INTERSPEECH 2009 - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE LOEBNER CONTEST 2009 "How can we tell if a machine can think?"  This question is the inspiration for the Loebner contest, hosted by Interspeech, which will be held in the Brighton Centre from 10:45am on Sunday 6 September. It conducts a Turing test to determine whether a computer program can successfully give the illusion of being human. We are seeking volunteers to pit themselves against the entries -- and prove to the judges just how human they are!  The test involves using a computer interface to chat (type messages) for 5 minutes with a judge, who does the same with the program, not knowing which is which. The judge has to determine which is the true human. The test involves multiple rounds and the whole competition is expected to last approximately 2 hours. Further details can be found on the conference website (http://www.interspeech2009.org/conference/exhibition.php).  If you are interested in taking part or have any questions, please contact the organiser directly, Philip Jackson (p.jackson@surrey.ac.uk). Everyone is welcome to attend. We'll be in the Rainbow Room!

Dear students,

The International Speech Communication Association ISCA is now opening an online system to build a database of résumés of researchers/students working in the various fields of speech communication.
The goal of  this service is to build a centralized place where many interested employers/corporations can access and search for potential candidates.

Please be advised that the posting service will be updated at 4 month intervals. Next switch will be mid October 2009.

We encourage all of you to upload an updated version of your résumé to: http://www.isca-speech.org/resumes/ and wish you good luck with a fruitful career.


Professor Helen Meng 

Interspeech 2009 satellite workshops
---------------------------------------------------

http://www.interspeech2009.org/conference/workshops.php


ACORNS Workshop on Computational Models of Language Evolution, Acquisition and Processing

The workshop brings together up to 50 scientists to discuss future research in language acquisition, processing and evolution. Deb Roy, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Rochelle Newman and Lou Boves will provide an overview of the state-of-art, a number of discussants from different disciplines will widen the perspective, and all participants can contribute to a roadmap.




AVSP 2009 - Audio-Visual Speech Processing

The International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP) attracts an interdisciplinary audience of psychologists, engineers, scientists and linguists, and considers a range of topics related to speech perception, production, recognition and synthesis. Recently the scope of AVSP has broadened to also include discussion on more general issues related to audiovisual communication. For example, the interplay between speech and the expressions of emotion, and the relationship between speech and manual gestures.




Blizzard Challenge Workshop

In order to better understand and compare research techniques in building corpus-based speech synthesizers on the same data, the Blizzard Challenge was devised. The basic challenge is to take the released speech database, build a synthetic voice from the data and synthesize a prescribed set of test sentences which are evaluated through listening tests. The results are presented at this workshop. Attendance at the 2009 workshop for the 4th Blizzard Challenge is open to all, not just participants in the challenge. Registration closes on 14th August 2009.




SIGDIAL - Special Interest Group on Dialogue

The SIGDIAL venue provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. The conference is sponsored by the SIGDIAL organization, which serves as the Special Interest Group in discourse and dialogue for both the Association for Computational Linguistics and theInternational Speech Communication Association.



SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education

SLaTE 2009 follows SLaTE 2007, held in Farmington, Pennsylvania, USA, and the STiLL meeting organized by KTH in Marholmen, Sweden, in 1998. The workshop will address all topics which concern speech and language technology for education. Papers will discuss theories, applications, evaluation, limitations, persistent difficulties, general research tools and techniques. Papers that critically evaluate approaches or processing strategies will be especially welcome, as will prototype demonstrations of real-world applications.




Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems is an annual workshop designed for students, post docs, and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop is meant to provide an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research, and help create a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field.

Chiba, Japan
Conference Website
ISCA is pleased to announce that INTERSPEECH 2010 will take place in Makuhari-Messe, Chiba, Japan, September 26-30, 2010. The event will be chaired by Keikichi Hirose (Univ. Tokyo), and will have as a theme "Towards Spoken Language Processing for All - Regardless of Age, Health Conditions, Native Languages, Environment, etc."

Interspeech 2011

Palazzo dei Congressi,  Italy, August 27-31, 2011.

Organizing committee

Piero Cosi (General Chair),

Renato di Mori (General Co-Chair),

Claudia Manfredi (Local Chair),

Roberto Pieraccini (Technical Program Chair),

Maurizio Omologo (Tutorials),

Giuseppe Riccardi (Plenary Sessions).

More information www.interspeech2011.org

Call for Papers

PhD Position in The Auckland University - New Zealand Speech recognition for Healthcare Robotics Description:  This project is the speech recognition component of a larger project for a speech enabled command module with verbal feedback software to facilitate interaction between aged people and robots. Including: speech generation and empathetic speech expression by the robot, speech recognition by the robot. For more details please refer to the link:  https://wiki.auckland.ac.nz/display/csihealthbots/Speech+recognition+PhD

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT POSITION IN SPEECH RECOGNITION, PROCESSING AND SYNTHESIS =========================================================================

The position is available immediately in the Speech group of the Analysis/Synthesis team at Ircam.
The Analysis/Synthesis team undertakes research and development
centered on new and advanced algorithms for analysis, synthesis and
transformation of audio signals, and, in particular, speech.

JOB DESCRIPTION:
A full-time position is open for research and development of advanced statistics
and signal processing algorithms in the field of speech recognition,
transformation and synthesis.
http://www.ircam.fr/anasyn.html  (projects Rhapsodie, Respoken,
Affective Avatars, Vivos, among others)
The applications in view are, for example,
- Transformation of the identity, type and nature of a voice
- Text-to-Speech and expressive Speech Synthesis
- Synthesis from actor and character recordings.
The principal task is the design and the development of new algorithms
for some of the subjects above and in collaboration with the other
members of the Speech group. The research environment is Linux, Matlab
and various scripting languages like Perl. The development environment
is C/C++, for Windows in particular.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE:
O Excellent experience of research in statistics, speech and signal processing
O Experience in speech recognition, automatic segmentation (e.g. HTK)
O Experience of C++ development
O Good knowledge of UNIX and Windows environments
O High productivity, methodical work, and excellent programming style.

AVAILABILITY:
The position is available in the Analysis/Synthesis team of the Research
and Ddevelopment department of Ircam to start as soon as possible.

DURATION:
The initial contract is for 1 year, and could be prolonged.

EEC WORKING PAPERS:
In order to be able to begin immediately, the candidate SHALL HAVE valid EEC working papers.

SALARY:
According to formation and experience.

TO APPLY:
Please send your CV describing in a very detailed way the level of knowledge,
expertise and experience in the fields mentioned above (and any other
relevant information, recommendations in particular) preferably by email to:

 Xavier.Rodet@ircam.fr (Xavier Rodet, Head of the Analysis/Synthesis team)

Or by fax: (33 1) 44 78 15 40, attention of Xavier Rodet

Or by post to: Xavier Rodet, IRCAM, 1 Place Stravinsky, 75004 Paris, France 

 Several Ph.D. Positions and Ph.D. or Postdoc Scholarships, Universität Bielefeld

-       speech synthesis and/or recognition

-       discourse prosody

-       laboratory phonology

-       speech and language rhythm research

-       multimodal speech (technology)

=============================================================================
PhD POSITION in MACHINE TRANSLATION AND SPEECH UNDERSTANDING (starting
09/09)
=============================================================================

The PORT-MEDIA (ANR CONTINT 2008-2011) is a cooperative project
sponsored by the French National Research Agency, between the University
of Avignon, the University of Grenoble, the University of Le Mans, CNRS
at Nancy and ELRA (European Language Resources Association).  PORT-MEDIA
will address the multi-domain and multi-lingual robustness and
portability of spoken language understanding systems. More specifically,
the overall objectives of the project can be summarized as:
- robustness: integration/coupling of the automatic speech recognition
component in the spoken language understanding process.
- portability across domains and languages: evaluation of the genericity
and adaptability of the approaches implemented in the
understanding systems, and development of new techniques inspired by
machine translation approaches.
- representation: evaluation of new rich structures for high-level
semantic knowledge representation.

The PhD thesis will focus on the multilingual portability of speech
understanding systems. For example, the candidate will investigate
techniques to fast adapt an understanding system from one language to
another and creating low-cost resources with (semi) automatic methods,
for instance by using automatic alignment techniques and lightly
supervised translations. The main contribution will be to fill the gap
between the techniques currently used in the statistical machine
translation and spoken language understanding fields.

The thesis will be co-supervised by Fabrice Lefèvre, Assistant Professor
at LIA (University of Avignon) and Laurent Besacier, Assistant Professor
at LIG (University of Grenoble). The candidate will spend 18 months at
LIG then 18 months at LIA.

The salary of a PhD position is roughly 1,300€ net per month. Applicants
should hold a strong university degree entitling them to start a
doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline
(Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, etc).
The applicants should be fluent in English. Competence in French is
optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill
during training. All applicants should have very good programming skills.

For further information, please contact Fabrice Lefèvre (Fabrice.Lefevre
at univ-avignon.fr) AND Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr).

====================================================================================
Sujet de thèse en Traduction Automatique et Compréhension de la Parole
(début 09/09)
====================================================================================

Le projet PORT-MEDIA (ANR CONTINT 2008-2011) concerne la robustesse et
la portabilité multidomaine et multilingue des systèmes de compréhension
de l'oral. Les partenaires sont le LIG, le LIA, le LORIA, le LIUM et
ELRA (European Language Ressources Association). Plus précisément, les
trois objectifs principaux du projet concernent :
-la robustesse et l'intégration/couplage du composant de reconnaissance
automatique de la parole dans le processus de compréhension.
-la portabilité vers un nouveau domaine ou langage : évaluation des
niveaux de généricité et d'adaptabilité des approches implémentées dans
les systèmes de compréhension.
-l’utilisation de représentations sémantiques de haut niveau pour
l’interaction langagière.

Ce sujet de thèse concerne essentiellement la portabilité multilingue
des différents composants d’un système de compréhension automatique ;
l’idée étant d’utiliser, par exemple, des techniques d’alignement
automatique et de traduction pour adapter rapidement un système de
compréhension d’une langue vers une autre, en créant des ressources à
faible coût de façon automatique ou semi-automatique. L'idée forte est
de rapprocher les techniques de traduction automatique et de
compréhension de la parole.

Cette thèse est un co-encadrement entre deux laboratoires (Fabrice
Lefevre, LIA & Laurent Besacier, LIG). Les 18 premiers mois auront lieu
au LIG, les 18 suivants au LIA.

Le salaire pour un etudiant en thèse est d'environ 1300€ net par mois.
Nous recherchons des étudiants ayant un Master (ou équivalent) mention
Recherche dans le domaine de l'Informatique, et des compétences dans les
domaines suivants : traitement des langues écrites et/ou parlées,
apprentissage automatique...

Pour de plus amples informations ou candidater, merci de contacter
Fabrice Lefèvre (Fabrice.Lefevre at univ-avignon.fr) ET Laurent Besacier
(Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr).

-------------------------- 

PhD POSITION in MACHINE TRANSLATION AND SPEECH UNDERSTANDING (starting 09/09)
=============================================================================

The PORT-MEDIA (ANR CONTINT 2008-2011) is a cooperative project sponsored by the French National Research Agency, between the University of Avignon, the University of Grenoble, the University of Le Mans, CNRS at Nancy and ELRA (European Language Resources Association).  PORT-MEDIA will address the multi-domain and multi-lingual robustness and portability of spoken language understanding systems. More specifically, the overall objectives of the project can be summarized as:
- robustness: integration/coupling of the automatic speech recognition component in the spoken language understanding process.
- portability across domains and languages: evaluation of the genericity and adaptability of the approaches implemented in the
understanding systems, and development of new techniques inspired by machine translation approaches.
- representation: evaluation of new rich structures for high-level semantic knowledge representation.

The PhD thesis will focus on the multilingual portability of speech understanding systems. For example, the candidate will investigate techniques to fast adapt an understanding system from one language to another and creating low-cost resources with (semi) automatic methods, for instance by using automatic alignment techniques and lightly supervised translations. The main contribution will be to fill the gap between the techniques currently used in the statistical machine translation and spoken language understanding fields.

The thesis will be co-supervised by Fabrice Lefèvre, Assistant Professor at LIA (University of Avignon) and Laurent Besacier, Assistant Professor at LIG (University of Grenoble). The candidate will spend 18 months at LIG then 18 months at LIA.

The salary of a PhD position is roughly 1,300€ net per month. Applicants should hold a strong university degree entitling them to start a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, etc). The applicants should be fluent in English. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during training. All applicants should have very good programming skills.

