference will also organize four special sessions:
* Special Session on Rich Information Annotation and Spoken Language Processing
* Special Session on Robust Techniques for Organizing and Retrieving Spoken Documents
* Special Session on Speaker Recognition
* Special Panel Session on Multilingual Corpus Development
Schedule
* Full paper submission by Jun. 15, 2006
* Notification of acceptance by Jul. 25, 2006
* Camera ready papers by Aug. 15, 2006
* Early registration by Nov. 1, 2006
Please visit the conference website for more details.

ISCSLP 2006-Special session on speaker recognition

Singapore, Dec 13-16, 2006
Website
Chair:
Dr Thomas Fang Zheng, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing.
Speaker recognition (or voiceprint recognition, VPR) is one of the most important branches in speech processing. Its applications become wider and wider in various fields, such as public security, anti-terrorism, justice, telephony banking, personal services, and so on. However, there are still many fundamental and theoretical problems to solve, such as issues of background noises, cross-channel, multiple-speakers, and short speech segment for training and testing.
The purpose of this special session is to invite researchers in this field to present their state-of-art technical achievements. Papers are invited to cover, but not limited to, the following topics:
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification
* Speaker detection
* Speaker segmentation
* Speaker tracking
* Speaker recognition systems and application
* Resource creation for speaker recognition
This special session also provides a platform for developers in this field to evaluate their speaker recognition systems using the same database provided by this special session. Evaluation of speaker recognition systems will cover the following tasks:
* Text-independent speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification
* Text-independent cross-channel speaker identification
* Text-dependent and text-independent cross-channel speaker verification
Final details on these tasks (including evaluation criteria) will be made available in due course. The development and testing data will be provided by the Chinese Corpus Consortium (CCC). The data sets will be extracted from two CCC databases, which are CCC-VPR3C2005 and CCC-VPR2C2005-1000. Participants are required to submit a full paper to the conference describing their algorithms, systems and results.
Schedule for this special session
* Feb. 01, 2006: On-line registration open, CLOSED on May 1st, 2006
* May. 01, 2006: Development data made available to participants
* May. 21, 2006 (revised): Test data made available to participants
* Jun. 7, 2006 (revised):Test results due at CCC
* Jun. 10, 2006: Results released to participants
* Jun. 15, 2006: Papers due (using ISCSLP standard format)
* Jul. 25, 2006: The full set of the two databases made available to the participants of this special session upon request
* Dec. 16, 2006: Conference presentation
This special session is organized by the CCC .
Please address your enquiries to Dr. Thomas Fang Zheng.
Download the Speaker Recognition Evaluation Registration Form

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FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS


MMSP-06

IEEE Signal Processing Society 2006 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP06),
October 3-6, 2006,
Fairmount Empress Hotel, Victoria, BC, Canada
Website
- A Student Paper Contest with awards sponsored by Microsoft Research. To enter the contest a paper submission must have a student as the first author
- Overview sessions that consist of papers presenting the state-of-the-art in methods and applications for selected topics of interest in multimedia signal processing
- Wrap-up presentations that summarize the main contributions of the papers accepted at the workshop, hot topics and current trends in multimedia signal processing
- New content requirements for the submitted papers
- New review guidelines for the submitted papers
SCOPE
Papers are solicited for, but not limited to, the general areas:
- Multimedia Processing (modalities: audio, speech, visual, graphics, other; processing: pre- and post- processing of multimodal data, joint audio/visual and multimodal processing, joint source/channel coding, 2-D and 3-D graphics/geometry coding and animation, multimedia streaming)
- Multimedia Databases (content analysis, representation, indexing, recognition, and retrieval)
- Multimedia Security (data hiding, authentication, and access control)
- Multimedia Networking (priority-based QoS control and scheduling, traffic engineering, soft IP multicast support, home networking technologies, wireless technologies)
- Multimedia Systems Design, Implementation and Applications (design: distributed multimedia systems, real-time and non real-time systems; implementation: multimedia hardware and software; applications: entertainment and games, IP video/web conferencing, wireless web, wireless video phone, distance learning over the Internet, telemedicine over the Internet, distributed virtual reality)
- Human-Machine Interfaces and Interaction using multiple modalities
- Human Perception (including integration of art and technology)
- Standards
SCHEDULE
- Notification of acceptance by: June 8, 2006
- Camera-ready paper submission by: July 8, 2006 (Instructions for Authors)
Check the workshop website for updates.
Manage your subscription at: http://ewh.ieee.org/enotice/ options.php?LN=CONF

