Subject: ESCApad #9 Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 17:27:20 GMT From: Isabel Trancoso To: esca_list@speech.inesc.pt ============================================================================ ESCApad number 9 December 23, 1998 ============================================================================ Dear ESCA members, Welcome to ESCApad #9. This issue is mainly dedicated to AVISA, the second ESCA SIG, and its first news bulletin. Good luck to AVSPers! Some short announcements: - ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Interactive Dialogue in Multi-Modal Systems, June 1999, Kloster Irsee, Germany. The deadline for the submission of summary has been extended from January 15 to January 31. (see also http://www.cpk.auc.dk/ids99/) - 1999 Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) workshop, December 12-15, Keystone, Colorado, USA. Deadline for submission of photo-ready papers: August 15 (see also http://asru99.research.att.com/) Merry Christmas and all the best for 1999 from the ESCA Board ============================================================================= AVISA News #1 (21 Dec 1998) Introduction AVISA (the Auditory-Visual Speech Association), which is the second ESCA SIG, started its official business on December 5, 1998, at the AVSP'98 (Auditory Visual Speech Processing) meeting in Terrigal, New South Wales, Australia. AVISA was first conceived by Christian Benoit, who wanted to see the auditory-visual speech community come together in a more formal way. Earlier this year, before his untimely death, Christian drafted a proposal to create AVISA. We are proud to announce the official formation of this SIG and dedicate it to Christian's memory. AVISA was created to promote interest and activity in auditory-visual speech processing and related areas. The AVISA objectives are to: - create a scientific link between researchers and others working in the various disciplines associated with audio-visual speech processing by humans or by machines; - facilitate better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in the production and perception of audio-visual speech communication through the audible and visible gestures of the vocal tract and of associated body gestures; - facilitate the modeling of speech gestures for realistic animation of synthetic actors and for automatic recognition of linguistic and communicative gestures transmitted through the auditory and visual modalities; - share linguistic knowledge through the study of audio-visual speech in as many languages as possible, including sign languages and cued speech; - favor the worldwide dissemination of knowledge, and make it available to the international community, in particular to students of speech science, clinicians and industrialists. To attain these goals, AVISA will: - organize and support scientific events (workshops, special sessions in conferences, summer schools); in particular, AVISA will support the continuation of the AVSP meetings including AVSP'99 (see below), and will sponsor sessions at other meetings, such as EUROSPEECH'99 and ICSLP'2000 (see below); - publish or help publish scientific articles in the proceedings of conferences, in special issues of international journals, books, etc.; - disseminate or help disseminate scientific articles, computer resources, audio-visual data, video tapes, and other relevant material; - keep its members informed of the AVISA activities and of any relevant information on audio-visual speech research and techniques through the AVISA websites, electronic mailing, newsletters of related associations, and journals. We are open to suggestions from all who are interested in participating. Please join us and provide us with feedback, news, opinions, etc., related to AV speech. To join AVISA and be placed on the AVISA mailing list, contact Philip Rubin at: rubin@haskins.yale.edu Formal Business Officers: At present, Philip Rubin is the Chairman of the AVISA SIG, Denis Burnham is the Vice-Chairman, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson is the Secretary/Treasurer, and Christian Abry is the liaison to ESCA. These officers will serve for a period of two years. At the inaugural meeting, the officers appointed a Steering Committee to assist the officers with various issues and to provide guidance and input regarding any matters of potential interest to the group. The Steering Committee members are: - Lynne Bernstein, Michael Brooke, Ruth Campbell, Bjorn Granstrom, Dominic Massaro, Shigeo Morishima, and Jean Vroomen. Membership: All attendees of the AVSP'98 meeting were inducted as members of AVISA. Membership in AVISA