For further information, please contact Fabrice Lefèvre (Fabrice.Lefevre at univ-avignon.fr) AND Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr). 

Thèse Cifre indexation de données multimédia
These
DeadLine: 01/11/2009
merialdo@eurecom.fr
http://bmgroup.eurecom.fr/
The Multimedia Communications Department of EURECOM, in partnership  the travel service provider company AMADEUS, invites applications for a PhD position on multimedia indexing. The goal of the thesis is to study new techniques to organize large quantities of multimedia information, specifically images and videos, for improving services to travelers. This includes managing images and videos from providers as well as from users about places, locations, events, etc… The approach will be based on the most recent techniques in multimedia indexing, and will benefit from the strong research experience of EURECOM in this domain, joint to the industrial experience of AMADEUS.
We are looking for very good and motivated students, with a strong knowledge in image and video processing, statistical and probabilistic modeling, for the theoretical part, and a good C/C++ programming ability for the experimental part. English is required. The successful candidate will be employed by AMADEUS in Sophia Antipolis, and will strongly interact with the researchers at EURECOM.
Applicants should email a resume, letter of motivation, and all relevant information to.with
Prof. Bernard Merialdo
merialdo@eurecom.fr
The project will be conducted within AMADEUS (http://www.amadeus.com/), a world leader in provision of solutions to the travel industry to manage the distribution and selling of travel services. The company is the leading Global Distribution System (GDS) and the biggest processor of travel bookings in the world. Their main development center is located in Sophia Antipolis, France, and employs more than 1200 engineers. The research will be supervised by EURECOM (http://www.eurecom.fr), a graduate school and research center in communication systems, whose activity includes corporate, multimedia and mobile communications. EURECOM currently counts about 20 professors, 10 post-docs, 170 MS and 60 PhD students, and is involved in many European research projects and joint collaborations with industry. EURECOM is also located in Sophia-Antipolis, a major European technology park for telecommunications research and development in the French Riviera.
 

Proposition de sujet de thèse 2009
Ecole Doctorale EDISCE (http://www-sante.ujf-grenoble.fr/edisce/)
Financement ANR (http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~schwartz/Multistap/Multistap.html)

Analyse de scènes de parole : le problème du liage audio-visuo-moteur à la lumière de données comportementales et neurophysiologiques


Deux questions importantes traversent les recherches actuelles sur le traitement cognitif de la parole : la question de la multisensorialité (comment se combinent les informations auditives et visuelles dans le cerveau) et celle des interactions perceptuo-motrices.

Une question manquante est selon nous celle du « liage » (binding) : comment dans ces processus de traitement auditif ou audiovisuel, le cerveau parvient-il à « mettre ensemble » les informations pertinentes, à éliminer les « bruits », à construire les « flux de parole » pertinents avant la prise de décision ? Plus précisément, les objets élémentaires de la scène de parole sont les phonèmes, et des modules spécialisés auditifs, visuels, articulatoires contribuent au processus d'identification phonétique, mais il n'a pas été possible jusqu'à présent d'isoler leur contribution respective, ni la manière dont ces contributions sont fusionnées. Des expériences récentes permettent d'envisager le processus d'identification phonétique comme étant de nature non hériarchique, et essentiellement instancié par des opérations associatives. La thèse consistera à développer d’autres paradigmes expérimentaux originaux, mais aussi à mettre en place des expériences de neurophysiologie et neuroimagerie (EEG, IRMf) disponibles au laboratoire et dans son environnement Grenoblois, afin de déterminer la nature et le fonctionnement des processus de groupement audiovisuel des scènes de parole, en relation avec le mécanismes de production.

Cette thèse se réalisera dans le cadre d’un projet ANR « Multistap » (Multistabilité et groupement perceptif dans l’audition et dans la parole » http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~schwartz/Multistap/Multistap.html). Ce projet fournira à la fois le support de financement pour la bourse de thèse, et un environnement stimulant pour le développement des recherches, en partenariat avec des équipes de spécialistes d’audition et de vision, de Paris (DEC ENS), Lyon (LNSCC) et Toulouse (Cerco).

Responsables
Jean-Luc Schwartz (DR CNRS, HDR) : 04 76 57 47 12,
Frédéric Berthommier (CR CNRS) : 04 76 57 48 28
Jean-Luc.Schwartz, Frederic.Berthommier@gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr

PhD position in Automatic Speech Recognition
=====================================

Starting in september-october 2009.

The ASH (Attelage de Systèmes Hétérogènes) project is a project funded by the ANR (French National Research Agency). Three French academic laboratories are involved: LIUM (University of Le Mans), LIA (University of Avignon) and IRISA (Rennes).

The main objective of the ASH project is to define and experiment an original methodological framework for the integration of heterogeneous automatic speech recognition systems. Integrating heterogeneous systems, and hence heterogeneous sources of knowledge, is a key issue in ASR but also in many other applicative fields concerned with knowledge integration and multimodality.

Clearly, the lack of a generic framework to integrate systems operating with different viewpoints, different knowledges and at different levels is a strong limitation which needs to be overcome: the definition of such a framework is the fundamental challenge of this work.

By defining a rigorous and generic framework to integrate systems, significant scientific progresses are expected in automatic speech recognition. Another objective of this project is to enable the efficient and reliable processing of large data streams by combining systems on the y.
At last, we expect to develop an on-the-fly ASR system as a real-time demonstrator of this new approach.

The thesis will be co-supervised by Paul Deléglise, Professeur at LIUM, Yannick Estève, Assistant Professor  at LIUM and Georges Linarès, Assistant Professor at LIA. The candidate will work at Le Mans (LIUM), but will regularly spend a few days in Avignon (LIA)

Applicants should hold a strong university degree entitling them to start a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (Computer Science, Human Language Technology, Machine Learning, etc).

The applicants for this PhD position should be fluent in English or in French. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during training. This position is funded by the ANR.

Strong software skills are required, especially Unix/linux, C, Java, and a scripting language such as Perl or Python.

Contacts:
Yannick Estève: yannick.esteve@lium.univ-lemans.fr
Georges Linarès: georges.linares@univ-avignon.fr 

Two post-doctoral positions in the framework of the Carnegie Mellon
University-Portugal program are available at the Spoken Language Systems
Lab (www.l2f.inesc-id.pt), INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal.
Positions are for a fixed term contract of length up to two and a half
years, renewable in one year intervals, in the scope of the research
projects PT-STAR (Speech Translation Advanced Research to and from
Portuguese) and REAP.PT (Computer Aided Language Learning – Reading
Practice), both financed by FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology).
The starting date for these positions is September 2009, or as soon as
possible thereafter.
Candidates should send their CVs (in .pdf format) before July 15th, to
the email addresses given below, together with a motivation letter.
Questions or other clarification requests should be emailed to the same
addresses.
======== PT-STAR (project CMU-PT/HuMach/0039/2008) ========
Topic: Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation
Description: We seek candidates with excellent knowledge in statistical
approaches to machine translation (and if possible also speech
technologies) and strong programming skills. Familiarity with the
Portuguese language is not at all mandatory, although the main source
and target languages are Portuguese/English.
Email address for applications: lcoheur at l2f dot inesc-id dot pt
======== REAP.PT (project CMU-PT/HuMach/0053/2008) ========
Topic: Computer Aided Language Learning
Description: We seek candidates with excellent knowledge in automatic
question generation (multiple-choice synonym questions, related word
questions, and cloze questions) and/or measuring the reading difficulty
of a text (exploring the combination of lexical features, grammatical
features and statistical models). Familiarity with a romance language is
recommended, since the target language is Portuguese.
Email address for applications: nuno dot mamede at inesc-id dot pt

POSTDOC POSITION in SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR UNDER-RESOURCED LANGUAGES (18 months ; starting January 2010 or later) IN GRENOBLE (France)

=============================================================================

PI (ANR BLANC 2009-2012) is a cooperative project sponsored by the French National Research Agency, between the University of Grenoble (France), the University of Avignon (France), and the International Research Center MICA in Hanoï (Vietnam).


PI addresses spoken language processing (notably speech recognition) for under-resourced languages (or ?-languages). From a scientific point of view, the interest and originality of this project consists in proposing viable innovative methods that go far beyond the simple retraining or adaptation of acoustic and linguistic models. From an operational point of view, this project aims at providing a free open source ASR development kit for ?-languages. We plan to distribute and evaluate such a development kit by deploying ASR systems for new under-resourced languages with very poor resources from Asia (Khmer, Lao) and Africa (Bantu languages).

The POSTDOC position focus on the development of ASR for two low-ressourced languages from Asia and Africa. This includes : supervising the ressource collection (in relation with the language partners), propose innovative methods to quickly develop ASR systems for these languages, evaluation., etc.

The salary of the POSTDOC position is roughly 2300€ net per month. Applicants should hold a PhD related to spoken language processing. The applicants should be fluent in English. Competence in French is optional, though applicants will be encouraged to acquire this skill during the postdoc.

For further information, please contact Laurent Besacier (Laurent.Besacier at imag.fr).

  Vocal Prosthesis Based on Machine Learning(2)

Two PhD students for Second Language Acquisition/Computational Linguistics (1,0 fte)

Faculty of Arts, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Vacancy number: 23.24.09
Closing date: 1 September 2009

Job description
As a PhD student you will take part in the larger research project ‘Corrective feedback and the acquisition of syntax in oral proficiency’. The goal of this research project is to investigate the essential role of corrective feedback in L2 learning of syntax in oral proficiency. It will proceed from a granular level investigating the short-term effects of different types of feedback moves on different types of learners, to a global level by studying whether the granular, short-term effects also generalize to actual learning in the long term. Corrective feedback will be provided through a CALL system that makes use of automatic speech recognition. This will make it possible to assess the learner’s oral production online and to provide corrective feedback immediately under near-optimal conditions.
As a PhD student you will study which feedback moves lead to immediate uptake and acquisition in learners with a high level of education (PhD1) or learners with a low level of education (PhD2).
You are expected to start in November 2009. You will be part of an international and interdisciplinary team and will work in a motivating research environment.
For more information, see: http://lands.let.ru.nl/~strik/research/ASOP.html; http://www.ru.nl/cls/.

Requirements
You must have:
- a Master’s degree in (Applied) Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Psycholinguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science or Education;
- programming skills (e.g. Matlab, Perl);
- an interest in second language acquisition;
- a working knowledge of Dutch and a good command of the English language.

Organization
The Faculty of Arts consists of eleven departments in the fields of language and culture, history, history of arts, linguistics and business communication, which together cater for about 2,800 students and collaborate closely in teaching and research. The project will be carried out at the Centre for Language Studies as part of the Linguistic Information Processing and Communicative Competences research programmes.
Website: http://www.ru.nl/cls/

Conditions of employment
Employment: 1,0 fte

Additional conditions of employment
The total duration of the contract is 3.5 years. The PhD students will receive an initial contract for 18 months with possible extension by 2 years.
The starting gross salary is €2,042 per month based on full-time employment.

The short-listed applicants will be interviewed in September 2009

Other Information
Please include:
- a copy of your university degree (in English or Dutch)
- a list of all your university marks (in English or Dutch)
- a motivation letter with details of research interests/experience, programming skills and knowledge of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics.

Additional Information
Prof. Roeland van Hout (r.vanhout@let.ru.nl)
Dr. Catia Cucchiarini (c.cucchiarini@let.ru.nl)
Dr. Helmer Strik (h.strik@let.ru.nl)

Application
You can apply for the job (mention the vacancy number 23.24.09) before 1 September 2009 by sending your application -preferably by email- to:

RU Nijmegen, Faculty of Arts, Personnel Department
P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
E-mail: vacatures@let.ru.nl

Acoustic Signal Detection Engineer

OSU’s Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies offers one year of support, with the possibility of additional support, for a researcher on a project studying passive acoustic monitoring of large whales under the direction of Dr. David Mellinger. This is a full-time (1.0 FTE), 12-month-per-year, fixed-term Faculty Research Assistant position. Individuals with a Ph.D. may be appointed as a Research Associate (Postdoc). To see full details and to apply, please see http://oregonstate.edu/jobs, then search for posting #0004462 (the leading zeros are required). For questions, please email Jessica.Waddell@oregonstate.edu or David.Mellinger@oregonstate.edu. For full consideration, apply by September 21, 2009. OSU is an Affirmative Action/Office of Equal Opportunity employer. 

