======================================================================== ISCApad number 40 September 20th, 2001 ======================================================================== Dear ISCA members, Welcome to ISCApad#40. Here's the table of contents of this issue: ISCA news: - Elections: - At Eurospeech 2001 (Aalborg), the composition of the Board has changed according to our statutes. Three new members Valerie Hazan, Eva Hejicova and Lin Shan Lee replaced Roger Moore, Paul Dalsgaard and Isabel Trancoso who were active in the Board for 2 terms (8 years). The Board thanked them for all the services they offered to the Speech Community and welcomed the new members for their first Board meeting. - Due to the new composition several responsibilities have changed and our page Web will be updated very soon. The most important change is the election of Sadaoki Furui as new president with Julia Hirschberg as vice-president. Another change which has an impact on IscaPad: the new responsible for the Web and the publications is Chris Wellekens. This change of responsibilities is the reason of the delayed issue of ISCApad which will be issued in the future earlier in the month as done by Isabel in the past. Please keep sending the information you want to see on ISCApad to public@isca-speech.org. - News from EUROSPEECH'2001: - The General Assembly was organised in Aalborg: a report will be posted soon on our Website. http://www.isca-speech.org - The stand was very active and sold a lot of Proceedings, CD ROM's as well as ISCA cups, umbrellas, T-shirts, watches,... Thanks to Manu. - Four young researchers were invited to have lunch with the board and to exchange ideas on the organization of a student branch and special forums for young researchers. - The ISCA medal was awarded this year to Louis Pols who recived this honour for his significant contribution to a broad spectrum of subjects, including speech analysis, speech perception, text-t-speech synthesis and synthesis systems evaluation. - Best Student Paper presented at Eurospeech 2001: Prize awarded to Liang Gu for the paper, "Split-band Perceptual Harmonic Cepstral Coefficients as Acoustic Features for Speech Recognition", by Liang Gu and Kenneth Rose, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. - Best paper published in the Speech Communication Journal during 1998-2000: Prize awarded to Mehryar Mohri and Michael Riley, AT&T Labs-Research, for their paper, "Network optimizations for large-vocabulary speech recognition", Vol. 28, May 1999, pp. 1-12. Journals: - Computer Speech and Language Special Issue on New Computational Paradigms for Acoustic Modelling in Speech Recognition - Deadline extended to 31 October 2001 (see below) - Speech Communication Special Issue on Adaptation Methods in Speech Recognition. Submission deadline: March 1st, 2002. Guest editor: Prof. Chris Wellekens, Institut Eurecom, Sophia Antipolis christian.wellekens@eurecom.fr (see below) Future events: see also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops. - Speech Technology: Applications and Technology Conference 24th & 25th September 2001, London http://www.smi-online.co.uk/speechrecognition2.asp or phone Gospesh Raichura on +44 (0) 207 827 6756 for further details. (see below) - MMSP-01 (IEEE Signal Processing Society / ISCA) 2001 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing Cannes, France, October 3-5, 2001 http://mmsp01.eurecom.fr (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) - ITRW on TEMPORAL INTEGRATION IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH Aix-en-Provence, France, 8-10 April 2002 mailto:tips@lpl.univ-aix.fr http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~tips (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 MULTI-MODAL DIALOGUE IN MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS(IDS'02) June 17-21, 2002 , Kloster Irsee, Germany http://www.sigmedia.org/ids02 (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) - InSTIL 2002 Symposium http://dbs.tay.ac.uk/instil Speech Technology in the Learning and Assistive Interface San Diego State University Advance Notice, Preliminary Registration and Call for Papers InSTIL is a Special Interest Group of CALICO, EUROCALL and ISCA and an affiliate of IALLT (see below) Job announcements: - ASSISTANT PROFESSORSHIP IN SPEECH COMMUNICATION at GRAZ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, GRAZ, AUSTRIA (see below) - UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON Department of Phonetics and Linguistics THREE RESEARCH FELLOW/RESEARCHER POSTS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE (see below) ======================================================================== JOURNALS ======================================================================== 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. ======================================================================== SPEECH COMMUNICATION Special Issue on Adaptation Methods in Speech Recognition. Papers are invited on the following topics: -speaker adaptation -channel and noise compensation -task adaptation -lexicon adaptation -language adaptation Deadline for submission: March 1st 2002. Guidelines to the authors: see any recent issue of Speech Communication. Send papers to the Guest editor: Professor Chris J.Wellekens, Institut Eurecom, 2229 route des Cretes, BP 193, F-06904 Sophia Antipolis, France. welleken@eurecom.fr ======================================================================== FUTURE EVENTS ======================================================================== Speech Technology: Applications and Technology Conference 24th & 25th September 2001, London http://www.smi-online.co.uk/speechrecognition2.asp Never before has the need for good information been more important. Speech technology, networks, systems and services are undergoing major changes. SMi's Voice Recognition conference, taking place in London on 24th - 25th September 2001, will help you keep on top of what is going on. Please visit http://smi-online.co.uk/speechrecognition2.asp or phone Gospesh Raichura on +44 (0) 207 827 6756 for further details. ======================================================================== IEEE Signal Processing Society 2001 International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing(MMSP-01) October 3-5, 2001, Radisson SAS Hotel, Cannes , France MMSP-01 is the fourth international workshop on multimedia signal processing. The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. SCOPE: Papers cover the general areas: - Multimedia Processing - Multimedia Databases - Multimedia System Design and Implementation - Multimodal Human-Machine Interface and Perception - Multimedia Networking and Communications - Multimedia Applications - Standards and related issues. Check the workshop website for up-to-date information http://mmsp01.eurecom.fr ======================================================================== 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. ======================================================================== 2nd call for communications TEMPORAL INTEGRATION IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH ISCA International Tutorial and Research Workshop Aix-en-Provence, France, 8-10 April 2002 mailto:tips@lpl.univ-aix.fr http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~tips OVERVIEW The workshop will aim to get researchers from different fields discussing their views on current issues in speech perception. The workshop's unifying focus is temporal integration of different types of sensory information in the perception and understanding of speech. Central questions concern the dynamics of speech perception, especially how the listener combines short-domain and long-domain acoustic cues to a phonemic distinction, and the nature of the perceptual "glue" that allows different chunks of acoustic information to hold together as the speech signal is processed. The workshop will comprise five oral sessions: . Phonetic and phonological issues (role of long-domain phonetic dependencies in word recognition and its implications for current research in non-segmental phonology; abstractionist vs episodic models of word recognition) . Development (time course of speech perception in infants; structure of infants' and children's word representations) . Computational modelling (dynamics of information processing in connectionist models of speech perception and word recognition) . Cognitive and neural bases (cognitive/neural underpinnings of temporal integration in speech perception; Auditory Scene Analysis and speech perception) . Pathology (relationships between temporal aspects of speech perception and dyslexia) Each session will include two or three invited papers, followed by commentaries by designated discussants, and then open discussion. In addition, there will be three poster sessions for contributed papers. Only one session will be held at a time (no parallel sessions). TRIBUTE TO PETER JUSCZYK Peter Jusczyk had kindly agreed to give an invited paper. A tribute will be paid to him during the workshop. INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE The workshop is organized by Noël Nguyen (Univ. Provence), Sarah Hawkins (Univ. Cambridge), and John Laver (Queen Margaret Univ. College, Edinburgh). SPEAKERS Alain de Cheveigné, IRCAM, Paris, France John Coleman, Oxford University, UK Carolyn Drake, LPE, CNRS, Univ. Descartes, Paris, France Gareth Gaskell, University of York, UK Stephen Goldinger, Arizona State University, USA Steve Greenberg, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, USA Stephen Grossberg, Boston University, USA Michel Habib, LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France Sarah Hawkins, University of Cambridge, UK John Local, University of York, UK Brian Moore, University of Cambridge, UK Robert Remez, Columbia University, New York, USA Stuart Rosen, University College London, UK Provisional titles are available at www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~tips. SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Ellen Bard, University of Edinburgh, UK Bill Barry, University of Saarbrücken, Germany Patrice Beddor, University of Michigan, USA Lionel Collet, Université Claude Bernard, Lyon, France Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, USA Uli Frauenfelder, Université de Genève, Switzerland Frank Guenther, Boston University, USA Bernard Laks, Université Paris-X, France Françoise Macar, CRNC-CNRS, Marseille, France William Marslen-Wilson, MRC-CBU, Cambridge, UK Dominic Massaro, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA Mario Rossi, Université de Provence, France Jean-Luc Schwartz, ICP, Grenoble, France Juan Segui, LPE, CNRS, Université Descartes, Paris, France Richard Shillcock, University of Edinburgh, UK Steve Young, University of Cambridge, UK LOCAL COMMITTEE Philippe Blache Christian Cavé Ludovic Jankowski Christine Meunier Noël Nguyen Véronique Rey Bernard Teston CALL FOR POSTER COMMUNICATIONS Poster papers are invited on the topics covered by the workshop. Abstracts not exceeding 400 words must be submitted by 1 November 2001 by e-mail (tips@lpl.univ-aix.fr) or in hard copy to the