is open to all those who are interested in auditory-visual speech processing. We will be contacting attendees of AVSP'97 and others via email. At present there are no AVISA dues. If you wish to join AVISA, please contact Philip Rubin (rubin@haskins.yale.edu). We encourage all those who plan to join AVISA to also join ESCA. The AVISA Constitution was distributed to AVSP'98 attendees. It will also be made available on the AVISA website (see below). News At the AVSP'98 Meeting, the first official AVISA meeting was held. This brief meeting included information about the SIG's purpose (see above) and structure, including the naming of Officers and Steering Committee members. A special issue of Speech Communication was distributed to the AVISA members. This issue, Volume 26, Nos. 1-2, October 1998, contains selected papers from the AVSP'97 meeting in Rhodes. Also announced were support for the Golden Lips Award (see below), the release of the Talking Heads website (see below); and details on upcoming meetings (again, see below). (The deadline to submit abstracts for EUROSPEECH'99 is approaching fast (Jan. 15, 1999). We encourage all AVISA members to attend this meeting. If you are planning on attending, please contact Philip Rubin -- we hope to organize an AV session and we are also planning to have an AVISA SIG meeting.) The Golden Lips Award The Golden Lips award was initiated to honor the memory of Christian Benoit and is intended to be given to a young researcher whose work shows great promise. The first Christian Benoit Golden Lips award was presented to Asa Hallgren. (See photographs on the AVSP'98 website - http://www.cmis.csiro.au/avsp98/.) Over the next five years, the ICP in Grenoble, France, in conjunction with AVISA and other organizations, intends to present three Golden Lips Awards which, in addition to the trophy, will also include a monetary award. AVISA will provide input during the selection process and will contribute to the monetary award. Talking Heads Website At the AVSP'97 meeting in Rhodes, Philip Rubin promised to create a website related to the meeting. Working with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, and barely keeping the promise, the Talking Heads website was formally unleashed at AVSP'98. The URL is: http://www.haskins.yale.edu/haskins/heads.html In addition, the website is a "Work In Progress" in the "Library" section on the MIT COGNET site at: http://cognet.mit.edu/. AVISA Website In the future we hope to have an AVISA website on the ESCA server. When this is formalized we will inform the AVISA membership of the URL. Upcoming Meetings: - EUROSPEECH'99 EUROSPEECH'99, the 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology will be held in Budapest, Hungary, on September 5-10, 1999. We encourage you to submit abstracts. Please let one of the AVISA officers know if you plan to attend this conference, and if you plan to present a paper or have a poster in the AV area -- we would like to organize an AV session at this meeting. In addition, we will be having an AVISA meeting at EUROSPEECH'99. The deadline for abstracts is January 15, 1999. The EUROSPEECH'99 URL is: http://tel.ttt.bme.hu/Eurospeech99 For additional information, send email to: eurospeech99@ttt.bme.hu - AVSP'99 AVSP'99, the fourth annual Auditory-Visual Speech Processing conference, will be held on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz (7-9 August, 1999). It will be a satellite of the ICPhS '99 conference in San Francisco, CA. Four to six page papers will be published in a hard-copy proceedings volume, and in CD-ROM form. Full papers submissions will be due March 1, 1999. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by April 1, 1999. Final papers will be due June 1, 1999. The AVSP'99 URL is: http://mambo.ucsc.edu/avsp99 For additional information, send email to: avsp99@fuzzy.ucsc.edu - ICSLP 2000 ICSLP 2000, the the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processsing will be held in Beijing, China (16-20 October, 2000). For information send email to: Dr. Min Chu (Conference Secretariat) at: mchu@plum.ioa.ac.cn Other Business: BBS Book Review Please contact Dominic Massaro (massaro@fuzzy.ucsc.edu) regarding a "Call for Book Nominations for Behavioral and Brain Sciences Mutiple Book Review". ============================================================================= All additional information at the ESCA web-site: http://www.esca-speech.org The ESCA secretariat can be contacted at: info@esca-speech.org For message distribution at esca_list contact: Isabel.Trancoso@inesc.pt =============================================================================