Subject: ISCApad #39 Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:29:45 +0100 From: Isabel Trancoso To: isca_members@isca-speech.org ============================================================================ ISCApad number 39 August 10th, 2001 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad #39. Here's the table of contents of this issue: ISCA news: - Elections: Following the announcement in the last issue of ISCApad of the election procedure to replace 7 members of the ISCA Board whose terms of office will end in September 2001, no nominations were received from ISCA members. (Details in the webpage: ) Therefore, the list of 7 candidates proposed by the ISCA Board was considered to be accepted by the membership. The Board would like to welcome the 3 new members: Eva Hajicova (Czech Republic), Valerie Hazan (United Kingdom) and Lin-Shan Lee (Taiwan). They will replace Paul Dalsgaard, Roger Moore, and myself. The other 4 candidates are the Board members who have served only one term and will be willing to serve a second one: Gerrit Bloothooft (The Netherlands), Rolf Carlson (Sweden), Wolfgang Hess (Germany), and George Kokkinakis (Greece). Congratulations to all! - News from EUROSPEECH'2001: As usual in INTERSPEECH events, ISCA will have a booth in Aalborg, September 3-7. All members are most welcome! You can ask questions, buy proceedings (on paper and CDROM), pick up your ISCA pins, etc. Some brand new ISCA 'gadgets' may also be bought at the booth. (see below message from EUROSPEECH'2001 Chairman) - Relationship with ACL: ISCA and the Association for Computational Linguistcs (ACL) have agreed to offer 25% discounts on membership fees to members of either organization who are *not* currently members of the other organization. I.e, ISCA members who are not currently ACL members may save 25% on the ACL membership fee and vice versa. Journals: - Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on New Computational Paradigms for Acoustic Modelling in Speech Recognition - Deadline extended to 31 October 2001 Future events: - Internoise 2001 30th International Congress on Noise Control Engineering The Hague, The Netherlands, August 27-30, 2001 http://internoise2001.tudelft.nl - ITRW Workshop on Adaptation Methods in Automatic Speech Recognition Sophia Antipolis (French Riviera), August 29-30, 2001 http://www.eurecom.fr/ITRW (see below) - COCOSDA Workshop 2001 Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:40 p.m., Aalborg, Denmark http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/cocosda/scandinavia.html (see below) - TSD'2001 International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue September 10 - 13, 2001, Zelezna Ruda, Czech Republic http://www-kiv.zcu.cz/events/tsd2001 (see below) - WI-2001 and IAT-2001 Joint Conference The First Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence The Second Asia-Pacific Conf. on Intelligent Agent Technology Maebashi TERRSA, Maebashi City, Japan, October 23-26, 2001 http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/wi01/ http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/iat01/ - International Workshop on Information Presentation and Natural Multimodal Dialogue Verona, Italy, 14-15 December 2001 http://i3p-class.itc.it/events/ipnmd2001.html (see below) - The Fifth Symposium on Natural Language Processing 2002 + Oriental COCOSDA Workshop 2002 Hua Hin, Prachuapkirikhan, Thailand, 9-11 May 2002 http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/ or http://www.links.nectec.or.th/itech/snlp-o-cocosda2002/ (see below) - ITRW on Advanced ASR for Telecom Applications Palais des Papes, Avignon, France, 27-29 November 2002 Provisional website: http://smada.research.kpn.com (Click on Events and Activities) (see below) - MMSP-02 (IEEE Signal Processing Society / ISCA) 2002 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, December 9-11, 2002 http://mmsp02.njit.edu (see below) This issue will be the last one I put together, as Publications Coordinator within the ISCA Board. I often found colleagues at conferences who commented on the amount of work it must involve editing ISCApad. It was not that much because I had a big help from all the other Board members and I received a lot of useful contributions from the ISCA members. So, I must thank you all. Editing ISCApad was fun. I hope you found it useful! See you in Aalborg, Isabel Trancoso ============================================================================= MESSAGE FROM EUROSPEECH'2001 CHAIRMAN: The number of registered participants for Eurospeech 2001 - Scandinavia was about 1000 at the end of the second week in August. The Conference Commitee expect to reach additional 50 - 100 at the time of the conference. All