following address: ISCA Workshop on Speech Perception Laboratoire Parole et Langage Université de Provence 29, avenue Robert Schuman 13621 Aix-en-Provence France They will be selected by the Scientific Committee on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the workshop. A booklet containing the abstracts will be available at the start of the workshop. PUBLISHED PROCEEDINGS We expect to publish the invited papers and discussions, together with selected poster presentations. Oxford University Press and the Journal of Phonetics have both expressed an interest. There will be no other proceedings. In particular, camera-ready papers need not be produced before the workshop, although invited papers will be circulated beforehand to the designated discussants. REGISTRATION The fee includes registration, the welcome reception, lunch, tea/coffee during breaks, the farewell dinner, the booklet with abstracts, and an ISCA complimentary membership for non-ISCA participants. Status before 15/01/02 after 15/01/02 ISCA member 165 Euros 225 Euros non-ISCA member 210 Euros 270 Euros ISCA student 150 Euros 210 Euros non-ISCA student 165 Euros 225 Euros 10 to 15 ISCA grants will be available for students and young scientists. See www.isca-speech.org/grants.html for further information. The workshop is also sponsored by the Groupe Francophone de la Communication Parlée (www.gcfp.org), and young French-speaking scientists may apply for a GFCP grant. IMPORTANT DATES 01 Nov 2001: Submission of abstracts 15 Dec 2001: Notification of acceptance/rejection 8-10 Apr 2002: TIPS Workshop NB: Speech Prosody 2002 will be held at Aix-en-Provence from 11 to 13 April 2002. VENUE The workshop will be held in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences Humaines. Facilities include a conference room and a cafeteria. The MMSH is about 15 minutes away by bus from the city center. ACCOMMODATION A number of hotel rooms in Aix-en-Provence are available to the participants at a 10% discount rate until mid-February 2002. Bookings will be dealt with by the Aix Tourism Office. SPONSORS . Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) . International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) . Cognisud - Réseau Sud-Est des Sciences Cognitives . Groupe Francophone de la Communication Parlée (GFCP) ======================================================================== 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". ======================================================================== ITRW on MULTI-MODAL DIALOGUE IN MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS (IDS'02) June 17 through June 21, 2002 http://www.sigmedia.org/ids02 INTRODUCTION Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in this ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on MULTI-MODAL DIALOGUE IN MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS, which will be held at the Kloster Irsee in southern Germany from June 17 through June 21, 2002. The workshop will cover all aspects of spoken, but also multi-modal interaction in mobile environments and will emphasise design issues and applications. Moreover, the workshop will focus on research and results, give information on tools and run prototype demonstrators of the expected future application. After the successful ETRW on Interactive Dialogue in Multi-Modal Systems at Kloster Irsee, Germany in June 1999, it is our belief that it is now the time to arrange a workshop, where the latest developments within the area of multi-modal dialogue in mobile environments will be discussed among researchers and industrialists active in the area. The workshop is organised as a collaboration between the University of Southern Denmark, DaimlerChrysler AG and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). We welcome you to the workshop. Laila Dybkjær Natural Interactive Systems Laboratory University of Southern Denmark Denmark laila@nis.sdu.dk Paul Heisterkamp, Wolfgang Minker Speech Understanding Systems DaimlerChrysler AG Germany paul.heisterkamp@daimlerchrysler.com wolfgang.minker@daimlerchrysler.com Elisabeth Andre University of Augsburg Germany andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de WORKSHOP THEMES The workshop focuses on research issues, applications and tools concerned with the following interdisciplinary topics which are all part of general research and development of the main areas of multi-modal dialogue in mobile environments. Papers may discuss theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, general tools and techniques. Discussion papers that critically evaluate approaches or processing strategies and prototype demonstrations are especially welcome. Speech and its Interpretation -> robust algorithms for automatic speech recognition and understanding in mobile environments -> spontaneous, conversational and disfluent speech -> spoken dialogue processing -> speech and language modelling -> microphone and processing devices Design Issues -> dialogue control -> situation awareness -> pro-active dialogue -> geo-position awareness -> spatial reference (input and output) -> attention raising -> multi-modality and safety considerations -> ergonomics and usability Applications -> applications for mobile environments -> co-ordination of multiple applications -> conflict description and solving -> industrial applications and commercialised products Dialogue Systems Architecture -> integration of local and server-based dialogue -> technical integration management Evaluation of Dialogue Strategies and Systems -> strategies and paradigms especially adapted to