PHD OPPORTUNITY:

A full-time 3 year PhD position is available at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

The position is within the Speech and Audio Research Lab, part of Smart Systems Theme of the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, and the Information Securities Institute.  The lab conducts world class research and  postgraduate training in a variety of speech and audio processing areas (speaker recognition, diarisation, speech detection, speech enhancement, multi-microphone speech technology, automatic language identification, keyword spotting)

Project title: Speaker Diarisation
Starting date: November/December 2009
Research fields:  Speech and audio processing, pattern recognition, bayesian theory, machine learning, biometrics and security.
Project Description:  
Large volumes of spoken audio are being recorded on a daily basis and audio archives of these recordings around the world are expanding rapidly. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to efficiently and automatically search, index and access information from these audio information sources. Speaker diarisation is an important, fundamental task in this process which aims to annotate the audio stream with speaker identities for each temporal region—determining “who spoke when.”

Current diarisation systems are susceptible to a number of impediments including wide variability in the acoustic characteristics of recordings from different sources, differences in the number of speakers present in a recording, the dominance of speakers, and the style and structure of the speech.  All can affect the diarisation performance dramatically.

The aim of this research is to develop a framework and methods for better exploiting the sources of prior information that are generally available in many applications with the view to making portable, robust speaker diarisation systems a reality.  Examples of relevant prior information include identities of participating speakers, models describing the characteristics of speakers in general or of a specific known speaker, models of the effects that recording conditions and domains have on acoustic features and knowledge of the recording domain.

Information for Applicants:
Applicants should hold a strong university degree which would entitle them to embark on a doctorate (Masters/diploma or equivalent) in a relevant discipline (computer science, mathematics, computer systems engineering etc). International students are encouraged to apply. The project is part of a ARC linkage between QUT, a commercial partner, and two  partner speech/audio processing laboratories at European universities.  Opportunities for exchange/internships at these partner institutions exist.  The opportunity also exists for cotutelle PhD with the French partner university.  

Information on Brisbane and Queensland University of Technology can be found at www.qut.edu.au

The salary of the PhD piosition is provided as a Linkage APAI scholarship ($26,669 in 2009, indexed annually) + top-up scholarship (approx $5,000pa). The salary is tax-exempt.   
Funding is also available for conference/internship travel.

Interested students are encouraged to contact both the project leader Prof. Sridha Sridharan  (s.sridharan@qut.edu.au), and Dr Brendan Baker (bj.baker@qut.edu.au).  

Applicants are asked to provide:
- cover letter describing your interest in the project
- curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, disciplines covered (list of courses), publications, and other relevant experience.  
- sample of written work (research papers in English) is also desirable.  
- references along with contact details

As the start date is later this year, potential applicants are encouraged to contact the project coordinators as soon as possible to register their interest.

Deadlines for applications: 10 September 2009. (international applicants should apply as soon as possible)

PhD Positions

The Applied Informatics Group, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University is looking for PhD candidates for grants and project positions in the following areas:

* Dialog modeling for human-robot interaction

* Speech signal modelling and analysis for speech recognition and synthesis

* Modeling and combining bottom-up with top-down attentional-processes

We invite applications from motivated young scientists with a background in computer science, linguistics, psychology, robotics, mathematics, cognitive science or similar areas, that are willing to contribute to the cross-disciplinary research agenda of our research group. Research and development are directed towards understanding the processes and functional constituents of cognitive interaction, and establishing cognitive interfaces and robots that facilitate the use of complex technical systems. Bielefeld University provides a unique environment for research in cognitive and intelligent systems by bringing together researchers from all over the world in a variety of relevant disciplines under the roof of central institutions such as the Excellence Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) or the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab).

Successful candidates should hold an academic degree (MSc/Diploma) in a related discipline and have a strong interest in research and social robotics.

All applications should include: a short cover letter indicating the motivation and research interests of the candidate, a CV including a list of publications, and relevant certificates of academic qualification.

Bielefeld University is an equal opportunity employer. Women are especially encouraged to apply and in the case of comparable competences and qualification, will be given preference. Bielefeld University explicitly encourages disabled people to apply. Bielefeld University offers a family friendly environment and special arrangements for child care and double carrier opportunities.

Please send your application with reference to one of the three offered research areas no later than 15.9.2009 to Ms Susanne Hoeke (shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de).

Contact:

Susanne Hoeke

AG Applied Informatics

Faculty of Technology

Universitaetsstr. 21-23

33615 Bielefeld

Germany

Email: shoeke@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de

Le laboratoire LIG propose un sujet de recherche
    pour un post-doctorant
    CDD de 12 mois
    Grenoble, campus
    année 2009-2010

Sujet de recherche
------------------
Apprentissage Parallèle pour l'Indexation Multimédia Sémantique
Mots-clés : Apprentissage, Parallélisme, Indexation Multimédia.

Contexte
--------
Le poste est proposé dans le contexte du projet APIMS (Apprentissage
Parallèle pour l'Indexation Multimédia Sémantique) soutenu par le pôle
MSTIC de l’Université Joseph Fourrier.

La quantité de documents image et vidéo numériques croît de manière
exponentielle depuis de nombreuses années et cette tendance devrait se
poursuivre encore longtemps grâce aux progrès technologiques dans ce
domaine. L’indexation par concepts des documents image et vidéo est une
nécessité pour gérer de manière efficace les masses de données
correspondantes. En effet, les mots-clés nécessaires pour la recherche
par le contenu n’y sont pas explicitement présents comme dans le cas
des documents textuels. La recherche à partir d’exemples ou à partir
de caractéristiques dites « de bas niveau » présente également de
sérieuses limitations : les exemples nécessaires ne sont généralement
pas disponibles et les caractéristiques de bas niveau ne sont pas
aisément manipulables et interprétables par un utilisateur. Par ailleurs,
une similarité au niveau de ces caractéristiques ne correspond pas
forcément à une similarité au niveau sémantique. L’indexation par
concepts est un grand challenge en raison du « fossé sémantique »
séparant le contenu brut de ces documents (pixels, échantillons audio)
et les concepts qui on un sens pour un utilisateur.

Des progrès importants ont été accomplis ces dernières années, notamment
dans le cadre des campagnes d’évaluation TRECVID [1]. Ces campagnes
annuelles organisées par le National Institute of Standards and
Technologies (NIST) américain fournissent des données en quantité
importante, des tâches bien définies, des « vérités terrain », des
métriques et des outils d’évaluation associés. Elles contribuent
largement à fédérer les recherches dans le domaine de l’indexation
et de la recherche par le contenu des documents vidéo.
Les méthodes fonctionnant le mieux actuellement sont des méthodes
statistiques fonctionnant par apprentissage supervisé à partir
d’exemples annotés manuellement. Des caractéristiques dites de bas
niveau sont extraites à partir du signal audio ou image brut (des
histogrammes de couleur ou des transformées de Gabor par exemple) et
sont ensuite envoyées à des classifieurs qui sont entraînés à partir
d’exemples positifs et négatifs des concepts à reconnaître. Pour
obtenir de bons résultats, il est nécessaire de multiplier les
caractéristiques utilisées et de les combiner en utilisant des
techniques de fusion appropriées. Un gain supplémentaire est obtenu
en utilisant les relations entre les concepts comme les relations
statistiques (cooccurrences) ou logiques (générique-spécifique par
exemple).

Les principes généraux étant les mêmes, les différences entre les
approches concernent les choix sur les caractéristiques, sur les
outils de classification et/ou de fusion, et sur la façon de prendre
en compte le contexte. La qualité et la quantité des exemples positifs
et négatifs utilisés fait également une différence importante. L’état
de l’art actuel est l’extraction conjointe de plusieurs centaines de
concepts définis dans l’ontologie LSCOM [2]. Cependant, malgré les
efforts très importants fournis par un grand nombre d’équipes (plus
de 40 équipes ont participé à la tâche d’extraction de concepts dans
les plans vidéo lors de la campagne TRECVID 2008), la précision
moyenne des meilleurs systèmes ne dépasse pas 20%.

L’équipe MRIM du LIG a développé des méthodes et des outils pour
l’extraction automatique de concepts dans les plans vidéo et a
obtenu des résultats un peu supérieurs à la moyenne dans les
campagnes TRECVID 2005 à 2007 [3]. L’objectif de ce projet est
d’améliorer de manière importante ces méthodes et de leur faire
rejoindre voire définir l’état de l’art dans le domaine. Pour
cela, il faut d’une part les optimiser en prenant en compte tous
les facteurs importants et de leur ajouter un certain nombre
d’innovations comme l’utilisation de concepts de niveau
intermédiaire, la combinaison de méthodes génériques et
spécifiques, et l’apprentissage actif pour l’amélioration de
la quantité et qualité de l’annotation servant à l’entraînement
des systèmes.

Un des facteurs limitant est la puissance de calcul nécessaire.
Il faut en effet entraîner et évaluer les systèmes sur plusieurs
centaines de concepts et sur plusieurs dizaines de milliers
d’images ou de plans vidéo. Il faut en outre faire cela en
étudiant de multiples combinaisons de caractéristiques de bas
et moyen niveau, de méthodes de classification et de méthodes
de fusion. Nous envisageons pour cela d’utiliser les ressources
du projet GRID 5000 [4] afin de pouvoir étudier à grande échelle
l’influence combinée de ces différents facteurs. Dans sa version
simple, le problème se parallélise assez facilement (on peut faire
faire l’apprentissage et l’évaluation d’un concept sur un
processeur) mais lorsqu’on veut utiliser le contexte, c'est-à-dire
les relations statistiques ou ontologiques des concepts entre eux,
il y a lieu de faire coopérer les différents processus entre eux
et cela devient un réel problème de programmation parallèle.
L’équipe MESCAL du LIG dispose d’une grande expertise dans ce
domaine et participera à l’étude et à la mise en œuvre des versions
parallèles des méthodes d’extraction de concepts.

L’utilisation de la multi modalité naturellement présente dans
les documents vidéo est également essentielle pour la performance
des systèmes d’indexation par concepts. L’équipe GETALP du LIG
dispose de compétences dans le domaine du traitement du signal
audio et de parole et participera à la définition et à
l’optimisation des caractéristiques de bas et moyen niveau pour
l’indexation des concepts à partir de la piste audio. De même,
l’équipe GPIG de GIPSA-Lab dispose de compétences dans l’analyse
et l’indexation du mouvement dans les documents vidéo et participera
à la définition et à l’optimisation des caractéristiques de bas et
moyen niveau pour l’indexation des concepts à partir du mouvement
dans la piste image.

Références
[1] Smeaton, A. F., Over, P., and Kraaij, W. TRECVID: evaluating
    the effectiveness of information retrieval tasks on digital video.
    In Proceedings of the 12th Annual ACM international Conference on
    Multimedia, New York, NY, USA, October 10-16, 2004.
[2] M. Naphade, J.R. Smith, J. Tesic, S.-F. Chang, W. Hsu,
    L. Kennedy, A. Hauptmann and J. Curtis, Large-Scale Concept
    Ontology for Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia 13(3), pp. 86-91, 2006.
[3] Stéphane Ayache, Georges Quénot and Jérôme Gensel, CLIPS-LSR
    Experiments at TRECVID 2006, TRECVID’2006 Workshop, Gaithersburg,
    MD, USA, November 13-14, 2006.
[4] Bolze, R. et al, Grid'5000: a large scale and highly reconfigurable
    experimental Grid testbed International Journal of High Performance
    Computing Applications, 20(4), pp 481-494, 2006.

Description du poste
--------------------
La première partie du travail consistera à mettre en œuvre des
versions parallèles des méthodes de classification développées dans
l’équipe MRIM et à utiliser ces versions parallèles pour optimiser
conjointement les différents éléments (jeux de caractéristiques,
opérateurs de classification et opérateurs de fusion) intervenant
dans celles-ci. Cette optimisation devra être faire de manière aussi
systématique que possible. Compte tenu de l’aspect hautement
combinatoire et du coût de calcul (même sur une architecture
parallèle) de celle-ci, des méthodes heuristiques appropriées devront
être étudiées et mises en œuvre afin d’obtenir le meilleur résultat
dans un temps donné.

Dans une deuxième partie, il faudra mettre en œuvre des approches
intégrées pour la reconnaissance simultanée de plusieurs centaines
de concepts en prenant en compte dès les premiers niveaux de
l’apprentissage les corrélations existant entre ceux-ci.

Ces travaux seront, dans la mesure du possible, planifiés en fonction
des évaluations TRECVID sur la détection de concepts dans les plans
vidéo. Les expérimentations on lieu en général pendant l’été
(juillet-août) et les campagnes s’étendent de février à novembre de
l’année en cours. L’objectif est de pouvoir évaluer lors des campagnes
2009 et 2010 ce qu’il est prévu de développer dans la première et la
deuxième partie décrites ci-dessus.