material is ready, and I invite you go to the web server and make a print out of all sessions and abstracts of each paper. This is available in pdf-format. Presently we have 14 exhibitor booths that represents a number of companies, projects, organisations and next conferences. Jointly with the conference there are nine pre- and post-conference satellite workshops. Five of these are organised at the Conference Center in Aalborg. PS: Those who plan to participate and have not yet registered, please do your registration NOW. We are soon running out of cheap hotels, and the hotels are now further away from the Conference Center. We are looking forward to see you in Aalborg shortly. Kind regards Paul Dalsgaard ============================================================================= COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE SPECIAL ISSUE ON NEW COMPUTATIONAL PARADIGMS FOR ACOUSTIC MODELLING IN SPEECH RECOGNITION THIRD CALL FOR PAPERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 31 OCTOBER 2001 AIM In recent years there has been an increased interest in approaches to speech and pattern processing that go beyond the conventional hidden Markov model (HMM) framework. This has been motivated by limitations of current systems both in their error performance and by the fact that current statistical modelling assumptions are inconsistent with that of natural speech signals. Researchers observe that current models are fragile in noise, are limited in their ability to handle pronunciation variation, and are costly for large vocabulary spontaneous speech transcription. They also point to limitations of HMMs in that they might not best represent the crucial non-stationary temporal behaviour of speech. The aim of this issue is to bring together up-to-date reviews of new computational techniques, including those that are being explored in other fields, with original work on extending and evaluating these techniques on speech recognition tasks. Papers are therefore solicited in the area of computational paradigms for acoustic modelling in speech recognition. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * Extensions and developments of HMMs, such as multi-stream models, factorial HMMs and graphical models in general * Computational models motivated by the need to accommodate structure in speech patterns which is potentially relevant for recognition but which is absent from the conventional HMM formalism (e.g. trajectories, linguistic features). * Computational models which accommodate novel feature extraction techniques that go beyond the traditional fixed frame-rate analyses. * Non-HMM-based approaches, or hybrid systems combining other classifiers with HMMs * Theoretical developments (of HMMs and extensions) which appear to have significant implications for speech processing. Manuscript submission Authors should send copies of their papers to one of the guest editors, Martin Russell or Jeff Bilmes, by the extended deadline of 31 October 2001. Authors should follow the CSL guidelines for paper submission; electronic submissions are encouraged preferably in postscript or Adobe pdf. Guest Editors Professor Martin J Russell, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birminhgham B15 2TT, U.K. E-mail: m.j.russell@bham.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 121 414 3093; Fax: +44 (0) 121 414 4291 or Jeff A Bilmes, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, 418 EE/CSE, Box 352500, Seattle, WA 98195-2500, USA. E-mail: bilmes@ee.washington.edu Phone (206) 543-2150. ============================================================================= ITRW Workshop on Adaptation Methods in Automatic Speech Recognition August 29-30, 2001 at Sophia Antipolis (French Riviera) This is to inform you of the update of the website of the conference: http://www.eurecom.fr/ITRW. The final program is now available. Four invited lectures will introduce the major topics of the workshop. Then a tenth of posters will be presented on the topic and after a moderator will lead a discussion on the topic: I recommend the attendees to be active during the session: a workshop is not a conference...it is a place where people interact very much and that is the reason the number of participants is recommended to remain below 100. Authors must check on the web the space allocated to each poster (100x 140 cm normally along the portrait mode). Please have in mind there will be no on site registration. All registrations are made in advance and payment is only by credit cards. The organizers have negotiated special rates in the hotels recommended on the Web site. Attendees have to register themselves and the rates will apply if they refer to the workshop (the