mobile environments SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME The format of the workshop will be a non-overlapping mixture of oral and poster sessions. A number of tutorial lectures will be given by internationally recognised experts from the area of multi-modal dialogue systems. All poster sessions will be opened by an oral summary by the session chair. A number of poster sessions will be succeeded by a discussion session focussing on the subject of the session. It is our belief that this general format will ensure a lively and valuable workshop. The organisers would like to encourage researchers and industrialists to take the opportunity to bring their applications as well as their demonstrator prototypes and design tools for demonstration to the workshop. If sufficient interest is shown, a special demonstrator/poster session will be organised and followed by a discussion session. A booklet containing the abstracts of the accepted papers and the proceedings from the workshop will be available The official language of the workshop is English. At the opening of the workshop hardcopies of the abstracts and proceedings on CD-ROM will be available. An edition of Lecture Notes in Computer Science collecting the full-paper versions presented at the workshop is planned. TIMING AND DATES - -> February 15, 2002: Deadline for submission of summary - -> April 1, 2002: Notification of acceptance/rejection - -> May 15, 2002: Deadline for submission of accepted paper and advance registration - -> June 7, 2002: Final programme available on web - -> June 17 - 21, 2002: Workshop CONTACT INFORMATION Comments on IDS'02 Workshop to: ids02-info@sigdial.org Comments on webpages to: sigmedia@dfki.de To subscribe to this list: majordomo@sigdial.org with the body text: subscribe ids02-info ======================================================================= 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 ======================================================================= InSTIL 2002 Symposium The second bi-ennial symposium of InSTIL will take place in the beautiful Californian city of San Diego in a university with an international reputation in Computer Assisted Language Learning. The theme of the Symposium --------------------------- Building on the original theme of InSTIL 2000, the Symposium acknowledges the obvious, namely that many advances in the integration of ST in CALL have been driven by concerns outside CALL. The theme is also sufficiently broad to cover all the areas of interest of InSTIL members, in other words speech recognition, synthesis, analysis, manipulation, visualization, animation, talking heads, etc.... Work related to any area of Speech Therapy which impacts on Education and Learning is also welcome. Informal enquiries may be made at the point of sending an abstract. We intend the symposium to be an interdisciplinary meeting point for researchers and practitioners. Contributions relating to basic research, method development, system design and evaluation are welcome. Format of the event ------------------- This will be a full symposium open to presenters or simply members of the CALL or Speech Community not yet actively involved in the field. As in Dundee, we will run one day Training Seminars in parrallel. Each thematic session will be introduced by a tutorial presentation by an invited expert. All papers will be presented in plenary sessions with time for demonstration and discussion. Other contributions will be presented in poster sessions followed by a plenary discussion. A small exhibition is planned both for commercial systems and research prototypes. The Symposium will also see the first presentation on American soil of the poster exhibition entitled "An Illustrated History of Speech Technology in Language Learning". Proceedings ----------- The Symposium Contributions and, where possible Courseware Demos, will be published in a CD-ROM which will be available to participants at the time of the Symposium. Subsequently, revised contributions will be published in an edited volume or in the InSTIL Journal. The Venue ---------- InSTIL 2000 will happen at San Diego State University. Registration Fees ----------------- The fee for the Symposium, including CD-ROM proceedings for the two full days, Monday 25th and Tuesday 26th March 2002 is 150 US dollars Early Bird. These rates apply for registrations before 31/1/2002. Late registrants will be charged an additional 25 US dollars ($175). Important dates --------------- 31/10/01 Preliminary registration and deadline for submission of title and abstract. PLEASE SEND YOUR 200 TO 400 ABSTRACT TO P.DELCLOQUE@MSEC.AC.UK. Figures and pictures should be sent as separate attachments. 30/11/01 Notification of acceptance, instructions for authors will be sent before December 7th. 31/1/2002 Deadline for early registration and for sending 4 pages of A4 contribution. 