Type de poste et localisation
-----------------------------
CDD de 12 mois au laboratoire LIG.

Intégration dans l’équipe MRIM du LIG (recherche en recherche
d’information multimédia et systèmes de recommandation) et
collaboration avec les équipes GETALP et MESCAL du LIG et
l’équipe GPIG du laboratoire GIPSA.

Localisation : Grenoble, campus de Saint Martin d’Hères.
Salaire : 2 000 euros nets / mois environ.

Formation et compétences nécessaires
------------------------------------
Profil demandé
o Expérience importante et compétences reconnues en conception –
  développement de logiciels.
o Connaissances et expérience significative en langage C ou C++.
o Thèse dans l’un des domaines suivants : programmation parallèle,
  systèmes de recherche d’information, apprentissage automatique,
  traitement statistique des données, traitement d’images.

Compétences complémentaires intéressantes pour le poste
o Expérience dans l’optimisation des performances des algorithmes.
o Expérience du travail en équipe.

Date limite de candidature
--------------------------
Les candidatures peuvent être déposée jusqu’au 30 septembre 2009.
Le poste est à pourvoir début novembre ou décembre 2009 au plus tard.
Dès qu'une candidature sera retenue, le poste sera affecté.

Contact
-------
Georges Quénot – Laboratoire LIG – Equipe MRIM – http://mrim.imag.fr/georges.quenot
Adresse : Bâtiment B – 385 avenue de la Bibliothèque – 38400 Saint Martin d’Hères
E-mail : Georges.Quenot@imag.fr – Tél : 04 76 63 58 55

 SPECIAL ISSUE OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION

NON-NATIVE SPEECH PERCEPTION IN ADVERSE CONDITIONS: IMPERFECT KNOWLEDGE, IMPERFECT SIGNAL

Much work in phonetics and speech perception has focused on doubly-optimal conditions, in which the signal reaching listeners is unaffected by distorting influences and in which listeners possess native competence in the sound system. However, in practice, these idealised conditions are rarely met. The processes of speech production and perception thus have to account for imperfections in the state of knowledge of the interlocutor as well as imperfections in the signal received. In noisy settings, these factors combine to create particularly adverse conditions for non-native listeners.

The purpose of the Special Issue is to assemble the latest research on perception in adverse conditions with special reference to non-native communication. The special issue will bring together, interpret and extend the results emerging from current research carried out by engineers, psychologists and phoneticians, such as the general frailty of some sounds for both native and non-native listeners and the strong non-native disadvantage experienced for categories which are apparently equivalent in the listeners’ native and target languages.

Papers describing novel research on non-native speech perception in adverse conditions are welcomed, from any perspective including the following. We especially welcome interdisciplinary contributions.

• models and theories of L2 processing in noise
• informational and energetic masking
• role of attention and processing load
• effect of noise type and reverberation
• inter-language phonetic distance
• audiovisual interactions in L2
• perception-production links
• the role of fine phonetic detail

GUEST EDITORS

Maria Luisa Garcia Lecumberri (Department of English, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, Spain).
garcia.lecumberri@ehu.es

Martin Cooke (Ikerbasque and Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Spain).
m.cooke@ikerbasque.org

Anne Cutler (Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and MARCS Auditory Laboratories, Sydney, Australia).
anne.cutler@mpi.nl


DEADLINE

Full papers should be submitted by 31st July 2009

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Authors should consult the “guide for authors”, available online at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/specom, for information about the preparation of their manuscripts. Papers should be submitted via http://ees.elsevier.com/specom, choosing “Special Issue: non-native speech perception” as the article type. If you are a first time user of the system, please register yourself as an author. Prospective authors are welcome to contact the guest editors for more details of the Special Issue. 

Call for Papers IEEE Signal Processing Society IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing  Special Issue on Speech Processing for Natural Interaction                   with Intelligent Environments  With the advances in microelectronics, communication technologies and smart materials, our environments are transformed to be increasingly intelligent by the presence of robots, bio-implants, mobile devices, advanced in-car systems, smart house appliances and other professional systems. As these environments are integral parts of our daily work and life, there is a great interest in a natural interaction with them. Also, such interaction may further enhance the perception of intelligence. "Interaction between man and machine should be based on the very same concepts as that between humans, i.e. it should be intuitive, multi-modal and based on emotion," as envisioned by Reeves and Nass (1996) in their famous book "The Media Equation". Speech is the most natural means of interaction for human beings and it offers the unique advantage that it does not require carrying a device for using it since we have our "device" with us all the time.  Speech processing techniques are developed for intelligent environments to support either explicit interaction through message communications, or implicit interaction by providing valuable information about the physical ("who speaks when and where") as well as the emotional and social context of an interaction. Challenges presented by intelligent environments include the use of distant microphone(s), resource constraints and large variations in acoustic condition, speaker, content and context. The two central pieces of techniques to cope with them are high-performing "low-level" signal processing algorithms and sophisticated "high-level" pattern recognition methods.  We are soliciting original, previously unpublished manuscripts directly targeting/related to natural interaction with intelligent environments. The scope of this special issue includes, but is not limited to:  * Multi-microphone front-end processing for distant-talking interaction * Speech recognition in adverse acoustic environments and joint          optimization with array processing * Speech recognition for low-resource and/or distributed computing          infrastructure * Speaker recognition and affective computing for interaction with          intelligent environments * Context-awareness of speech systems with regard to their applied          environments * Cross-modal analysis of speech, gesture and facial expressions for          robots and smart spaces * Applications of speech processing in intelligent systems, such as          robots, bio-implants and advanced driver assistance systems.  Submission information is available at http://www.ece.byu.edu/jstsp. Prospective authors are required to follow the Author's Guide for manuscript preparation of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing at http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tsp. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed according to the standard IEEE process.  Manuscript submission due:    		 		  		 		  Jul. 3, 2009 First review completed:       		 		  		 		  Oct. 2, 2009 Revised manuscript due:      		 		  		 		  Nov. 13, 2009 Second review completed:      		 		  		 		  Jan. 29, 2010 Final manuscript due:         		 		  		 		  Mar. 5, 2010  Lead guest editor:         Zheng-Hua Tan, Aalborg University, Denmark             zt@es.aau.dk  Guest editors:         Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, University of Paderborn, Germany             haeb@nt.uni-paderborn.de         Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan             furui@cs.titech.ac.jp         James R. Glass, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA             glass@mit.edu         Maurizio Omologo, FBK-IRST, Italy             omologo@fbk.eu

CALL FOR PAPERS
IEEE Signal Processing Society
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
Special Issue on Voice Transformation
With the increasing demand for Voice Transformation in areas such as
speech synthesis for creating target or virtual voices, modeling various
effects (e.g., Lombard effect), synthesizing emotions, making more natural
dialog systems which use speech synthesis, as well as in areas like
entertainment, film and music industry, toys, chat rooms and games, dialog
systems, security and speaker individuality for interpreting telephony,
high-end hearing aids, vocal pathology and voice restoration, there is a
growing need for high-quality Voice Transformation algorithms and systems
processing synthetic or natural speech signals.
Voice Transformation aims at the control of non-linguistic information of
speech signals such as voice quality and voice individuality. A great deal
of interest and research in the area has been devoted to the design and
development of mapping functions and modifications for vocal tract
configuration and basic prosodic features.
However, high quality Voice Transformation systems that create effective
mapping functions for vocal tract, excitation signal, and speaking style
and whose modifications take into account the interaction of source and
filter during voice production, are still lacking.
We invite researchers to submit original papers describing new approaches
in all areas related to Voice Transformation including, but not limited to,
the following topics:
* Preprocessing for Voice Transformation
(alignment, speaker selection, etc.)
* Speech models for Voice Transformation
(vocal tract, excitation, speaking style)
* Mapping functions
* Evaluation of Transformed Voices
* Detection of Voice Transformation
* Cross-lingual Voice Transformation
* Real-time issues and embedded Voice Transformation Systems
* Applications
The call for paper is also available at:
http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/sps/tap/sp_issue/VoiceTransformationCFP.pdf
Prospective authors are required to follow the Information for Authors for
manuscript preparation of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and
Language Processing Signal Processing at
http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/periodicals/journals/taslp-author-information/
Manuscripts will be peer reviewed according to the standard IEEE process.
Schedule:
Submission deadline: May 10, 2009
Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2009
Final manuscript due: October 30, 2009
Publication date: January 2010
Lead Guest Editor:
Yannis Stylianou, University of Crete, Crete, Greece
yannis@csd.uoc.gr
Guest Editors:
Tomoki Toda, Nara Inst. of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan
tomoki@is.naist.jp
Chung-Hsien Wu, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
chwu@csie.ncku.edu.tw
Alexander Kain, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland Oregon, USA
kaina@ohsu.edu
Olivier Rosec, Orange-France Telecom R&D, Lannion, France
olivier.rosec@orange-ftgroup.com

Samy Bengio, Google Inc., Mountain View (CA), USA, bengio@google.com 

 
Call for papers (submission deadline Friday 17 April 2009)
 
Special Session : "Machine Learning for Adaptivity in Spoken Dialogue Systems"
at Interspeech 2009, Brighton U.K., http://www.interspeech2009.org/
Session chairs: Oliver Lemon, Edinburgh University,
and Olivier Pietquin, Supélec - IMS Research Group
In the past decade, research in the field of Spoken Dialogue Systems
(SDS) has experienced increasing growth, and new applications include
interactive mobile search, tutoring, and troubleshooting systems
(e.g. fixing a broken internet connection). The design and
optimization of robust SDS for such tasks requires the development of
dialogue strategies which can automatically adapt to different types
of users (novice/expert, youth/senior) and noise conditions
(room/street). New statistical learning techniques are emerging for
training and optimizing adaptive speech recognition, spoken language
understanding, dialogue management, natural language generation, and
speech synthesis in spoken dialogue systems. Among machine learning
techniques for spoken dialogue strategy optimization, reinforcement
learning using Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially
Observable MDP (POMDPs) has become a particular focus.
We therefore solicit papers on new research in the areas of:
- Adaptive dialogue strategies and adaptive multimodal interfaces
- User simulation techniques for adaptive strategy learning and testing
- Rapid adaptation methods
- Reinforcement Learning of dialogue strategies
- Partially Observable MDPs in dialogue strategy optimization
- Statistical spoken language understanding in dialogue systems
- Machine learning and context-sensitive speech recognition
- Learning for adaptive Natural Language Generation in dialogue
- Corpora and annotation for machine learning approaches to SDS
- Machine learning for adaptive multimodal interaction
- Evaluation of adaptivity in statistical approaches to SDS and user
simulation.
Important Dates--
Full paper submission deadline: Friday 17 April 2009
Notification of paper acceptance: Wednesday 17 June 2009
Conference dates: 6-10 September 2009

IDP 09 : CALL FOR PAPERS

Discourse – Prosody Interface

Paris, September 9-10-11, 2009

The third round of the “Discourse – Prosody Interface” Conference will be hosted by the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (UMR 7110 / LLF), the Equipe CLILLAC-ARP (EA 3967) and the Linguistic Department (UFRL) of the University of Paris-Diderot (Paris 7), on September 9-10-11, 2009 in Paris. The first round was organized by the Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 6057 /LPL) in September 2005, in Aix-en-Provence. The second took place in Geneva in September 2007 and was organized by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Geneva, in collaboration with the École de Langue et Civilisation Françaises at the University of Geneva, and the VALIBEL research centre at the Catholic University of Louvain.

The third round will be held at the Paris Center of the University of Chicago, 6, rue Thomas Mann, in the XIIIth arrondissement, near the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand (BNF).

The Conference is addressed to researchers in prosody, phonology, phonetics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and also psycholinguistics, who are particularly interested in the relations between prosody and discourse. The participants may develop their research programmes within different theoretical paradigms (formal approaches to phonology and semantics/ pragmatics, conversation analysis, descriptive linguistics, etc.). For this third edition, spécial attention will be given to research work that propose a formal analysis of the Discourse- Prosody interface.

So as to favour convergence among contributions, the IDP09 conference will focus on :

* Prosody, its parts and discourse :

- How to analyze the interaction between the different prosodic subsystems (accentuation,

intonation, rhythm; register changes or voice quality)?

- How to model the contribution of each subsystem to the global interpretation of discourse?

- How to describe and analyze prosodic facts, and at which level (phonetic vs. phonological) ?