CFP Fifth Slovenian and First International LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES CONFERENCE IS-LTC 2006

Slovenian Language Technologies Society
Information Society - IS 2006
Ljubljana, Slovenia/October 9 - 10, 2006
conference website
The Slovenian Language Technologies Society invites contributions to its biennial conference to be held in the scope of the Information Society - IS 2006, taking place October 9 - 13, 2006 at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The official languages of the conference are English and Slovene. The conference will be organised in two tracks, one for contributions in English, and the other for those in Slovenian. The accepted papers will be published in printed proceedings, as well as on-line, on the conference Web site http://nl.ijs.si/is-ltc06/.
Conference Topics
We invite papers from academia, government, and industry on all areas of traditional interest to the HLT community, as well as related fields, including but not limited to:
* development, standardisation and use of language resources
* speech technologies
* machine translation and other multi- and cross-lingual processing
* semantic web and knowledge representation related HLT
* statistical and machine learning of language models
* information retrieval and extraction, question answering
* HLT applications
* presentations of HLT related projects
Invited speakers
> Nick Campbell, Chief Researcher, Media Information Science Laboratories
ATR, Japan
Steven Krauwer, Coordinator of ELSNET (European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies)
Utrecht University, Netherlands
Title of talk: Strengthening the smaller languages in Europe
Guidelines for Submissions
Submitted papers should present original research relevant to the field of human language technologies. Overview papers on HLT research and applications are also welcome.
The contributions should be written in English or Slovene. They should be 4 or 6 pages long and formatted according to the conference style guidelines, which are available from the conference Web site.
The papers will be published in printed proceedings, as well as on-line, on the conference Web site. Some papers will be chosen for re-submission to the journal Informatica.
Important Dates
June 25th paper submission deadline
September 15th camera ready submission
October 9 - 10 conference
Organising Committee
Tomaž Erjavec, Jožef Stefan Institute
Vojko Gorjanc, University of Ljubljana
Jerneja Žganec Gros, Alpineon
Information
Up to date information is available at http://nl.ijs.si/is-ltc06/ or email.

Call for papers- 9th DIMACS Implementation Challenge Workshop: Shortest Paths

WEBSITE
Goals
Shortest path problems are ones of the most fundamental combinatorial optimization problems with many applications, both direct and as subroutines in other combinatorial optimization algorithms. Algorithms for these problems have been studied since 1950's and still remain an active area of research. One goal of this Challenge is to create a reproducible picture of the state of the art in the area of shortest path algorithms. To this end we are identifying a standard set of benchmark instances and generators, as well as a benchmark implementations of well-known shortest path algorithms. Another goal is to enable current researchers to compare their codes with each other, in hopes of identifying the more effective of the recent algorithmic innovations that have been proposed. The final goal is to publish proceedings containing results presented at the Challenge Workshop, and a book containing the best of the proceedings papers.
Scope
The Challenge addresses a wide range of shortest path problems, including all sensible combinations of the following:
* Point-to-point, single-source, all-pairs.
* Non-negative arc lengths and arbitrary arc lengths (including negative cycle detection).
* Directed and undirected graphs.
* Static and dynamic problems. The latter include those dynamic in CS sense (arc additions, deletions, length changes) and those dynamic in OR sense (arc transit times depending on arrival times).
* Exact and approximate shortest paths.
* Compact routing tables and shortest path oracles.
Implementations on any platform of interest, for example desktop machines, supercomputers, and handheld devices, are encouraged.
How to participate
People interested in submitting papers to the Challenge Workshop can find benchmark instances, generators, and code for the problems they address at the Challenge website, along with detailed information on file formats. Your work can take two different directions.
1. Defining instances for algorithm evaluation. The instances should be natural and interesting. By the latter we mean instances that cause good algorithms to behave differently from the other instances. Interesting real-life application data are especially welcome.
2. Algorithm evaluation. Description of implementations of algorithms with experimental data that supports conclusions about practical performance. Common benchmark instances and codes should be used so that there is common ground for comparison. The most obvious way for such a paper to be interesting (and selected for the proceedings) is if the implementation improves state-of-the-art. However, there may be other ways to produce and interesting paper, for example by showing that an approach that looks well in theory does not work well in practice by explaining why this is the case.
Challenge Book
The best papers presented at the Challenge Workshop will be selected for publication in a book published in the DIMACS Book Series.
Important dates
- August 25, 2006: Paper submission deadline
- September 25, 2006: Author notification
- November 13-14, 2006: Challenge Workshop, DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Organizing Committee
Camil Demetrescu, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Andrew Goldberg, Microsoft Research
David Johnson, AT&T Labs - Research
Advisory Committee
Paolo Dell'Olmo, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Irina Dumitrescu, University of New South Wales
Mikkel Thorup, AT&T Labs-Research
Dorothea Wagner, Universitaet Karlsruhe