hotels receive updated lists of participants from the organizors). Please check individually the possible need of a visa to enter the European Community. If you need a written proof of your registration, please contact me. The Proceedings will be available at the workshop. A CD-ROM containing the last presentation material will be sent to all participants after the workshop. The banquet (August 29, evening) is included for all participants (including students) in the registration rate. For any additional question, please contact me or better send an email to adaptation@eurecom.fr (several members of the local committe have access to this email address). I will be happy and proud to welcome you at Sophia Antipolis to this satellite meeting of Eurospeech 2001, which most of you will certainly also attend. Professor Christian J. Wellekens Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 00 26 28 Dpt Multimedia Communications Secr:+33 (0) 4 93 00 26 33 EURECOM,2229 route des Cretes BP193 Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 00 26 27 F-06904 Sophia Antipolis Web:http://www.eurecom.fr/~welleken ============================================================================ COCOSDA Workshop 2001 Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:40 p.m., Aalborg, Denmark Room Gaestesalen, Aalborg Congress and Culture Center Final Program and Call for Participation COCOSDA is an international organization for coordinating the globalized efforts in language resource developments and speech technology evaluation. The annual workshops of COCOSDA have been held as satellite events of ICSLP on even years and Eurospeech on odd years. This year the workshop will be on Sept 2, Sun, 1:00-6:40 p.m., right before Eurospeech 2001 at Aalborg, Denmark. COCOSDA is organized with a structure which reflects the two dimensions of its functionalities: "Topic Domains" and "Regional Programs". The former considers the dynamic technology environments, while the latter addresses the regional efforts and differences. Four topic domains have been established: Evaluation of Speech Understanding/Dialogue Systems, Multi-Modal Corpora, Corpus Annotation Tools and Local Languages. Six regional programs are currently present: North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Latin America and Africa. The COCOSDA Workshop 2001 is organized to address all issues relevant to COCOSDA. You are invited to participate in the workshop. The final program of the workshop is below. It includes pre-organized reports for all the topic domains and regional programs mentioned above and other relevant reports/discussions, plus presentations from the open-call submissions. A "Workshop Notes" will be published including written materials for the reports/presentations. More information about the reports and presentations at the Beijing workshop, Oct 2000, as well as about COCOSDA can be found at: "http://www.slt.atr.co.jp/cocosda/" Final Program 1:00-1:10 -Opening 1:10-3:50 -Issues and Developments in 2001 for Spoken Language Resources in Oceania (20 min) Bruce Millar, Australia -Overview of Recent Speech Corpora and Assessment Activities in East Asia (20 min) S. Itahashi, Japan; P. C. Ching, Hong Kong, China; Y. J. Lee, Korea; R. Thongprasirt, Thailand; H. C. Wang, Taiwan -The JST/CREST "Expressive Speech Processing" Project (20 min) Nick Campbell, Japan -Recent Examples for Evaluating Spoken Language Dialogue Systems (20 min) Wolfgang Minker, Germany -Overview on Recent Activities in Local Languages (20 min) Dafydd Gibbon, Germany -Development of English Speech Database Spoken By Japanese Learners (20 min) N. Minematsu, Y. Tomiyama, K. Yoshimoto, K. Shimizu, S. Nakagawa, M. Dantsuji, S. Makino, Japan -Overview of Recent Activities in Europe (20 min) Khalid Choukri, France -Strengthening the Dutch Language and Speech Technology Infrastructure (20 min) C. Cucchiarini, W. Daelemans, H. Strik, The Netherlands 3:50-4:20 -Coffee Break 4:20-6:00 -Overview on Recent Activities in Multi-modal Speech Projects (20 min) Satoshi Nakamura, Japan -Survey of Multi-modal Data Resources, Annotation Schemes and Tools (20 min) M.W. Knudsen, L. Dybkjaer, N.O. Bernsen, Denmark -Overview on Recent Activities in Corpus Annotation Tools (20 min) Steven Bird, USA -The African Speech Technology Project: Challenges for the Collection of Speech Databases (20 min) Justus C. Roux, South Africa -Research Activities in and Applications of Speech Technologies in Latin America (20 min) Elsa Mora, Manuel Rodriguez, Venezuela 6:00-6:30 -General Discussions Ways Ahead 6:30-6:40 -Closing ============================================================================ An International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialog (TSD 2001) September 10-13, 2001 Plzen, Czech Republic http://www-kiv.zcu.cz/events/tsd2001/ TSD 2001 will be an international conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue. The TSD2001 Conference continues the tradition of annual international workshops devoted to the natural language processing (corpora, texts and transcription; speech analysis, recognition and synthesis; their intertwinnig within NL dialogue systems),started by the SQEL Workshop in 1997. TOPICS OF INTEREST text corpora and tagging; transcription problems in spoken corpora; sense disambiguation; links between text and speech oriented systems; parsing issues, especially parsing problems in spoken texts; multilingual issues, especially multilingual dialog systems; information retrieval and text/topic summarization; speech modeling; speech segmentation; speech recognition; text-to-speech synthesis; speech and motions; dialog systems; development of dialog strategies; assistive technologies based on speech and dialog; applied systems and software. TUTORIALS - E. NOETH and W. ECKERT (University of Erlangen-Nuermberg, Germany) Spoken Dialogue Systems - I. KOPECEK, R.BATUSEK, P.GAURA, P. NYGRYN (Masaryk University, Brno) Dialogue systems for Impaired People - T. HARISSIS (Systema Informatics, S.A., Athens, Greece) Force Feedback Haptic Devices - N. BRAUN (ZGDV e. V., Darmstadt, Germany) Modeling of Conversational User Interface CONFERENCE PROGRAM The conference program will include tutorials, invited papers given by keynote speakers, oral presentations of accepted submissions of several kinds, short poster presentations and poster sessions. The conference will also include social events (welcome reception, conference banquet, bartender show) and trips to some of the most popular places in Sumava Mountains- Sumava National Park, Black and Devil's lake (12km hiking tour), the Laka lake (10 km hiking tour), bus-trip to the city of Klatovy and Klenova castle, and 20km hiking tour to Grosser Osser, Grosser Arber and Arbersee im Bayerischer Wald on the German side of the border. Conference Chair: FREDERICK JELINEK ----------------- Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore, USA Conference Executive: HYNEK HERMANSKY --------------------- Oregon Graduate Institute, Portland, USA: Organizing Committee < tsd2001@kiv.zcu.cz > Vaclav Matousek (chair), Helena Benesova, Kamil Ekstein, Jana Hesova, Svatava Kindlova, Jana Kleckova, Ivan Kopecek, Jana Krutisova, Josef Masek, Pavel Mautner, Roman Moucek, Jana Ocelikova, Karel Pala, Pavel Slavik, Petr Sojka Karel Tauser ============================================================================ International Workshop on Information Presentation and Natural Multimodal Dialogue Verona, Italy 14-15 December 2001 http://i3p-class.itc.it/events/ipnmd2001.html Recently, the two research areas of Intelligent Interactive Information Presentation and Natural and Multimodal Interactivity have emerged as key requirements for the usability and effectiveness of information systems. * Intelligent Interactive Information Presentation relates to the ability of a computer system to automatically produce multimodal information presentations, taking into account the specifics about the user, such as needs, interests, or knowledge, and engaging in a collaborative interaction that helps the retrieval of relevant information and its understanding on the part of the user. In order to build intelligent multimodal interactive presentation systems, different technologies must be exploited synergistically, such as natural language generation, language-based interaction and advanced user modelling. Also, the media and modalities used impose further constraints. For instance, the same meaning can be conveyed differently according to the communication channels available for the specific application setting. In particular, when several media and modalities are involved, presentations require their appropriate co-ordination. * Natural and Multimodal Interactivity has the goal of ultimately supporting people in communicating with an information system in the same ways in which they would communicate with one another. This requires not only natural output presentation but also that users are able to present input to the computer in ways which feel natural to them, e.g. by talking to the computer whilst also pointing with the hand/arm and wrinkling the eyebrows, all of which is being understood by the system. The construction of natural interactive and multimodal systems requires equal focus on input and output so that technologies such as natural language understanding, dialogue management, speech and other signal processing techniques are needed in addition to those