* Prosodic units & discourse units

- What are the relevant units for discourse or conversation analysis ? What are their prosodic

properties ?

- How the embedding of utterances in discourse is marked syntactically or prosodically ?

What consequence of the modelling of syntax & prosody ?

* Prosody and context(s)

- What is the contribution of the context in the analysis of prosody in discourse?

- How can the relations between prosody and context(s) be modelled?

* Acquisition of the relations between prosody & discourse in L1 and L2

- How are the relations between prosody & discourse acquired in L1, in L2 ?

- Which methodological tools could best describe and transcribe these processes ?

Guest speakers :

* Diane Blakemore (School of Languages, University of Salford, United Kingdom)

* Piet Mertens (Department of Linguistics, K.U Leuven, Belgium)

* Hubert Truckenbrodt (ZAS, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin,

Germany)

Conference will be held in English or French. Studies can be about any language.

Submission will be made by uploading an anonymous two pages abstract (plus an extra page for references and figures) in A4 and with Times 12 font, written in either English or French as PDF file at the following address : http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=idp09 .

Author’s name and affiliation should be given as requested, but not in the PDF file.

If you have any question concerning the submission procedure or you encounter any problem,

please send an email at the following address : idp09@linguist.jussieu.fr

Authors may submit as many proposals as they wish.

The proposals will be evaluated anonymously by the scientific committee.

Schedule

• Submission deadline: April, 26th, 2009

• Notification of acceptation: June, 8th, 2009

• Conference (IDP 09): September 9th-11th, 2009.

Further information is available on the conférence website : http://idp09.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr

International Workshop on Spoken Language Technology for Development
- from promise to practice
 
Venue - The Abbey Hotel, Tintern, UK
Dates - 11-12 September 2009
  
Following on from a successful special session at SLT 2008 in Goa, this workshop invites participants with an interest in SLT4D and who have expertise and experience in any of the following areas:
- Development of speech technology for resource-scarce languages
- SLT deployments in the developing world
- HCI in a developing world context
- Successful ICT4D interventions
  
The aim of the workshop is to develop a "Best practice in developing and deploying speech systems for developmental applications". It is also hoped that the participants will form the core of an open community which shares tools, insights and methodologies for future SLT4D projects. 
  
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please submit a 2-4 page position paper explaining how your expertise and experience might be applied to SLT4D, formatted according to the Interspeech 2009 guidelines, to Roger Tucker at roger@outsideecho.com by 30th April 2009. 
  
Important Dates:
Papers due: 30th April 2009
Acceptance Notification: 10th June 2009
Early Registration deadline: 3rd July 2009
Workshop: 11-12 September 2009
  
Further details can be found on the workshop website at www.llsti.org/SLT4D-09

Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems 2009

13th-14th September, at Queen Mary University of London


*Overview and goals*

The Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS) is an annual workshop designed for post-graduate students, post-docs and junior researchers working in research related to spoken dialogue systems in both academia and industry. The roundtable provides an open forum where participants can discuss their research interests, current work and future plans. The workshop has three main goals:
- to offer an interdisciplinary forum for creative thinking about current issues in spoken dialogue systems research
- to provide young researchers with career advice from senior researchers and professionals from both academic and industrial backgrounds
- to develop a stronger international network of young researchers working in the field.

(Important note: There is no age restriction to participating in the workshop; the word 'young' is meant to indicate that it is targeted towards researchers who are at a relatively early stage in their career.)


*Topics and sessions*
Potential roundtable discussion topics include: best practices for conducting and evaluating user studies of spoken dialogue systems, the prosody of conversation, methods of analysis for dialogue systems, conversational agents and virtual characters,cultural adaptation of dialogue strategies, and user modelling.

YRRSDS’09 will feature:

- a senior researcher panel (both academia and industry)
- a demo and poster session
- a special session on frameworks and grand challenges for dialogue system evaluation
- a special session on EU projects related to spoken dialogue systems.

Previous workshops were held in Columbus (ACL 2008), Antwerp (INTERSPEECH 2007), Pittsburgh (INTERSPEECH 2006) and Lisbon (INTERSPEECH 2005).


*Workshop date*

YRRSDS'09 will take place on September 13th and 14th, 2009 (immediately after Interspeech and SIGDial 2009).


*Workshop location*

The 2009 YRRSDS will be held at Queen Mary University of London, one of the UK's leading research-focused higher education institutions. Queen Mary’s Mile End campus began life in 1887 as the People's Palace, a philanthropic endeavour to provide east Londoners with education and social activities, and is located in the heart of London's vibrant East End.


*Grants*

YRRSDS 2009 will be supported this year by ISCA, the International Speech Communication Association. ISCA will consider applications for a limited number of travel grants. Applications should be send directly to grants@isca-speech.org, details of the application process and forms are available from http://www.isca-speech.org/grants.html.We are also negotiating with other supporters the possibility of offering a limited number of travel grants to students.


*Endorsements*

SIGDial, ISCA, Dialogs on Dialogs


*Sponsors*

Orange, Microsoft Research, AT&T


*Submission process*

Participants will be asked to submit a 2-page position paper based on a template provided by the organising committee. In their papers, authors will include a short biographical sketch, a brief statement of research interests, a description of their research work, and a short discussion of what they believe to be the most significant and interesting issues in spoken dialogue systems today and in the near future. Participants will also provide three suggestions for discussion topics.
Workshop attendance will be limited to 50 participants. Submissions will be accepted on a first-come-first-served basis. Submissions will be collated and made available to participants. We also plan to publish the position papers and presentations from the workshop on the web, subject to any sponsor or publisher constraints.

*Important Dates*

- Submissions open: May 15, 2009
- Submissions deadline: June 30, 2009
- Final notification: July 31, 2009

- Registration begins: TBD
- Registration deadline: TBD

- Interspeech: 6-10 September 2009
- SIGDial: 11-12 September, 2009
- YRR:  13-14 September, 2009

*More information on related websites*

- Young Researchers' Roundtable website: http://www.yrrsds.org/
- SIGDIAL 2009 conference website: http://www.sigdial.org/workshops/workshop10/
- Interspeech 2009 website: http://www.interspeech2009.org/

*Organising Committee*

- David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain
- Milica Gašić, Cambridge University, UK
- François Mairesse, Cambridge University, UK
- Matthew Marge, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Joana Paulo Pardal, Technical University Lisbon, Portugal
- Ricardo Ribeiro, ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal

*Local Organisers*

- Arash Eshghi, Queen Mary University of London, UK
- Christine Howes, Queen Mary University of London, UK
- Gregory Mills, Queen Mary University of London, UK

*Scientific Advisory Committee*

- Hua Ai, University of Pittsburgh, USA
- James Allen, University of Rochester, USA
- Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Dan Bohus, Microsoft Research, USA
- Philippe Bretier, Orange Labs, France
- Robert Dale, Macquarie University, Australia
- Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
- Luis Hernández Gómez, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain
- Carlos Gómez Gallo, University of Rochester, USA
- Kristiina Jokinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Nuno Mamede, Spoken Language Systems Lab, INESC-ID, Portugal
- David Martins de Matos, Spoken Language Systems Lab, INESC-ID, Portugal
- João Paulo Neto, Voice Interaction, Portugal
- Tim Paek, Microsoft Research
- Antoine Raux, Honda Research, USA
- Robert J. Ross, Universitat Bremen, Germany
- Alexander Rudnicky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Mary Swift, University of Rochester, USA
- Isabel Trancoso, Spoken Language Systems Lab, INESC-ID, Portugal
- Tim Weale, The Ohio State University, USA
- Jason Williams, AT&T, USA
- Sabrina Wilske, Lang Tech and Cognitive Sys at Saarland University, Germany
- Andi Winterboer, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Craig Wootton, University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland
- Steve Young, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

RANLP-09 Second Call for Papers and Submission Information
  
 
  
"RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING"
  
 
  
International Conference RANLP-2009
  
 
  
September 14-16, 2009
  
Borovets, Bulgaria
  
http://www.lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009
  
 
  
Further to the successful and highly competitive 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th
  
and 6th conferences 'Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing'
  
(RANLP), we are pleased to announce the 7th RANLP conference to be held in
  
September 2009.
  
 
  
The conference will take the form of addresses from invited keynote
  
speakers plus peer-reviewed individual papers. There will also be an
  
exhibition area for poster and demo sessions.
  
 
  
We invite papers reporting on recent advances in all aspects of Natural
  
Language Processing (NLP). The conference topics are announced at the
  
RANLP-09 website. All accepted papers will be published in the full
  
conference proceedings and included in the ACL Anthology. In addition,
  
volumes of RANLP selected papers are traditionally published by John
  
Benjamins Publishers; currently the volume of Selected RANLP-07 papers is
  
under print.
  
 
  
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
  
•       Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (University of Colorado School of Medicine),
  
•       Mirella Lapata (University of Edinburgh),
  
•       Shalom Lappin (King’s College, London),
  
•       Massimo Poesio (University of Trento and University of Essex).
  
 
  
CHAIR OF THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
  
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton)
  
 
  
CHAIR OF THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
  
Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
  
 
  
The PROGRAMME COMMITTEE members are distinguished experts from all over
  
the world. The list of PC members will be announced at the conference
  
website. After the review, the list of all reviewers will be announced at
  
the website as well.
  
 
  
SUBMISSION
  
People interested in participating should submit a paper, poster or demo
  
following the instructions provided at the conference website. The review
  
will be blind, so the article text should not reveal the authors' names.
  
Author identification should be done in additional page of the conference
  
management system.
  
 
  
TUTORIALS 12-13 September 2009:
  
Four half-day tutorials will be organised at 12-13 September 2009. The
  
list of tutorial lecturers includes:
  
•       Kevin Bretonnel Cohen (University of Colorado School of Medicine),
  
•       Constantin Orasan (University of Wolverhampton)
  
 
  
WORKSHOPS 17-18 September 2009:
  
Post-conference workshops will be organised at 17-18 September 2009. All
  
workshops will publish hard-copy proceedings, which will be distributed at
  
the event. Workshop papers might be listed in the ACL Anthology as well
  
(depending on the workshop organisers). The list of RANLP-09 workshops
  
includes:
  
•       Semantic Roles on Human Language Technology Applications, organised by
  
Paloma Moreda, Rafael Muсoz and Manuel Palomar,
  
•       Partial Parsing 2: Between Chunking and Deep Parsing, organised by Adam
  
Przepiorkowski, Jakub Piskorski and Sandra Kuebler,
  
•       1st Workshop on Definition Extraction, organised by Gerardo Eugenio
  
Sierra Martнnez and Caroline Barriere,
  
•       Evaluation of Resources and Tools for Central and Eastern European
  
languages, organised by Cristina Vertan, Stelios Piperidis and Elena
  
Paskaleva,
  
•       Adaptation of Language Resources and Technology to New Domains,
  
organised by Nuria Bel, Erhard Hinrichs, Kiril Simov and Petya Osenova,
  
•       Natural Language Processing methods and corpora in translation,
  
lexicography, and language learning, organised by Viktor Pekar, Iustina
  
Narcisa Ilisei, and Silvia Bernardini,
  
•       Events in Emerging Text Types (eETTs), organised by Constantin Orasan,
  
Laura Hasler, and Corina Forascu,
  
•       Biomedical Information Extraction, organised by Guergana Savova,
  
Vangelis Karkaletsis, and Galia Angelova.
  
 
  
 
  
IMPORTANT DATES:
  
 
  
Conference paper submission notification: 6 April 2009
  
Conference paper submission deadline: 13 April 2009
  
Conference paper acceptance notification: 1 June 2009
  
Final versions of conference papers submission: 13 July 2009
  
 
  
Workshop paper submission deadline (suggested): 5 June 2009
  
Workshop paper acceptance notification (suggested): 20 July 2009
  
Final versions of workshop papers submission (suggested): 24 August 2009
  
 
  
RANLP-09 tutorials: 12-13 September 2009 (Saturday-Sunday)
  
RANLP-09 conference: 14-16 September 2009 (Monday-Wednesday)
  
RANLP-09 workshops: 17-18 September 2009 (Thursday-Friday)
  
 
  
For further information about the conference, please visit the conference
  
site http://www.lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009.
  
 
  
 
  
THE TEAM BEHIND RANLP-09
  
Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria, Chair of the Org.
  