Call for papers 8th International Conference on Signal Processing

Nov. 16-20, 2006, Guilin, China
website
The 8th International Conference on Signal Processing will be held in Guilin, China on Nov. 16-20, 2006. It will include sessions on all aspects of theory, design and applications of signal processing. Prospective authors are invited to propose papers in any of the following areas, but not limited to:
A. Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
B. Spectrum Estimation & Modeling
C. TF Spectrum Analysis & Wavelet
D. Higher Order Spectral Analysis
E. Adaptive Filtering &SP
F. Array Signal Processing
G. Hardware Implementation for Signal Processing
H. Speech and Audio Coding
I. Speech Synthesis & Recognition
J. Image Processing & Understanding
K. PDE for Image Processing
L. Video compression &Streaming
M. Computer Vision & VR
N. Multimedia & Human-computer Interaction
O. Statistic Learning & Pattern Recognition
P. AI & Neural Networks
Q. Communication Signal processing
R. SP for Internet and Wireless Communications
S. Biometrics & Authentification
T. SP for Bio-medical & Cognitive Science
U. SP for Bio-informatics
V. Signal Processing for Security
W. Radar Signal Processing
X. Sonar Signal Processing and Localization
Y. SP for Sensor Networks
Z. Application & Others

CFP CI 2006 Special Session on Natural Language Processing for Real Life Applications

November 20-22, 2006 San Francisco, California, USA
Website
Topics
The Special Session on Natural Language Processing for Real Life Applications will cover the following topics (but is not limited to):
1. speech recognition, in particular
* multilingual speech recognition
* large vocabulary continuous speech recognition with focus on the application
2. real life dialog systems
* natural language dialog systems
* multimodal dialog systems
3. speech-based classification
* speaker classification, i.e. exploiting paralinguistic features of the speech to gather information about the speaker (for example age, gender, cognitive load, and emotions)
* language and accent identification
Paper Submission
Please submit papers for the special session directly to the session chair (christian.mueller@dfki.de). DO NOT submit the papers through the IASTED website. Otherwise, the papers will be handled as general papers for the conference. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. The final selection of papers for the session will be done by the session chair; acceptance/rejection letters and review comments along with registration information will be provided by IASTED by the general Notification deadline.
Formatting instructions
Please follow the formatting instructions provided by IASTED. Website.
Important Dates
Submissions due June 15, 2006
Notification of acceptance August 1, 2006
Camera-ready manuscripts due September 1, 2006
Registration Deadline September 15, 2006
Conference November 20 - 22, 2006
Registration
All papers accepted for the special session are required to register before the general conference registration deadline.

