Subject: ISCApad #28 Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 12:13:14 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 28 September 7th, 2000 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #28. Here's the table of contents for this month's bulletin: ISCA news: - The second meeting of the ISCA BOARD will take place in Paris, hosted by ENST, during the weekend of September 16-17 that precedes ASR'2000. As usual, ISCA members are invited to bring points to the attention of the Board. - Participation report from an ISCA granted participant (Bouda-Khanda Dachiev a) at ESSLLI 2000, August 6-18 2000, Birmingham, UK. Available on the ISCA webpage for grants. - Participation reports from two ISCA granted participants (Velislava Stoykova and Fernando Pietro Ramos) at TeSTIA 2000, 8TH European Summer School on Language & Speech Communication, July 15-30, Chios, Greece, Speech Communication Journal: - New team of Editors-in-Chief (see below) Happening this month: - ISCA ITRW ASR2000 - International Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition: Challenges for the Next Millennium, Paris, France, September 18-20, 2000 http://www-tlp.limsi.fr/asr2000 - ISCA supported event: TSD 2000 Workshop on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE Brno, Czech Republic, Sept. 13-16, 2000 http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2000/ - ISCA supported event: COMLEX 2000 Workshop on "Computational Lexicography and Multimedia Dictionaries" Patras, Greece, 22-23 September 2000 http://www.wcl2.ee.upatras/comlex2000.htm - SPECOM 2000 - 5th International Workshop 'Speech and Computer' St.-Petersburg, September 25-28, 2000 http://www.spiiras.nw.ru/speech Proceedings can be available by e-mail: specom@mail.iias.spb.su Future events (see summaries below): - ISCA supported event: PEVOC IV - 4th Pan European Voice Conference Stockholm, Sweden, 23-26 August, 2001 http://www.speech.kth.se/voice/pevoc4/ - Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics 2000 Pereslavl-Zalesskiy (near Moscow), Russia, October, 23-24, 2000 - I Meeting on Language Engineering Sevilla, Spain, 6-10 November 2000 - WISP 2001 - Workshop on Innovation in Speech Processing Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 2nd-3rd April 2001 http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/wisp-2001/ - Special session on "Applications of Instrumentation and Measurement Techniques to Human-Computer Interaction" Budapest, Hungary, May 21-23, 2001 http://www.mit.bme.hu/events/imtc2001/cfp2001a.html - Summer workshop on Language Technology at the Johns Hopkins University Call for proposals: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu See also: - IWCS-4: Fourth International Workshop on Computational Semantics Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 10-12, 2001 http://www.sigsem.org/iwcs4.html - Fourteenth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence Ottawa, Canada, June 7-9, 2001 http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~stroulia/AI2001 Job offers (see below): - Group leader in speech processing, MULTITEL-TCTS Lab, Mons, Belgium - Post-Doctoral Researcher in Language Modeling at Philips Research Labs, Aachen, Germany ISCA greetings, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================ >From Speech Communication Editors-in-Chief: Speech Communication continues to thrive. We are grateful for the opportunity we have had to contribute to its development, and for the strong support we have received from our editors and reviewers. However, to promote the journal's continued vitality and to increase its inter-disciplinary nature, we believe that it is also good to regularly modify the makeup of the editorial leadership. Consequently, we recently decided (in agreement with the Speech Communication Editorial Board) that each of the three Editors-in-Chief would in turn retire from this role and be replaced by a new colleague once every 1-2 years. The new Editor-in-Chief will be nominated and elected by the Editorial Board, and will be chosen with both geographical and scientific balance in mind. A similar procedure should also apply to the Editorial Board, in which we will regularly welcome new members (according to upcoming by-law). This year, Nelson Morgan, who has recently taken on increased administrative responsibility at his home institution, has offered to be the first to phase out of his role as co-Editor-in-Chief. We sincerely thank him for his services to our journal, and wish him well in his new responsibilities. He will continue to be associated with Speech Communication as a member of the Editorial Board. We are confident that his replacement, Abeer Alwan of the UCLA faculty, will be an excellent addition to our working group. ============================================================================ PEVOC IV 23-26 August, 2001, Stockholm The 4th Pan European Voice Conference (PEVOC IV) is being organised by KTH in Stockholm in August 2001. Four main topics "Basic biological aspects: applications to voice disorders", "Voice source: acoustics & imaging", "Assessment & efficacy of voice treatment" and "Singing & professional speaking voice", will be covered by a special session with a keynote presentation followed by a talk