Committee
  
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
  
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK, Chair of the Programme
  
Committee
  
Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc, USA (Editor of volume with selected papers)
  
Nikolai Nikolov, INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
  
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria (Workshop Coordinator)
  
 
  
e-mail: ranlp09 [AT] lml (dot) bas (dot) 

First Call for Papers

Student Research Workshop

14-15 September 2009, Borovets, Bulgaria

associated with the International Conference RANLP-2009

/RECENT ADVANCES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING/

http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009/stud-ranlp09

The International Conference RANLP 2009 would like to invite students at all levels (Bachelor-, Master-, and PhD-students) to present their ongoing work at the Student Research Workshop. This will provide an excellent opportunity to present and discuss your work in progress or completed projects to an international research audience and receive feedback from senior researchers. The research being presented can come from any topic area within natural language processing and computational linguistics including, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

Anaphora Resolution, Complexity, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse, Evaluation, Finite-State Technology, Formal Grammars and Languages, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Lexical Knowledge Acquisition, Lexicography, Machine Learning, Machine Translation, Morphology, Natural Language Generation, Natural Language in Multimodal and Multimedia Systems, Natural Language Interraction, Natural Language Processing in Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Natural Language Processing for Biomedical Texts, Ontologies, Opinion Mining, Parsing, Part-of-Speech Tagging, Phonology, Post-Editing, Pragmatics and Dialogue, Question Answering, Semantics, Speech Recognition, Statistical Methods, Sublanguages and Controlled Languages, Syntax, Temporal Processing, Term Extraction and Automatic Indexing, Text Data Mining, Text Segmentation, Text Simplification, Text Summarisation, Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Translation Technology, Tree-Adjoining Grammars, Word Sense Disambiguation.

All accepted papers will be presented at the Student Workshop sessions during the main conference days: 14-16 September 2009. The articles will be issued in special Student Session electronic proceedings.

            Important Dates

Submission deadline: 25 July
Acceptance notification: 20 August
Camera-ready deadline: 1 September

      Submission Requirements

All papers must be submitted in .doc or .pdf format and must be 4-8 pages long (including references). For format requirements please refer to the main RANLP website at http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2009, Submission Info Section. Each submission will be reviewed by 3 reviewers from the Programme Committee, who will feature both experienced researchers and PhD students nearing the completion of their PhD studies. The final decisions will be made based on these reviews. The submissions will have to specify the student's level (Bachelor-, Master-, or PhD).

            Programme Committee

To be announced in the Second Call for Papers.

            Organising Committee

Irina Temnikova (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

Ivelina Nikolova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria)

Natalia Konstantinova (University of Wolverhampton, UK)

            For More Information

51st International Symposium ELMAR-2009
28-30 September 2009 Zadar, CROATIA
Paper submission deadline: March 16, 2009
http://www.elmar-zadar.org/
CALL FOR PAPERS TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS IEEE Region 8 EURASIP - European Assoc. Signal, Speech and Image Processing IEEE Croatia Section IEEE Croatia Section Chapter of the Signal Processing Society IEEE Croatia Section Joint Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS INDEXED BY IEEE Xplore
INSPEC TOPICS --> Image and Video Processing --> Multimedia Communications --> Speech and Audio Processing --> Wireless Commununications --> Telecommunications --> Antennas and Propagation --> e-Learning and m-Learning --> Navigation Systems --> Ship Electronic Systems --> Power Electronics and Automation --> Naval Architecture --> Sea Ecology --> Special Sessions Proposals - A special session consist of 5-6 papers which should present a unifying theme from a diversity of viewpoints
KEYNOTE TALKS
* Prof. Gregor Rozinaj,Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava, SLOVAKIA: -Title to be announced soon.
* Mr. David Wood, European Broadcasting Union, Geneva, SWITZERLAND: What strategy and research agenda for Europe in 'new media'?
SUBMISSION
Papers accepted by two reviewers will be published in conference proceedings available at the conference and abstracted/indexed in the IEEE Xplore and INSPEC database. More info is available here: http://www.elmar-zadar.org/ IMPORTANT: Web-based (online) paper submission of papers in PDF format is required for all authors. No e-mail, fax, or postal submissions will be accepted. Authors should prepare their papers according to ELMAR-2009 paper sample, convert them to PDF based on IEEE requirements, and submit them using web-based submission system by March 16, 2009.
SCHEDULE OF IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submission of full papers: March 16, 2009
Notification of acceptance mailed out by: May 11, 2009
Submission of (final) camera-ready papers: May 21, 2009
Preliminary program available online by: June 11, 2009
Registration forms and payment deadline: June 18, 2009
Accommodation deadline: September 10, 2009
GENERAL CO-CHAIRS
Ive Mustac, Tankerska plovidba, Zadar, Croatia Branka Zovko-Cihlar, University of Zagreb, Croatia
PROGRAM CHAIR
Mislav Grgic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE Juraj Bartolic, Croatia David Broughton, United Kingdom Paul Dan Cristea, Romania Kresimir Delac, Croatia Zarko Cucej, Slovenia Marek Domanski, Poland Kalman Fazekas, Hungary Janusz Filipiak, Poland Renato Filjar, Croatia Borko Furht, USA Mohammed Ghanbari, United Kingdom Mislav Grgic, Croatia Sonja Grgic, Croatia Yo-Sung Ho, Korea Bernhard Hofmann-Wellenhof, Austria Ismail Khalil Ibrahim, Austria Bojan Ivancevic, Croatia Ebroul Izquierdo, United Kingdom Kristian Jambrosic, Croatia Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, USA Tomislav Kos, Croatia Murat Kunt, Switzerland Panos Liatsis, United Kingdom Rastislav Lukac, Canada Lidija Mandic, Croatia Gabor Matay, Hungary Branka Medved Rogina, Croatia Borivoj Modlic, Croatia Marta Mrak, United Kingdom Fernando Pereira, Portugal Pavol Podhradsky, Slovak Republic Ramjee Prasad, Denmark Kamisetty R. Rao, USA Gregor Rozinaj, Slovak Republic Gerald Schaefer, United Kingdom Mubarak Shah, USA Shiguang Shan, China Thomas Sikora, Germany Karolj Skala, Croatia Marian S. Stachowicz, USA Ryszard Stasinski, Poland Luis Torres, Spain Frantisek Vejrazka, Czech Republic Stamatis Voliotis, Greece Nick Ward, United Kingdom Krzysztof Wajda, Poland Branka Zovko-Cihlar, Croatia
CONTACT INFORMATION Assoc.Prof. Mislav Grgic, Ph.D. FER, Unska 3/XII HR-10000 Zagreb CROATIA Telephone: + 385 1 6129 851 Fax: + 385 1 6129 717 E-mail: elmar2009 (at) fer.hr For further information please visit: http://www.elmar-zadar.org/

            APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference October 5 - 7, 2009
                       Sapporo Convention Center, Sapporo, Japan
2009 APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference is the inaugural event supported by the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA). The APSIPA is a new association and it promotes all aspects of research and education on signal processing, information technology, and communications. The field of interest of APSIPA concerns all aspects of signals and information including processing, recognition, classification, communications, networking, computing, system design, security, implementation, and technology with applications to scientific, engineering, and social areas. The topics for regular sessions include, but are not limited to:
Signal Processing Track
1.1 Audio, speech, and language processing
1.2 Image, video, and multimedia signal processing
1.3 Information forensics and security
1.4 Signal processing for communications
1.5 Signal processing theory and methods
Sapporo and Conference Venue: One of many nice cities in Japan, Sapporo is always recognized as a quite beautiful and well-organized city. With a population of 1,800,000, Hokkaido's largest/capital city, Sapporo, is fully serviced by a network of subway, streetcar, and bus lines connecting to its full
compliment of hotel accommodations. Sapporo has already played host to international meetings, sports events, and academic societies. There are a lot of flights from/to Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka et al. and overseas cities. With all the amenities of a major city yet in balance with its natural surroundings, this beautiful northern capital, Sapporo, is well-equipped to offer a new generation of conventions.
Important Due Dates and Author's Schedule:
Proposals for Special Session: March 1, 2009
Proposals for Forum, Panel and Tutorial Sessions: March 20, 2009
Deadline for Submission of Full-Papers: March 31, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: July 1, 2009
Deadline for Submission of Camera Ready Papers: August 1, 2009
Conference dates: October 5 - 7, 2009
Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit either long papers, up to 10 pages in length, or short papers up to four pages in length, where long papers will be for the single-track oral presentation and short papers will be mostly for poster presentation. The conference proceedings will be published, available, and maintained at the APSIPA website.
Detail Information: WEB Site : http://www.gcoe.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/apsipa2009/
Organizing Committee:
Honorary Chair : Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
General co-Chairs : Yoshikazu Miyanaga, Hokkaido University, Japan K. J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland,USA
Technical Program co-Chairs : Hitoshi Kiya, Tokyo Metropolitan Univ., Japan Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Keio University, Japan Mark Liao, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Takao Onoye, Osaka University, Japan               

Call for Papers 2009 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing - MMSP'09   October 5-7, 2009 Sheraton Rio Hotel & Resort Rio de Janeiro, Brazil   We would like to invite you to submit your work to MMSP-09, the eleventh IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing. We also would like to advise you of the upcoming paper submission deadline on April, 17th.  This year MMSP will introduce a new type of paper award: the “top 10%” paper award. While MMSP papers are already very well regarded and highly cited, there is a growing need among the scientific community for more immediate quality recognition. The objective of the top 10% award is to acknowledge outstanding quality papers, while at the same time keeping the wider participation and information exchange allowed by higher acceptance rates. MMSP will continue to accept as many as high quality papers as possible, with acceptance rates in line with other top events of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. This new award will be granted to as many as 10% of the total paper submissions, and is open to all accepted papers, whether presented in oral or poster form.     The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.   Organized in Rio de Janeiro, MMSP-09 provides excellent conditions for brainstorming on, and sharing the latest advances in multimedia signal processing and technology in one of the most beautiful and exciting cities in the world.   Scope: Papers are solicited on the following topics (but not limited to)   Systems and applications - Teleconferencing, telepresence, tele-immersion, immersive environments - Virtual classrooms and distance learning - Multimodal collaboration, online multiplayer gaming, social networking - Telemedicine, human-human distance collaboration - Multimodal storage and retrieval   Multimedia for communication and collaboration - Ad hoc broadband sensor array processing - Microphone and camera array processing - Automatic sensor calibration, synchronization - De-noising, enhancement, source separation, - Source localization, spatialization   Scene analysis for immersive telecommunication and human collaboration - Audiovisual scene analysis - Object detection, identification, and tracking - Gesture, face, and human pose recognition - Presence detection and activity classification - Multimodal sensor fusion   Coding - Distributed/centralized source coding for sensor arrays - Scalable source coding for multiparty conferencing - Error/loss resilient coding for telecommunications - Channel coding, error protection and error concealment   Networking - Voice/video over IP and wireless - Quality monitoring and management - Security - Priority-based QoS control and scheduling - Ad-hoc and real time communications - Channel coding, packetization, synchronization, buffering   A thematic emphasis for MMSP-09 is on topics related to multimedia processing and interaction for immersive telecommunications and collaboration.  Papers on these topics are encouraged.   Schedule - Papers (full paper, 4 pages, to be received by): April 17, 2009 - Notification of acceptance by: June 13, 2009 - Camera-ready paper submission by: July 6, 2009   More information is available at http://www.mmsp09.org   ================================================================================ You have received this mailing because you are a member of IEEE and/or one of the IEEE Technical Societies.   To unsubscribe, please go to http://ewh.ieee.org/enotice/options.php?SN=Wellekens&LN=CONF and be certain to include your IEEE member number.  If you need assistance with your E-Notice subscription, please contact k.n.luu@ieee.org

Call for Papers

2009 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and

Acoustics

Mohonk Mountain House

New Paltz, New York

October 18-21, 2009

http://www.waspaa2009.com

The 2009 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and

Acoustics (WASPAA'09) will be held at the Mohonk Mountain House in New

Paltz, New York, and is sponsored by the Audio & Electroacoustics committee

of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The objective of this workshop is to

provide an informal environment for the discussion of problems in audio and

acoustics and the signal processing techniques leading to novel solutions.

Technical sessions will be scheduled throughout the day. Afternoons will be

left free for informal meetings among workshop participants.