ELEVENTH AUSTRALASIAN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND, 6-8 DECEMBER 2006
Conference Website Conference Website
The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA) is a scientific association that aims to advance the understanding of speech science and its application to speech technology. ASSTA and the University of Auckland are pleased to announce the Eleventh International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2006).
Conference Themes
Submissions are invited for oral and poster presentations. Submissions should describe original contributions to spoken language, speech science and/or technology that will be of interest to an audience including scientists, engineers, linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, audiologists and other professionals. Submissions are invited in all areas of speech science and technology, but particularly in the following areas:
Speech production
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustics of accent change
Music and speech processing
Emotional speech, voice, intonation and prosody
Applications of speech science and technology
Speech Processing for Forensic Applications
Speech recognition and understanding
Speaker recognition and classification
Speech enhancement and noise cancellation
Pedagogical technologies for speech and singing
Corpus management and speech tools
Contributions of speech science and technology to Phonetics and Phonology of Australian and New Zealand English audiology and speech language therapy (PANZE)
Combined session with Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation
Keynote Speakers
Prof. Joseph Perkell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof. Pat Keating, University of California Los Angeles
Prof. Michael Corballis, University of Auckland.
Important Dates
. Abstract submission closing date - Monday, 28 August 2006
. Acceptance notice date - Monday, 25 September 2006
. Manuscript closing date - Monday, 6 November 2006
. Early registration date for conference and pre-conference workshop - Sunday, 29 October 2006
. Presenter/Author registration Deadline - Sunday, 29 October 2006
. Pre-conference tutorials and workshops - 5 December 2006
. SST 2006 Conference, 6-8 December
Important Contacts:
Abstract and Manuscript Submission: these should be submitted online. Click on the "Submission" link and follow the guidelines posted. Word and Latex templates, and a comprehensive author's guide for submissions, are available on the website.
Registration: An online registration form can be found on the conference website. Any queries regarding your registration should be directed either to the University Conference Management or to the Conference Chair Dr Catherine Watson.
Pre-Conference Workshops: Any enquiries regarding the Pre-Conference workshops should be sent to Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren.
Conference Organising Committee: Dr Catherine Watson (chair), Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren, Dr Waleed Abdulla, Dr Elaine Ballard, Helen Charters, Dr. Claire Fletcher Flynn, Dr Bernard Guillemin, Dr William Thorpe, Assoc. Prof. Suzanne Purdy, Dr Peter Keegan
Conference Advisory Committee Prof. Cathy Best, Prof. Bob Bogner, Prof. Herve Bourlard, Prof. Anne Cutler, Prof. Hiroya Fujisaki, . Jonathan Harrington, Prof. Hynek Hermansky, Prof. Louis Pols, Prof. Peter Thorne, Prof. Roger Wales, Assoc. Prof. Paul Warren, Assoc. Prof. Thomas Fang Zheng Pre-Conference Workshops: Morning 1. Speech Processing Waleed Abdulla, University of Auckland 2. Intonation and Prosody in AuE and NZ Janet Fletcher, University of Melbourne and Paul Warren, Victoria University of Wellington Afternoon 3. Speech database management and access Jen Hay, University of Canterbury 4. The phonetics of Maori Peter Keegan, University of Auckland Accommodation: A variety of accommodation options have been arranged at special conference rates. An accommodation reservation form can be downloaded from the website http://www.assta.org/sst/2006/. Other hotels within walking distance of the University include The Copthorne, Duxton, Rydges and Quest on Mount. Information regarding these hotels can be found on the www.nz.com website

CFP - IEEE/ACL 2006 Workshop on Spoken Language Technology

Aruba Marriott
Palm Beach, Aruba
December 10 -- December 13, 2006
Workshop website
Workshop Topics
Spoken language understanding; Spoken document summarization, Machine translation for speech; Spoken dialog systems; Spoken language generation; Spoken document retrieval; Human/Computer Interactions (HCI); Speech data mining; Information extraction from speech; Question/Answering from speech; Multimodal processing; Spoken language systems, applications and standards.
Submissions for the Technical Program
The workshop program will consist of tutorials, oral and poster presentations, and panel discussions. Attendance will be limited with priority for those who will present technical papers; registration is required of at least one author for each paper. Submissions are encouraged on any of the topics listed above. The style guide, templates, and submission form will follow the IEEE ICASSP style. Three members of the Scientific Committee will review each paper. The workshop proceedings will be published on a CD-ROM.
Schedule
Camera-ready paper submission deadline July 15, 2006
Hotel Reservation and Workshop registration opens July 30, 2006
Paper Acceptance / Rejection September 1, 2006
Hotel Reservation and Workshop Registration closes October 15, 2006
Workshop December 10-13, 2006
Registration and Information
Registration and paper submission, as well as other workshop information, can be found on the SLT website.