required for output presentation. Moreover, the issue of choosing the appropriate media and modalities for the application at hand increases in complexity when both input and output must be taken into account. Workshop Goal The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from the fields of Natural Language Generation, Conversational Spoken Dialogue, Multimodal Communication, Life-like Characters, Adaptive Hypermedia, User Modelling, and technologists interested in new media and modalities. Submitted abstracts should present innovative results or introduce challenging issues in at least one of the two areas mentioned above in order to stimulate discussion. The workshop will include short presentations and brainstorming sessions initiated by invited speakers. Authors of some selected abstracts will be invited to submit a full version of their papers to be published in an international journal. The workshop is sponsored by the CLASS Project, funded by the Human Language Technologies (HLT), which is part of the Information Society Technologies Programme of the EC's 5th Framework. CLASS (http://www.class-tech.org) was created on the request of the European Commission for the purpose of stimulating cross-project collaborations among HLT projects and between HLT projects and relevant projects world-wide, and for suggesting how the Commission can better support and meet the needs of advanced HLT research projects. Researchers working on European projects are particularly encouraged to submit abstracts to the workshop. Instruction for authors * Authors are requested to send an extended abstract of three pages, including a list of keywords and most relevant references. * Abstracts should be sent in PDF or PS formats to class-ws@itc.it Important dates: Paper submission: 15 September 2001 Acceptance notification: 5 October 2001 Workshop: 14-15 December 2001 Program Committee: Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany Niels Ole Bernsen, NISLab, Denmark Justine Cassell, MIT, USA Phil Cohen, OGI, USA Laila Dybkjær, NISLab, Denmark Elena Not, ITC-irst, Italy Catherine Pelachaud, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari, Italy Donia Scott, University of Brighton, UK Oliviero Stock, ITC-irst, Italy Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI, Germany Massimo Zancanaro, ITC-irst, Italy Venue: The workshop will be held in the heart of historical Verona (http://tourism.verona.it), located only a few minutes from Verona's International Airport and only an hour and a half by train from Milan and Venice. The workshop will take place at the prestigious Due Torri Hotel (+39 045 595 044) (http://www.baglionihotels.com), set on a thirteenth century mansion and located adjacent to the city's major tourist attractions, cultural centre, and shopping areas. A limited number of rooms have been reserved until 31 October 2001, at the special rate of approximately 114 Euros/single occupancy and 95 Euros/double occupancy per person, per night. All workshop participants are requested to register, however, there will be no fee for participation. Conference costs, lunch and coffee breaks at the hotel will be covered by CLASS. The workshop will be inaugurated with a welcome dinner to be held on Thursday, 13 December 2001, followed by a talk by an invited speaker. ============================================================================ The Fifth Symposium on Natural Language Processing 2002 + Oriental COCOSDA Workshop 2002 9-11 May 2002 Hua Hin, Prachuapkirikhan, Thailand http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/ or http://www.links.nectec.or.th/itech/snlp-o-cocosda2002/ The Fifth Symposium on Natural Language Processing and Oriental COCOSDA 2002 will be jointly held in a single all-encompassing event called SNLP-O-COCOSDA 2002. This international joint conference is hosted by Thammasat University in cooperation with the Thailand's National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC). The Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SNLP) is an international conference held biannually since 1993 with the cooperative effort of a number of universities in Thailand. The purpose of SNLP is to promote research in Natural Language Processing by bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field to exchange ideas and present results from research in Natural Language Processing and various related fields. Oriental COCOSDA is an international workshop held annually by the oriental chapter of The International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques for Speech Input/Output. The first preparatory meeting was held in Hong Kong and then the past four workshops were held in Japan, Taiwan, China and Korea. The fifth workshop will be held in Thailand incorporated into SNLP-2002. Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to: - pragmatics and discourse - semantics, syntax and the lexicon - phonetics, phonology and morphology - interpreting and generating spoken and written language - linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language - information retrieval, information extraction, text mining - corpus-based language modeling - multi-lingual processing - machine translation and translation aids - natural language interfaces and dialogue systems - message and narrative understanding systems - pattern recognition - applied NLP systems - language processing in internet applications - human processing of language and speech - tools and resources for natural language processing - evaluation of natural language systems - speech processing - evaluation of speech understanding/dialogue systems - multi-modal speech corpora - speech corpus annotation tools - spoken language processing Submission Requirements and Reviewing: Papers should describe original work. They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Wherever appropriate, concrete results and evaluation should be included. Reviewing of papers will be blind. Reviewing will be managed by the Technical Committee and the International Advisory Committee who will identify a set of representative papers for submission. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. A paper accepted for presentation at SNLP-O-COCOSDA 2002 cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must indicate this on the Identification Page. Submission Process: 1. Register your intention to submit at http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/subreg/. In response, an Identification Page will be sent to your e-mail address. 2. Your paper should be eight pages or less including references. Format your paper using (preferably) LaTeX or Microsoft Word style files according the format template at http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/style/ or see a Description of Format Requirements if you cannot use these templates at the same site. 3. Prepare four (4) hard copies of the paper and attach the completed Identification Page to the first copy. Send to: Dr. Thanaruk Theeramunkong Information Technology Program, Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat Rangsit Campus, Pathumthani 12121, Thailand An Acknowledgement of your hard copy submission will be e-mailed soon after receipt. 4. For the purposes of partially automated routing of papers to reviewers only, submit one (1) electronic version of the paper in PDF (without the Identification Page) via an upload program available at: http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/submit/ or http://www.links.nectec.or.th/itech/snlp-o-cocosda2002/submit/. The submission deadline for both hard copy and electronic copy is 1 February 2002. You will be notified whether your paper has been accepted by 8 March 2002. PAPERS WHICH DO NOT MEET THESE REQUIREMENTS WILL BE SUBJECT TO REJECTION WITHOUT UNDERGOING THE APPROPIATE REVIEW PROCESS. 5. Once your paper has been accepted, submit your camera-ready copy along with a signed Copyright Release Statement by 29 March 2002. More Information For queries about complying to the submission process, e-mail snlp-o-cocosda2002qa@kind.siit.tu.ac.th sufficiently ahead of the submission deadline so that alternate arrangements can be made. For help with difficulties in electronic submission or technical problems, contact snlp-o-cocosda2002@kind.siit.tu.ac.th. Important Dates: Submission Deadline: February 1, 2002 Notification of Acceptance: March 8, 2002 Camera Ready Paper Due: March 29, 2002 SNLP2002 Conference Date: May 9-11, 2002 Related Events: - SNLP 2002, Student Session (see web sites http://kind.siit.tu.ac.th/snlp-o-cocosda2002/) Host and Co-Host: Thammasat University, Patumthani, Thailand National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), Thailand Conference Chair: - Director of Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology - Director of NECTEC Dean of Faculty of Arts, Thammasat University ============================================================================ ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on: Advanced ASR for Telecom Applications 27-29 November 2002 Palais des Papes, Avignon, France Provisional website: http://smada.research.kpn.com The IST project SMADA (Speech driven Multi-modal Automatic Directory Assistance) will organise a research workshop with the title - Advanced ASR for Telecom Applications - on 27-29 November 2002, almost one month before the conclusion of the project. The workshop, which is organised under the auspices of