Papers describing original research and new concepts are solicited for

technical sessions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

* Acoustic Scenes

- Scene Analysis: Source Localization, Source Separation, Room Acoustics

- Signal Enhancement: Echo Cancellation, Dereverberation, Noise Reduction,

Restoration

- Multichannel Signal Processing for Audio Acquisition and Reproduction

- Microphone Arrays

- Eigenbeamforming

- Virtual Acoustics via Loudspeakers

* Hearing and Perception

- Auditory Perception, Spatial Hearing, Quality Assessment

- Hearing Aids

* Audio Coding

- Waveform Coding and Parameter Coding

- Spatial Audio Coding

- Internet Audio

- Musical Signal Analysis: Segmentation, Classification, Transcription

- Digital Rights

- Mobile Devices

* Music

- Signal Analysis and Synthesis Tools

- Creation of Musical Sounds: Waveforms, Instrument Models, Singing

- MEMS Technologies for Signal Pick-up

Submission of four-page paper: April 15, 2009

Notification of acceptance: June 26, 2009

Early registration until:  September 1, 2009

Workshop Committee

General Co-Chair:

Jacob Benesty

Université du Québec

INRS-EMT

Montréal, Québec, Canada

benesty@emt.inrs.ca

General Co-Chair:

Tomas Gaensler

mh acoustics

Summit, NJ, USA

tfg@mhacoustics.com

Technical Program Chair:

Yiteng (Arden) Huang

WeVoice Inc.

Bridgewater, NJ, USA

arden_huang@ieee.org

Technical Program Chair:

Jingdong Chen

Bell Labs

Alcatel-Lucent

Murray Hill, NJ, USA

jingdong@research.bell-labs.com

Finance Chair:

Michael Brandstein

Information Systems

Technology Group

MIT Lincoln Lab

Lexington, MA, USA

msb@ll.mit.edu

Publications Chair:

Eric J. Diethorn

Multimedia Technologies

Avaya Labs Research

Basking Ridge, NJ, USA

ejd@avaya.com

Publicity Chair:

Sofiène Affes

Université du Québec

INRS-EMT

Montréal, Québec, Canada

affes@emt.inrs.ca

Local Arrangements Chair:

Heinz Teutsch

Multimedia Technologies

Avaya Labs Research

Basking Ridge, NJ, USA

teutsch@avaya.com

Far East Liaison:

Shoji Makino

NTT Communication Science

Laboratories, Japan

maki@cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp

Call for Papers

----------------------------

ACM Multimedia 2009 Workshop

Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2009)

***Submission Deadline Extended to Monday, June 15, 2009***

----------------------------

http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/

Multimedia content often contains spoken audio as a key component. Although speech is generally acknowledged as the quintessential carrier of semantic information, spoken audio remains underexploited by multimedia retrieval systems. In particular, the potential of speech technology to improve information access has not yet been successfully extended beyond multimedia content containing scripted speech, such as broadcast news. The SSCS 2009 workshop is dedicated to fostering search research based on speech technology as it expands into spoken content domains involving non-scripted, less-highly conventionalized, conversational speech characterized by wide variability of speaking styles and recording conditions. Such domains include podcasts, video diaries, lifelogs, meetings, call center recordings, social video networks, Web TV, conversational broadcast, lectures, discussions, debates, interviews and cultural heritage archives. This year we are setting a particular focus on the user and the use of speech techniques and technology in real-life multimedia access systems and have chosen the theme "Speech technology in the multimedia access framework."

The development of robust, scalable, affordable approaches for accessing multimedia collections with a spoken component requires the sustained collaboration of researchers in the areas of speech recognition, audio processing, multimedia analysis and information retrieval. Motivated by the aim of providing a forum where these disciplines can engage in productive interaction and exchange, Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS) workshops were held in conjunction with SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam and with SIGIR 2008 in Singapore. The SSCS workshop series continues with SSCS 2009 held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing. This year the workshop will focus on addressing the research challenges that were identified during SSCS 2008: Integration, Interface/Interaction, Scale/Scope, and Community.

We welcome contributions on a range of trans-disciplinary issues related to these research challenges, including:

***Integration***

-Information retrieval techniques based on speech analysis (e.g., applied to speech recognition lattices)

-Search effectiveness (e.g., evidence combination, query/document expansion)

-Self-improving systems (e.g., unsupervised adaptation, recursive metadata refinement)

-Exploitation of audio analysis (e.g., speaker emotional state, speaker characteristics, speaking style)

-Integration of higher-level semantics, including cross-modal concept detection

-Combination of indexing features from video, text and speech

***Interface/Interaction***

-Surrogates for representation or browsing of spoken content

-Intelligent playback: exploiting semantics in the media player

-Relevance intervals: determining the boundaries of query-related media segments

-Cross-media linking and link visualization deploying speech transcripts

***Scale/Scope***

-Large-scale speech indexing approaches (e.g., collection size, search speed)

-Dealing with collections containing multiple languages

-Affordable, light-weight solutions for small collections, i.e., for the long tail

***Community***

-Stakeholder participation in design and realization of real world applications

-Exploiting user contributions (e.g., tags, ratings, comments, corrections, usage information, community structure)

Contributions for oral presentations (8-10 pages) poster presentations (2 pages), demonstration descriptions (2 pages) and position papers for selection of panel members (2 pages) will be accepted. Further information including submission guidelines is available on the workshop website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/

Important Dates:

Monday, June 15, 2009 (Extended Deadline) Submission Deadline

Saturday, July 10, 2009 Author Notification

Friday, July 17, 2009 Camera Ready Deadline

Friday, October 23, 2009 Workshop in Beijing

For more information: m.a.larson@tudelft.nl

SSCS 2009 Website: http://ict.ewi.tudelft.nl/SSCS2009/

ACM Multimedia 2009 Website: http://www.acmmm09.org

On behalf of the SSCS2009 Organizing Committee:

Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Franciska de Jong, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Joachim Kohler, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany

Roeland Ordelman, Sound & Vision and University of Twente, The Netherlands

Wessel Kraaij, TNO and Radboud University, The Netherlands

NLP Approaches for Unmet Information Needs in Health Care

(http://www.uwm.edu/~hongyu/files/BIBM.workshop.html)

A workshop of IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and

Biomedicine 2009, Washington DC

As the amount of literature and other information in the biomedical

field continues to grow at a rapid rate, researchers in the health

care community dependent on computers to find the best answers for

meeting their information needs. Traditionally, information needs have

been simply represented as a set of queries. Recently, there have been

growing research efforts addressing these needs with natural languageapproaches. Although great strides have been made in producing

valuable biomedical databases, more work needs to be done to develop

computational approaches that enable users to search multiple

databases, which often comprise a variety of formats, including

journal articles, clinical guidelines, and electronic health care

records. Therefore, the task at hand is to develop natural language

systems that can understand the queries or complex questions being

asked, interpret the different resources that could be used to answer

the question, extract relevant information, and summarize this

information to meet user needs, and data mine the structured data for

clinical decision support. This workshop will explore a broad range of

traditional NLP approaches and emerging new methods, and the variety

of challenges that need to be overcome with respect to these issues.

Some specific topics include:

   * Clinical information needs

   * Clinical terminology and coding clinical data

   * Annotation and machine learning

   * Healthcare, domain-specific adaption of open-domain NLP techniques

   * Information extraction from electronic health records

   * Data mining of electronic health records

   * NLP approaches that involve with image and video

   * Automatic speech recognition for the healthcare domain

   * Spoken clinical question answering

Paper submission: http://kis-lab.com/cyberchair/bibm09/cbc_index.html

Timeline:

 August 10, 2009: Due date for full workshop papers submission

 September 10, 2009: Notification of paper acceptance to authors

 September 17, 2009: Camera-ready of accepted papers

 November 1-4, 2009: Workshops

Organizers:

Workshop co-chairs:

Hong Yu, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Dilek Hakkani-Tür, PhD, International Computer Science Institute

John Ely, MD University of Iowa

Lyle Ungar, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

Workshop PC members:

Eugene Agichtein, Emory University

Alan Aronson, NLM

James Cimino, NIH

Kevin Cohen, University of Colorado

Nigel Collier, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Chris Chute, Mayo Clinic

Dina Demner Fushman, NLM

Bob Futrelle, Northeastern University

Henk Harkema, University of Pittsburgh

Lynette Hirschman, MITRE

Susan McRoy, University of Wisconsin

Serguei Pakhomov, University of Minnesota

Tim Patrick, University of Wisconsin

Thomas Rindflesch, NLM

Pete White, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

John Wilbur, NLM

Pierre Zweigenbaum, LIMSI

The Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop
on Machine Learning for Multi-modal Interaction will jointly take place in the Boston area during November 2-6, 2009.

The main aim of ICMI-MLMI 2009 is to further scientific research within the broad field of multimodal interaction, methods and systems. The joint conference will focus on major trends and challenges in this area, and work to identify a roadmap for future research and commercial success. ICMI-MLMI 2009 will feature a single-track main conference with keynote speakers, panel discussions, technical paper presentations, poster sessions, and demonstrations of state of the art multimodal systems and concepts. It will be followed by workshops.

The conference will take place at the MIT Media Lab, widely known for its innovative spirit. Organized in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, ICMI-MLMI 09 provides an excellent setting for brainstorming and sharing the latest advances in multimodal interaction, systems and methods in an inspired setting of a city, known as one of the top historical, technological and scientific centers of the US.


Program committees:

James Crowley, INRIA
Yuri Ivanov, MERL
Christopher Wren, Google
Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap Research Institute
Michael Johnston, AT&T Research
Rainer Stiefelhagen University of Karlsruhe
Janet McAndless, MERL
Hervé Bourlard, Idiap Research Institute
Rana el Kaliouby, MIT Media Lab
Matthew Berlin, MIT Media Lab
Clifton Forlines, MERL
Deb Roy, MIT Media Lab
Thanks to Cole Krumbholz, MITRE
Sonya Allin, University of Toronto
Yang Liu, University of Texas at Dallas
Louis-Philippe Morency, University of South California
Xilin Chen, JDL
Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh
Denis Lalanne, University of Fribourg
Enrique Vidal, Polytechnic University of Valencia
Kenji Mase, University of Nagoya

ICMI Advisory Board

Matthew Turk, Chair, UC Santa Barbara (USA)
Jim Crowley, INRIA-Rhone Alpes (France)
Trevor Darrell, MIT (USA)
Kenji Mase, University of Nagoya (Japan)
Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research (USA)
Sharon Oviatt, Adapx (USA)
Fabio Pianesi, ITC-irst (Italy)
Wolfgang Wahlster, DFKI (Germany)
Jie Yang, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

MLMI Advisory Board

Hervé Bourlard, Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland)
Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Sharon Oviatt, Adapx (USA)
Rainer Stiefelhagen, Universitaet Karlsruhe (Germany)
Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS (France)
Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)
Samy Bengio, Google (USA)
Andrei Popescu-Belis, Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland)

See http://icmi2009.acm.org/ for more information.


The following is a list of co-located workshops.

2nd Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction
Thursday, 5 November 2009 (Full Day)
More Information: http://wocci2009.fbk.eu/


Workshop on Use of Context in Vision Processing (UCVP)
Thursday, 5 November 2009 (Full Day)
More Information: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/ucvp09


Affect-Aware Virtual Agents and Social Robots (AFFINE)
Friday, 6 November 2009 (Full Day)
More Information: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqjm/affine/index.html


Multimodal Computing with Mobile Phones: Sensing, Modeling and Sharing
Friday, 6 November 2009 (Morning)


Workshop on Multimodal Sensor-Based Systems for Social Computing
Friday, 6 November 2009 (Afternoon)
More Information: http://web.media.mit.edu

LRL WORKSHOP: Getting Less-Resourced Languages on-Board!

Name: Getting Less-Resourced Languages on-Board!

Date: 5.11.2009, half-day (13h30 – 18h00) + cocktail

Theme:

Language Technologies (LT) provide an essential support to the challenge of Multilingualism. In order to develop them, it is necessary to have access to Language Resources (LR) and to assess LT performances. To this regard, the situation is very different across the different languages. Little or sparse data exist for languages in countries or regions where limited efforts have been devoted to such issues in the past, also known as Less-Resourced Languages (LRL). The workshop aims at reporting the needs, at presenting achievements and at proposing solutions for the future, both in terms of LR and of LT evaluation, especially in the European, Euro-Mediterranean and regional frameworks. This will allow to identity the factors that have an impact on a potential and shared roadmap towards supplying LR and LT for all languages.

Topics:

-          Experience in the production, validation and distribution of LR for less-resourced languages

-          Experience in the evaluation of LT for less-resourced languages

-          Infrastructures for making available LR and LT in less-resourced languages

-          Alternative approaches (comparable corpora, pivot languages, language clustering…)

-          To be completed…

Co-Chairs: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS & IMMI-CNRS), Khalid Choukri(ELRA & ELDA), Zygmunt Vetulani (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

Paper submission deadline: August 15.