from one or more discussants. Accompanying events (plus workshops and poster sessions) include: "Dissertation pipeline: in & after" for those who are about to submit, or have recently submitted a doctoral thesis, "Non-verbal communication", "A survey of Internet free- and shareware tools for voice analysis" and "Party with lions" an informal gathering where young scientists can meet some of the great icons of research. Contact the organising committee via the official website http://www.speech.kth.se/voice/pevoc4 or by writing to PEVOC IV, KTH-TMH, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden (Fax: +46 8 790 7854, email: pevoc4@speech.kth.se). ============================================================================ International Conference "Cognitive Modeling in Linguistics 2000" October, 23-24, 2000. Pereslavl-Zalesskiy (near Moscow), Russia The conference is organized by Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence, Computing Center of Russian Academy of Science, and «Web Journal of Formal, Computational and Cognitive Linguistics». It will be third conference in the series. The aim of the conference is joining efforts in research of cognitive processes of researchers in the fields of cognitive linguistics, learning theory, neural networks, cognitive psychology, knowledge engineering. The reports on the following themes (but not only listed) are welcome: formal models in linguistics, psycholinguistics, language and thought, language processing in neural networks, cognitive models of thought and memory, cognitive models of language acquisition, semantic and pragmatic, language and culture, child speech, psychosemantics. The size of a paper is not limited. The papers could be presented in English (preferable) or Russian, in the later case an abstract in English is required. Please, send your papers by e-mail. Next formats are acceptable: MS_Word, RTF, PostScript, plain text. The deadline for the papers is September, 1, 2000. Please, send your papers by e-mail both to "solovyev@mi.ru" and "vladimir_polyakov@ yahoo.com". Contact. Post address: Russia, 420140, Kazan, Fuchika str., 127-88. Phone: 7-8432-624252 (home). Program committee chair Prof. Valery Solovyev (Kazan State University) ============================================================================ I MEETING ON LANGUAGE ENGINEERING 6-10 November 2000 Universidad de Sevilla and Universidad de Granada Sevilla, SPAIN The I MEETING ON LANGUAGE ENGINEERING will take place at the University of Seville from Monday 6th to Friday 10th November 2000. Oral presentations, posters and demos are invited on any topic concerned with the following related areas: - Phonetics and Phonology - Discourse Analysis - Language Modelling - Signal Processing and Analysis - Speech Recognition - Speech Processing - Speaker Recognition - Speech Synthesis - Language Generation - Dialogue Systems - Signal Coding - Resources, Assessment and Evaluation - Applications - Education - Development - Machine Translation - Parsing - Information Retrieval - Others An abstract of a maximum of 300 words must reach us by 1st October 2000. INFORMATION: UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE Teresa L. Soto Dpto. Lengua Inglesa Palos de la Frontera, s/n 41004 Sevilla SPAIN Tel: +34 954 551 588 Fax: +34 954 551 516 email: teresa@fing.us.es UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA Ramon Lopez-Cozar Delgado Dpto. Electronica y Tecnologia de Computadores Avda. Severo Ochoa, s/n 18071 Granada SPAIN Tel: +34 958 243 271 Fax: +34 958 243 230 email: rlopezc@ugr.es ============================================================================ UK Institute of Acoustics WISP 2001: Workshop on Innovation in Speech Processing WISP 2001 will bring together international experts in spoken language processing with experts from other relevant disciplines in a forum where new ideas can be discussed and evaluated. The workshop will be held in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, over two days on 2nd-3rd April 2001. The meeting will focus on four main themes: * New paradigms for speech pattern processing * Speech production and perception * Spoken dialogue processing * Spoken language in multi-media Each theme will be introduced in a plenary session by an invited expert in the field, who will have ample time to present new ideas or to review the state of the art. This will be followed by discussions open to all participants and by selected contributed papers and posters. Numbers will be limited to 100 to ensure the meeting has the feeling of a workshop rather than a conference. The Workshop will be held at the Victoria Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon (the birthplace of Shakespeare) and there will be a programme of sightseeing events available. For further details, including the procedure for paper submission, please see http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/wisp-2001/ ============================================================================ Special session "Applications of Instrumentation and Measurement Techniques to Human-Computer Interaction" IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (http://www.mit.bme.hu/events/imtc2001/cfp2001a.html) Where: Budapest, Hungary, When: May 21-23, 