ISCA, will provide a platform to present the latest results of research in the field of speech recognition for advanced telecommunication applications. Of course, the SMADA project expects to be able to present the results of its work, but all submissions, including those from within the project, will be reviewed by an independent scientific committee. All researchers active in the field are invited to submit papers on their own work on ASR for telecommunication services, preferably -but not necessarily- related to Directory Assistance. Papers on all topics related to ASR for telecommunication services will be considered, but the emphasis will be on problems -and hopefully solutions- that are specific for Directory Assistance services, for example very large vocabulary very high perplexity ASR, pronunciation of foreign names, techniques for automatically learning the formulations used by customers to refer to businesses and organisations, etc. The organisers are especially keen to solicit papers on ASR in multimodal interfaces based on small mobile terminals. Contributions to the workshop will be reviewed on the basis of full papers. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2002. The programme will include a number of tutorial papers by invited speakers, who will give a critical appraisal of the state-of-the-art in several sub-fields, one of which is speech in multimodal interfaces. Invited speakers include Chin Lee, Melvyn Hunt, Kansuan Wang, Jean-Luc Gauvain, and Eric Fosler-Lussier. The venue of the workshop is the beautiful medieval Palais des Papes in Avignon. A guided tour of the Palais is part of the workshop programme. For more information about the workshop surf to http://smada.research.kpn.com and click on "events and activities". ============================================================================ IEEE Signal Processing Society 2002 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP-02) December 9-11, 2002 Marriott Beach Resort St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands MMSP-02 is the fifth international workshop on multimedia signal processing. The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in cooperation with ISCA. SCOPE: Papers are solicited for, but not limited to, the general areas: - Multimedia Processing (joint audio/visual processing, 2-D and 3-D graphics/geometry coding and animation, pre/post- processing of digital video, joint source/channel coding, data streaming, speech/ audio, image/video coding and processing) - Multimedia Databases (content recognition, analysis, representation, indexing, and retrieval) - Human-Machine Interface - Security and Data Hiding - Multimedia Networking (priority-based QoS control and scheduling, traffic engineering, soft IP multicast support, home networking technologies) - Multimedia Systems: Design, Implementation and 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 Perception (including integration of art and technology) - Multimedia Applications - Standards MMSP 2002 Schedule Special Sessions and Tutorials: Contact the respective chair by: May 10, 2002. Demos: Contact the respective chair by: May 10, 2002. Papers: Full paper submission to be received by: May 10, 2002 Notification of acceptance by: August 10, 2002 Camera-ready paper submission by: September 10, 2002 Check the workshop website for up-to-date information (will be available in October 2001). http://mmsp02.njit.edu -General Co-Chairs Yun Q. SHI, New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ shi@njit.edu Sadaoki FURUI, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan furui@cs.titech.ac.jp -Technical Co-Chairs Joern OSTERMANN , AT&T Labs Research, NJ osterman@research.att.com Xinhua ZHUANG, University of Missouri-Columbia, MO zhuang@meru-a.rnet.missouri.edu -Special Sessions & Tutorials Sankar BASU, IBM, T. J. Watson Research Center, NY sbasu@us.ibm.com -Finance Chair Hong MAN, Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ hman@stevens-tech.edu -Publicity Chair Ed WONG, Polytechnic Univ., NY wong@poly.edu -Electronic Media Chair Yi SHI, CGS Computer Associates, NJ mmsp02@oak.njit.edu -Publication Chair Gerald SCHULLER, Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ schuller@agere.com -Demo Sessions Chair Jozsef VASS, Eyeball Networks, Vancouver, Canada jozsef@eyeball.com -Far East Liaison Meng Hwa ER, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore emher@ntu.edu.sg -Europe Liaison Peter PIRSCH , University of Hannover, Germany pirsch@ims.uni-hannover.de ============================================================================ 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. ============================================================================