Organizing Committee
General Chair: Mazin Gilbert, AT&T, USA
Co-Chair: Hermann Ney, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Finance Chair: Gokhan Tur, SRI, USA
Publication Chair: Brian Roark, OGI/OHSU, USA
Publicity Chair: Eric Fosler-Lussier, Ohio State U., USA
Industrial Chair: Roberto Pieraccini, Tell-Eureka, USA

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia - ISM 2006

Conference website
Special track: Remote Sensors for Audio Processing
In recent decades, the cost of acoustic technologies has declined dramatically. Advances in networks, storage devices, and power management have made it practical to consider the remote location of sensors that either transmit data to a central processing facility or store the data for later retrieval. Nonetheless, many challenges remain for the fabrication, deployment and use of remote sensors. In locations with limited infrastructure, power management and the ability for the user to access or retrieve the data are paramount. In some situations, the need for localization or improved signal to noise ratio may dictate the use of microphone arrays or other signal enhancement techniques. Deployment in hostile environments such as arctic or deep sea conditions requires additional considerations. Remote sensors are capable of generating large acoustic or mixed media datasets. With these large corpora, the need for automated processing becomes critical as the staffing requirements for human analysis are both cost and labor prohibitive. The development of automated analysis can yield valuable data such as seasonal or diel patterns of animals, perimeter intrusion detection, access control, and a myriad of other applications. This special session invites researchers to submit high quality papers describing either preliminary or mature results on topics related to audio for remote sensors.
Topics of interest
· Audio classification and detection tasks for remote sensors (speech, bioacoustics, auditory scene analysis, etc.)
· Deployment issues
· Power management
· Networking/Storage/Data Management
· Array processing
· Remote audio sensors in challenging environments
· Applications of remote sensors with a significant audio component
Submissions and deadlines
The written and spoken language of ISM2006 is English. Authors should submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format including authors' names and affiliations, and a short abstract electronically. Submissions should be directed to Prof. Marie Roch , following the formatting instructions available in the submission guidelines for regular papers. Note that papers should not be submitted directly to ISM web site. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF). The paper should have a cover page, which includes a 200-word abstract, a list of keywords, and author's phone number and e-mail address. The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.
Important dates:
· August 8 - submission of papers
· September 10 - Notification of acceptance of papers
· September 25 - Camera-ready papers due
· December 11-13 - Conference at Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego , California

Multimedia Content Access: Algorithms and Systems (EI121)

Part of the IS&T/SPIE International Symposium on Electronic Imaging 28 January - 1 February 2007, San Jose, California, USA
Conference Chairs:
Alan Hanjalic, Technische Univ. Delft (Netherlands);
Raimondo Schettini, DISCo/Univ. degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy);
Nicu Sebe, Univ. van Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Topics
Content Analysis:
* image, audio and video characterization (feature extraction)
* fusion of text, image, video and audio data
* content parsing, clustering and classification
* semantic modeling
* image, video and audio similarity measures
* object and event detection and recognition
* benchmarking of content analysis methods and algorithms
* generic methods and algorithms for content analysis
* affective content analysis.
Content Management and Delivery:
* (Internet) multimedia databases
* multimedia standards (e.g. SVG, SMIL, MPEG-7)
* efficient peer-to-peer storage and search techniques
* indexing and data organization
* system optimization for search and retrieval
* storage hierarchies, scalable storage
* personalized content delivery.
Content Search/Browsing/Retrieval:
* multimedia data mining
* active learning and relevance feedback
* query models
* browsing and visualization
* search issues in distributed and heterogeneous systems
* benchmarking search, browsing, and retrieval algorithms and systems
* generation of video summaries and abstracts
* cognitive aspects of human/machine systems.
Internet Imaging and Multimedia:
* peer-to-peer imaging systems for the Internet
* content creation and presentation for the Internet
* web cameras: impact on content analysis techniques
* interactive multimedia creation for the Internet
* content rating, authentication, non-repudiation, and cultural differences in content perception
* XML applications
* web crawling, caching, and security
* semantic web
* (adaptable) user interfaces.
Applications:
* commerce
* medicine
* news
* entertainment
* wearable and ubiquitous computing
* management of meetings
* biometrics
* cultural heritage and education
* collaborative systems and multi-device applications
* life log applications
* military and civilian security applications.
The conference program will include invited keynote presentations, invited special sessions, and a panel of experts who will be discussing the remaining research challenges related to multimedia content analysis, management and retrieval.
Important Dates
Paper Proposals (5,000 words): 04 August 2006 (last extension)
Final Manuscript Due Date: 13 November 2006
200-word Final Summary: 20 November 2006