2001 The conference will be held in Budapest from May 21-23, 2001 and will cover all aspects of theory and practice of metrology, measurement technologies, instrumentation, and related applications. About 20 invited state-of-the-art lectures will cover important points of instrumentation and measurement technology, including aspects of biomedical signal processing, and statistical modeling techniques. A number of satellite workshops are also being planned in conjunction with the conference: (http://www.mit.bme.hu/events/) ISP/2001:Workshop on Intelligent Signal Processing VIMS/2001:Workshop on Virtual and Intelligent Measurement Systems Currently under development: Self-Adaptive Software Workshop In addition, we are soliciting papers for a Special session that will focus on the following areas: Recent advances in articulatory measurements and modeling for speech recognition/synthesis Recent advances in optical measurements and modeling for visual recognition/synthesis State of the art in audio-visual recognition/synthesis Audio-visual synthesis for virtual agents or "talking heads" Applications of multimodal interaction aids for disabled individuals Other applications of audio-visual signal processing Noise/Echo cancellation for noisy/telephone speech and implications on recognition performance Use of microphone arrays for speech acquisition Submission For submission to the special session, please follow the instructions provided for submission to regular sessions on the conference web site at http://www.ieee-imtc.org AND, in the submission letter, specify the name of the special session to which the paper is submitted. Deadlines Abstracts (upto 4 pages) due by September 30, 2000 (please mark Abstract as belonging to this Special Session) For further information Please send email to mukund@us.ibm.com ============================================================================ Dear Colleague: I am writing in connection with the summer workshop on Language Technology we are preparing to host at the Johns Hopkins University in the summer of 2001. You may already have a good idea about the nature of these summer workshops, which we have hosted every year at Hopkins since 1995. If not, I have included a short summary description. If you need additional information, please feel free to ask me or visit our web pages at http://www.clsp.jhu.edu. These workshops have attempted to identify specific research topics (suitable for a six week team exploration) on which progress is needed to advance the state of the art in various fields of Language Technology (such as ASR, text-to-speech, TDT, MT, information retrieval, summarization, etc.). The research topics of the participating teams in previous workshops can serve as a good example (see below). Having identified such topics in an organizational conference (see below), we then attempt to get the best researchers to work on them. The purpose of this communication is to ask you for help in identifying suitable topics. Would you be interested and available to participate in the 2001 Summer Workshop (July 9 - August 17, 2001)? If so, we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration. It need only be a couple of paragraphs detailing the problem and a rough agenda to be addressed by the team in the 6-week period. If your proposal is chosen (by an independent review panel), we would invite you to join us for the Organizational Conference at the Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton, Virginia, November 17-19, 2000 (as our guest), for further discussions aimed at consensus. If, at the organizational meeting, a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the four to be pursued during the summer, we would expect you to be available for participation (and perhaps team leadership) in the six week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will take an active role in pursuing it. We would like to receive proposals by September 29, 2000 so that we may begin the review process. They may be faxed (410-516-5050), sent via return e-mail (berdann@jhu.edu) or via regular mail (CLSP, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Barton 320, Baltimore, MD 21218). Please let us know via return e-mail whether you are interested in submitting a proposal. Regards, Frederick Jelinek, Director Center for Language and Speech Processing Johns Hopkins University Information on Workshop 2001 The 6-week workshop at Johns Hopkins University on language engineering brings together teams of leading professionals and students to advance the state of the art. The professionals would normally be university professors and industrial and governmental researchers working in widely dispersed locations. The graduate students will be familiar with the field and will be selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. The undergraduates will be entering seniors who are new to the field and who have shown outstanding academic promise. They will be selected through a national search. Undergraduate participation began in 1998 with the intent of broadening the appeal of language engineering amongst students considering graduate studies. Proposals for research projects are being solicited from a wide range of academic and government institutions, as well as