25-26/3/02 Symposium InSTIL ------ InSTIL is a non-profit association and all net proceeds will be used to assist the activities of the SIG for the benefit of the research community. International Scientific Committee ---------------------------------- Monique Adriaen Nick Campbell Michael Cohen Ronald Cole Philippe Delcloque Rodolfo Delmonte Kathleen Egan Aline Germain-Rutherford Goh Kawai Eric Keller Ton Koet Steve Larocca Mary-Ann Lyman-Hager Philippe Martin Dominic Massaro Brigitte Zellner-Keller Organizing Committee -------------------- Philippe Delcloque Mary-Ann Lyman-Hager Payment ------- Payment can be made either by credit card, by bank transfer to or by cheque in dollars. This will be dealt with from November 2001. Early payment is encouraged to take the early bird rate. Participation can be guaranteed only after payment is received. Please do not hesitate to request more information, but reply to P.DELCLOQUE@MSEC.AC.UK rather than Philippe's address at UAD which will soon cease. This announcement will be placed on the InSTIL web site on 15/9/01. The InSTIL web site will soon migrate to http://www.instil.org/ ======================================================================== JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS ======================================================================== ASSISTANT PROFESSORSHIP IN SPEECH COMMUNICATION at GRAZ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, GRAZ, AUSTRIA Graz University of Technology (www.tugraz.at) has recently established a Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory led by Prof. Gernot Kubin, see www.inw.tugraz.at/spsc. Research and teaching activities focus on: * Theory and Algorithms for Nonlinear Signal Processing * Applications of Signal Processing for the Internet * Speech Communication The diversity of topics calls for a high degree of interaction across disciplines and with several industrial research partners. We serve students from three different study programs, i.e., electrical engineering, telematics, and audio engineering. The group has an immediate opening for an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication ("Universitaetsassistent" according to the new Austrian university law). A strong background in speech signal processing and/or spoken language engineering as well as a doctorate in a relevant discipline are required. Prior experience as a post-doctoral researcher is a plus, preferentially in speech recognition/dialogue systems research, while all specializations within speech communication are welcome. Successful candidates are expected to further develop their scientific career through top-level research, to develop and teach lecture courses and labs in speech signal processing and spoken language engineering, to supervise student projects, and to initiate and direct research projects funded from public sources or through industrial cooperations. Applicants who want to work towards the "habilitation" degree are highly welcome and will be actively supported. Fluency in English or German is a must. The gross yearly all-inclusive salary is EUR 43,600 with a teaching commitment equivalent to 6 ECTS points per semester. The contract extends over a duration of 6 years. Graz University of Technology is an equal opportunity employer. The laboratory is housed in the award-winning architecture of Riegler & Riewe. Contemporary art and culture are strong in Graz (www.graztourism.at) which is the second largest city of Austria located in the south-eastern province of Styria at the cross-roads of major continental-European cultures. It enjoys a vibrant student life with three universities and excellent leisure time opportunities in the larger Alps-Adriatic region. UNESCO has included the historic centre of Graz in its World Heritage List and Graz will be the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2003. Applications with a detailed CV, covering research, teaching, and project management experience, copies of relevant publications and two letters of reference are due by October 15, 2001. For further information, please contact Prof. Gernot Kubin at +43-699-10721996, g.kubin@ieee.org, ======================================================================= UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON Department of Phonetics and Linguistics THREE RESEARCH FELLOW/RESEARCHER POSTS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE Project 1: Synthetic talking face controlled by speech (2 posts) This project, with partners in Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK aims to provide hearing-impaired people with lipreading cues derived from acoustic speech. Posts are available for a Researcher (ref. 1) with skills in speech perception and a Research Fellow (ref. 2) with experience in speech recognition. The Researcher post is 0.8 FTE with a starting salary of GBP 21,620 pro rata and is available from 1 November 2001 to 30 September 2004. The Research Fellow post has a starting salary from GBP 21,620 to GBP 26,327 per annum depending on qualifications. This full-time post is for between 18 to 24 months depending on salary. Project 2: Use of auditory-visual speech in 2nd language training (1 post) This EPSRC-funded post (ref. 3) is available for 20 months. The main responsibility will be to carry out trials of a computer-based training system for Spanish learners of English. A background in speech perception and in phonetics or phonology at Master's or PhD level is essential. Conversational Spanish and an interest in computer-assisted learning are desirable. Starting salary between GBP 21,620 and GBP 26,327 per annum. Send requests for further information and applications including the names of two academic referees and a CV to Dr A Faulkner, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE (or email to andyf@phon.ucl.ac.uk). Tel. 020 7679 7408/7401. Closing dates are Monday, 15 October 2001 for post 1 and Wednesday, 31 October 2001 for posts 2 and 3. All salaries include a London Allowance. Further particulars can be found at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/jobs/ ======================================================================== 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. =======================================================================