CFP International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications (ISSPA 2007)

ISSPA 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of launching the first ISSPA in 1987 in Brisbane, Australia. Since its inception, ISSPA has provided, through a series of 8 symposia, a high quality forum for engineers and scientists engaged in research and development of Signal and Image Processing theory and applications. Effective 2007, ISSPA will extend its scope to add the new track of information sciences. Hence, the intention that the previous full name of ISSPA is replaced after 2007 by the following new full name: International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and their Applications. ISSPA is an IEEE indexed conference.
ISSPA 2007 will be organized between February 12 to 15, 2007 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE) by three prominent institutions located in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates: University of Sharjah, American University of Sharjah, and Etisalat University College.
The regular technical program will run for three days along with an exhibition of signal processing and information sciences products. In addition, tutorial sessions will be held on the first day of the symposium.
Topics
Papers are invited in, but not limited to, the following topics:
1.Filter Design Theory and Methods
2. Multirate Filtering & Wavelets
3.Adaptive Signal Processing
4.Time-Frequency/Time-Scale Analysis
5.Statistical Signal & Array Processing
6.Radar & Sonar Processing
7.Speech Processing & Recognition
8.Fractals and Chaos Signal Processing
9.Signal Processing in Communications
10.Signal processing in Networking
11. Multimedia Signal Processing
12. Nonlinear signal processing
13.Biomedical Signal and Image Processing
14.Image and Video Processing
15.Image Segmentation and Scene Analysis
16. VLSI for Signal and Image Processing
17.Cryptology, Steganography, and Digital Watermarking
18. Image indexing & retrieval
19.Soft Computing & Pattern Recognition
20. Natural Language Processing
21.Signal Processing for Bioinformatics
22. Signal Processing for Geoinformatics
23.Biometric Systems and Security
24.Machine Vision
25.Data visualization
26. Data mining
27. Sensor Networks and Sensor Fusion
28.Signal Processing and Information Sciences Education
29.Others
How to submit?
Prospective authors are invited to submit full length (four pages) papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above (indicate area in your submission). We also encourage the submission of proposal for student session, tutorial and sessions on special topics. All articles submitted to ISSPA 2007 will be peer-reviewed using a blind review process.
For more details and submission of papers please see : conference website
Important Dates
Full Paper Submission: September 15, 2006
Tutorials/Special Sessions Proposals: September 15, 2006
Notification of Paper Acceptance: November 15, 2006
Final Accepted Paper Submission: December 1, 2006
Conference: February 12 to 15, 2007 Contact person:
Dr Mohammed Al-Mualla ISSPA07 Publicity Chair

CFP ICASSP 2007

2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
April 15-20, 2007
Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.A.
conference website
Tutorial Proposals Due August 4, 2006
Special Session and Panel Proposals Due August 4, 2006
Notification of Special Session & Tutorial Acceptance September 8, 2006
TOPICS
* Audio and electroacoustics
* Bio imaging and signal processing * Design and implementation of signal processing systems
* Image and multidimensional signal processing
* Industry technology tracks
* Information forensics and security
* Machine learning for signal processing
* Multimedia signal processing
* Sensor array and multichannel systems
* Signal processing education
* Signal processing for communications
* Signal processing theory and methods
* Speech processing
* Spoken language processing
Submission of Papers
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers , including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. Please note that the submission dates for papers are strict deadlines.
Tutorial, Special Session, and Panel Proposals
Tutorials will be held on April 15 and 16, 2007. Brief proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2006, to Hideaki Sakai by email and must include title, outline, contact information for the presenter, and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants together with a short biography of the presenter and a list of publications related to the proposal. Special session and panel proposals should be submitted by August 4, 2006, to Phil Chou through the the ICASSP 2007 website and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited speakers.
Important Deadlines
Tutorial Proposals Due: August 4, 2006
Special Session and Panel Proposals Due: August 4, 2006
Notification of Special Session & Tutorial Acceptance: September 8, 2006
Submission of Camera-Ready Papers: September 29, 2006
Notification of Acceptance (by email): December 15, 2006
Author's Registration Deadline: February 2, 2007
Chairs
General Chairs
K. J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland, College Park
Todd Reed, University of Hawaii
Technical Program Chairs
Anthony Kuh, University of Hawaii
Yih-Fang Huang, University of Notre Dame

RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (RANLP-07)

SAMOKOV hotel, Borovets, Bulgaria
conference website
RANLP-07 tutorials: September 23-25, 2007 (Sunday-Tuesday)
RANLP-07 workshops: September 26, 2007 (Wednesday)
6th Int. Conference RANLP-07: September 27-29, 2007 (Thursday-Saturday)
We are pleased to announce that the dates for RANLP’07 have been finalised (see above). Building on both the successful international summer schools organised for more than 17 years, and previous conferences held in 1995, 1997, 2001, 2003 and 2005, RANLP has become one of the most influential, competitive and far-reaching conferences, with wide international participation from all over the world. Featuring leading lights in the area as keynote speakers or tutorial speakers, RANLP has now grown into a larger-scale meeting with accompanying workshops and other events. In addition to the 6 keynote speeches and tutorials on hot NLP topics, RANLP07 will be accompanied by workshops and shared task competitions.
Volumes of selected papers are traditionally published by John Benjamins Publishers and previous conferences have enjoyed support from the European Commission.
Important dates
: Conference 1st Call for Papers: October 2006;
Call for Workshop proposals: November 2006,
deadline of proposals end of January 2007;
Workshop selection: early March 2007;
Conference Submission deadline: March 2007 with notification 30 May 2007;
Workshop Submission deadline: 15 June 2007 with notification in July 2007;
RANLP-07 tutorials, workshops and conference: 23-30 September 2007
The conference will be held in the picturesque resort of Borovets. It is located in the Rila mountains and is one of the best known ski and tourist resorts in South-East Europe. The conference venue Samokov hotel offers excellent working and leisure facilities. Borovets is only 1 hour away from Sofia international airport.
THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-07
Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Chair of the Organising Committee)
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK (Chair of the Programme Committee)
Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Communications, Boulder, USA
Nikolai Nikolov, INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshop Coordinator)
E-mail

16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences

Saarland University, Saarbrücken,
6-10 August 2007.
The first call for papers will be made in April 2006. The deadline for *full-paper submission* to ICPhS 2007 Germany will be February 2007. Further information is available under conference website

CFP (First announcement) 3rd Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics

October 5-7, 2007,
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University,
Poznan, Poland,
Website
CONFERENCE TOPICS
The conference program will include the following topics:
* electronic language resources and tools
* formalisation of natural languages
* parsing and other forms of NL processing
* computer modelling of language competence
* NL user modelling
* NL understanding by computers
* knowledge representation
* man-machine NL interfaces
* Logic Programming in Natural Language Processing
* speech processing
* NL applications in robotics
* text-based information retrieval and extraction, question answering
* tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems
* translation enhancement tools
* methodological issues in HLT
* prototype presentations
* intractable language-specific problems in HLT (for languages other than English)
* HLT standards
* HLT as foreign language teaching support
* new challenge: communicative intelligence
* vision papers in the field of HLT
* HLT related policies
This list is not closed and we are open to further proposals. The Program Committee is also open to suggestions concerning accompanying events (workshops, exhibits, panels, etc). Suggestions, ideas and observations may be addressed directly to the LTC Chair
. FURTHER INFORMATION
Further details will be available soon. The call for papers will be distributed by mail and published on the conference site . The site currently contains information about LTC’05 including freely-downloadable abstracts of the papers presented.
Zygmunt Vetulani
LTC’07 Chair

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