from industry. All proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel. Those chosen will be presented at the Airlie conference to which both presenters and leading researchers will be invited. Out of these presentations and the discussion which will follow, the four research topics for WS01 will emerge. The primary goal of the workshop is to establish research directions and educate students in language technology. Additional expected benefits of the workshop are the recruitment of students into language engineering research; the creation, collection, and dissemination of tools and data for language engineering research; and the establishment of fruitful and long-lasting collaborations. Workshop 2000 investigated four topics: Pronunciation Modeling of Mandarin Casual Speech, Mandarin English Information, Audio-Visual Speech Recognition and Reading Comprehension. Amy Berdann 410-516x4778 Center Administrator berdann@jhu.edu 320 Barton Hall http://www.clsp.jhu.edu Center for Language and Speech Processing Johns Hopkins University ============================================================================ Open position: group leader in speech processing, MULTITEL-TCTS Lab, Mons, Belgium MBROLA, as well as other R&D projects in speech synthesis and recognition (see http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/research.html), is now maintained by MULTITEL, an independent research intitute associated to the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons to promote Multimedia and Telecommunications research in Wallonia. MULTITEL has an open permanent position for a senior (PhD) researcher with experience in speech and/or language processing, to lead its speech research activities (mostly on speech recognition), in collaboration with Prof. T. Dutoit. Previous experience in group leading is a serious advantage. For more information, see http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/vacancies.html or contact : Prof. Thierry Dutoit Ph: +32 65 374774 Faculte Polytechnique de Mons Fax: +32 65 374729 MULTITEL-TCTS Lab, http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/~dutoit Avenue Copernic, B-7000 Mons, Belgium ============================================================================ JOB OPPORTUNITY AT PHILIPS RESEARCH LABS AACHEN, GERMANY: Post-Doctoral Researcher in Language Modeling Job Description: Together with our interdisciplinary research team you will work on our project "Language Modeling in Automatic Speech Recognition for use in multi-lingual dictation products and internet applications". Description of Research Group: Philips is active in speech recognition and speech understanding, both in research and business. The speech recognition group is a department of our research organization of 400 employees on site. It has identified projects on large vocabulary continuous speech recognition for several European languages (speech to text), small vocabulary (command and control), and natural dialogue systems. We have available speech databases (basic and annotated data) and lexical databases (basic and annotated). Computer equipment consists of DEC workstations under UNIX. International links exist via ARPA benchmarking evaluations in speech recognition, European collaboration in both Speech and Language under ESPRIT and TELEMATICS, research links with France, UK, Italy, The Netherlands, national research links with ASL-Vermobil and MoTiv, and local research links with the Technical University. Internally, we are linked to several business units marketing speech recognition, among them Philips Speech Processing (Aachen and Vienna). Job Requirements: * Post-Doctoral Researcher * University Degree in Mathematics, Electrical Engineering or Computer Science * Experience in probability theory, statistical pattern recognition, algorithm design and efficiency * Excellent programming skills, in particular C/C++ under UNIX Personal Qualifications: * Fluent in English * Interest in application-oriented research Other important information: We offer this EU-sponsored Marie Curie Industry Host Fellowship (2-year- contract) in our Research Labs in Aachen, Germany. Details about these Fellowships such as terms and conditions, approx. salary are available at: http://improving-mcf.sti.jrc.it/project/ Please note that one of the EU-prerequisites is that you must be citizen of an EU- or EU-associated state. Please send your application to: Christiane Benicke Philips Research Laboratories Human Resources Department Weisshausstr. 2 D-52066 Aachen Germany Tel. +49/241/6003-477 Fax +49/241/6003-611 christiane.benicke@philips.com For further information about the project contact Dr. Dietrich Klakow (dietrich.klakow@philips.com). ============================================================================ All additional information at the ISCA web-site: http://www.isca-speech.org The ISCA secretariat can be contacted at: info@isca-speech.org Requests concerning membership, Speech Communication and ordering Proceedings should be forwarded to the Secretariat. For message distribution at ISCA list contact: public@isca-speech.org Short messages will be forwarded on a monthly scheme basis to all ISCA members. =============================================================================