Sponsors: FLaReNet, ELRA

Inscriptions: as for the general LTC (+ cc to workshop chairs)

Fees: inscription fees to the LTC + extra 40 Euros or 80 Euros for the Workshop-only attenders.

Paper submission: as for the general LTC(EasyChair) + to the workshop chairs

Presentation: publication in the LTC proceedings (paper + CD)

Reviewing: up to the workshop chairs + scientific committee

Program: The workshop will comprise presentations (including keynote talks) and a panel session, including a EC representative (tentative). In addition, selected speakers will be invited to

present their papers to a larger audience at the main LTC conference.

E-mail: ltc@amu.edu.pl

WWW: http://www.ltc.amu.edu.pl/

LTC2009 FlaReNet-LRL2009 Workshop - 1 week reminder for LTC

Call for papers and participation

The 4th LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge

for Computer Science and Linguistics (LTC 2009), a meeting organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz University Foundation (co-organizer), will take place on November 6-8, 2009.

Human Language Technologies (HLT) continue to be a challenge for computer science, linguistics and related fields as these areas become an ever more essential element of our everyday technological environment. Since the very beginning of the Computer and Information  Age these fields have influenced and stimulated each other. The European Union strongly supports HLT under the 7th Framework Program. These efforts as well as technological, social and cultural globalization have created a favorable climate for the intensive exchange of novel ideas, concepts and solutions across initially distant disciplines. We aim at further contributing to this exchange and invite you to join us at LTC in November 2009, as well as at the FlaReNet workshop (LRL 2009) on the theme "Getting Less-Resourced Languages on-Board!".

Zygmunt Vetulani

LTC 2009 Chair

vetulani@amu.edu.pl

CONFERENCE TOPICS

The conference topics include the following (the ordering is not significative):

   - electronic language resources and tools,

   - formalisation of natural languages,

   - parsing and other forms of NL processing,

   - computer modelling of language competence,

   - NL user modelling,

   - NL understanding by computers,

   - knowledge representation,

   - man-machine NL interfaces,

   - Logic Programming in Natural Language Processing,

   - speech processing,

   - NL applications in robotics,

   - text-based information retrieval and extraction,

   - question answering,

   - tools and methodologies for developing multilingual systems,

   - translation enhancement tools,

   - corpora-based methods in language engineering,

   - WordNet-like ontologies,

   - methodological issues in HLT,

   - language-specific computational challenges for HLTs (especially for languages other than English),

   - HLT standards,

   - HLTs as a support for foreign language teaching,

   - communicative intelligence,

   - legal issues connected with HLTs (problems and challenges),

   - contribution of HLTs to the Homeland Security problems (technology applications and legal aspects),

   - visionary papers in the field of HLT,

   - HLT's for the Less-Resourced Languages

   - HLT related policies,

   - system prototype presentations.

This list is by no means closed and we are open to further proposals. Please do not hesitate to contact us in order to feed us with you suggestions and ideas of how to satisfy your expectation concerning the program. The Program Committee is also open to suggestions concerning accompanying events (workshops, exhibits, panels, etc). Suggestions, ideas and observations may be addressed directly to the LTC Chair by email (vetulani@amu.edu.pl).

PAPER SUBMISSION

The conference accepts papers in English. Papers (5 formatted pages) are due by July 31, 2009 (midnight, any time zone) and should not identify the author(s)in any manner. In order to facilitate submission we have decided to reduce the formatting requirements as much as possible at this stage. Please, however, do observe the following:

1. Accepted fonts for texts are Times Roman, Times New Roman. Courier is recommended for program listings. Character size for the main text should be 10 points, with 11 points leading (line spacing).

2. Text should be presented in 2 columns, 8,42 cm each with 0,95 cm between columns (gutter).

3. The paper size is 5 pages formatted according to (1) and (2) above.

4. The use of PDF format is strongly recommended, although MS Word will also be accepted.

Detailed guidelines for the final submission of accepted papers will be

published on the conference Web site by September 10, 2009 (acceptance

notification date).

All submissions are to be made electronically via the LTC 2009 web submission system. Acceptance/rejection notification will be sent by September 1, 2009.

IMPORTANT DATES/DEADLINES

- Deadline for submission of papers for review:  July 31, 2009.

- Acceptance/Rejection notification: September 10, 2009.

- Deadline for submission of final versions of accepted papers: October 1, 2009.

- Conference: November 6-8, 2009.

REGISTRATION

Only electronic registration will be possible. Details will be provided later on www.ltc.amu.edu.pl.

CONFERENCE FEES

Non-student participants:

   - Regular registration (payment by October 4, 2009) 160 EURO

   - Late registration (payment after October 4, 2009) 190 EURO

Student participants:

   - Regular registration (payment before October 4, 2009)  100 EURO

   - Late registration (payment after October 4, 2009)  120 EURO

Extra 40 Euro will be charged for the LRL Workshop participation (5.11.2009, cf below).

Student registrations must be accompanied by a proof of full-time student status valid on the payment date. Registrants are requested to scan and e-mail their proof of student status to ltc@amu.edu.pl. The e-mail subject field must have the following format:

   LTC-09-StudentStatus-< Name_of_participant > 

   (e.g. LTC-09-StudentStatus-VETULANI)

The conference fee covers:

   - Participation in the scientific programme.

   - Conference materials.

   - Proceedings on CD and paper.

   - Social events (banquet,...).

   - Coffee breaks.

PAYMENT

The payment methods will be detailed shortly.

Entertainment=Emotion (International workshop) – From November 15 to 21, 2009 - Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual (Spanish Pyrenees)

What is the relationship between entertainment and emotions in the consumption of new forms of media?
How does said relationship affect the attitudes, behaviors and thoughts of audiences?
What new emotions are generated by the new forms of interactive entertainment?
How does interactivity affect the emotional experience of entertainment?
What is the importance of morality or aesthetic appreciation in the experience of emotions during the consumption of media entertainment?
What emotions do we consume through new interactive products?
How do the intensity and valence of emotions change our aesthetic perception of entertainment products?
How are we influenced both by the emotions experienced during the processes of media entertainment, and by the perception of entertainment we obtain from experiencing these emotions?
Where are we taken by the emotions that entertain us?
Are there other ways of entertaining ourselves that make us freer?
In what products, and with what characteristics, are emotions stimulated or presented nowadays?

What are the cultural, economic, ideological, sociological, or artistic consequences of experiencing media emotions nowadays?

Does entertaining ourselves essentially mean generating emotions?

These are the kind of questions that will be answered at Entertainment=Emotion (E=E), the first edition of a very special workshop that will be held at the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual (CCBPP) from November 15 to 21, co-managed by María Teresa Soto Sanfiel (Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Peter Vorderer (Center for Advanced Media Research -CAMeRA-, Free University Amsterdam).

E=E is an international workshop to which researchers, professionals and students of media entertainment are invited. The event, which follows a very special format, far removed from the traditional meetings held in the area, seeks to create the right atmosphere for prominent international researchers, media professionals, creators of content and students to think together about the phenomenon of emotions in the audiovisual consumption of entertainment. Of special interest to E=E are the new forms of interactive entertainment that provoke new emotional experiences among audiences.

The organizers are hoping that such a meeting, in the magnificent setting of the CCBPP, surrounded by beautiful mountains and delightful scenery, will encourage relaxed exchange between researchers and professionals from different traditions and of differing levels of experience, and for this to produce new visions and problems to be investigated, and the inspiration to create content. They also hope to create a permanent meeting point for media entertainment researchers that sets a first class international standard.

The organizers also hope to help generate aesthetic, philosophical, sociological and political discourse on the good for cultural progress signified by the different forms of emotional experience obtained during media entertainment processes. In this sense, the ultimate aim of E=E is to generate knowledge that arouses positive, free and responsible attitudes to the use, and experience, of emotions in relation to the consumption of audiovisual entertainment.

Similarly, the organizers of E=E seek to promote the creation, at the CCBPP, of a high level academic space where professionals and researchers can exchange and experience in situ the emotions produced through exposure to products that can generate emotion in order to entertain.

Finally, the organizers aim to investigate new forms of interactive entertainment and the emotional experiences they generate, and we therefore invite any developments to be exhibited or presented.

The application period for the presentation of communications, reports, presentations, exhibitions, audiovisual performances and poster session ends on September 7. The candidatures will be evaluated by a scientific committee, after which a list of those accepted will be published. For more information about the requirements for participation, please visit the website (http://www.benasque.org/2009emotion/) or write to Maria Teresa Soto (mariateresa.soto@uab.es <mailto:mariateresa.soto@uab.es>).

The best selected full papers from Entertainment=Emotion (International workshop) will be considered to be published in a *special issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART)*, the leading journal in the area (http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijart).

A limited number of people can attend the workshop, so we advise you to send in your application as early as possible.

The CCBPP is managed by Physics Professors José Ignacio Latorre (UB) and Manuel Asorey (UZAR) and is supported by the Spanish Ministry for Education and Science, the Benasque Town Council, the Government of Aragon, the University of Zaragoza and the BBV. The CCBPP is a centre of renowned international prestige and is used to hold high level scientific meetings and, as well as hosting this meeting, seeks to stimulate the production of significant advances both in the study of science as in the professional creation of content, associated to the experience of emotions in media entertainment. 

JPC3

Troisièmes Journées de Phonétique Clinique

Appel à Communication
**4-5 décembre 2009, Aix-en-Provence, France

_http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~jpc3/ <http://www.lpl-aix.fr/%7Ejpc3/>
_********************************************************************************************************


*
Ces journées s’inscrivent dans la lignée des premières et deuxièmes journées d’études de phonétique clinique, qui s’étaient tenues respectivement à Paris en 2005 et Grenoble en 2007. La phonétique clinique réunit des chercheurs, enseignants-chercheurs, ingénieurs, médecins et orthophonistes, différents corps de métiers complémentaires qui poursuivent le même objectif : une meilleure connaissance des processus d’acquisition et de dysfonctionnement de la parole et de la voix. Cette approche interdisciplinaire vise à optimiser les connaissances fondamentales relatives à la communication parlée chez le sujet sain et à mieux comprendre, évaluer, diagnostiquer et remédier aux troubles de la parole et de la voix chez le sujet pathologique.

Les communications porteront sur les études phonétiques de la parole et de la voix pathologiques, chez l’adulte et chez l’enfant. Les *thèmes* du colloque incluent, de façon non limitative :

   Perturbations du système oro-pharyngo-laryngé    Perturbations du système perceptif    Troubles cognitifs et moteurs    Instrumentation et ressources en phonétique clinique    Modélisation de la parole et de la voix pathologique    Evaluation et traitement des pathologies de la parole et de la voix
*Les contributions sélectionnées seront présentées sous l’une des deux formes suivantes :*

   Communication longue: 20 minutes, pour l’exposé de travaux aboutis    Communication courte: 8 minutes pour l’exposé d'observations
   cliniques, de travaux préliminaires, de problématiques émergentes
   afin de favoriser au mieux les échanges interdisciplinaires entre
   phonéticiens et cliniciens.
*Format de soumission:
*Les soumissions aux JPC se présentent sous la forme de résumés rédigés en français, d’une longueur maximale d’une page A4, police Times New Roman, 12pt, interligne simple. Les résumés devront être soumis au format PDF à l’adresse suivante: _soumission.jpc3@lpl-aix.fr


_*Date limite de soumission: 15 mai 2009
Date de notification auteurs : 1er juillet 2009

*Pour toute information complémentaire, contactez les organisateurs:
_org.jpc3@lpl-aix.fr

_/L’inscription aux JPC3 (1^er juillet 2009) sera ouverte à tous, publiant ou non publiant.

IEEE ICASSP 2010   International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing                            March 15 – 19, 2010                Sheraton Dallas Hotel * Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.                         http://www.icassp2010.com/     The 35th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will be held at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, March 15 – 19, 2010. The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions on the following topics:   * Audio and electroacoustics  * Bio imaging and signal processing  * Design and implementation of signal processing systems  * Image and multidimensional signal processing  * Industry technology tracks  * Information forensics and security  * Machine learning for signal processing  * Multimedia signal processing  * Sensor array and multichannel systems  * Signal processing education  * Signal processing for communications  * Signal processing theory and methods  * Speech processing  * Spoken language processing  Welcome to Texas, Y’All! Dallas is known for living large and thinking big. As the nation’s ninth-largest city, Dallas is exciting, diverse and friendly — factors that contribute to its success as a leading leisure and convention destination. There’s a whole “new” vibrant Dallas to enjoy-new entertainment districts, dining, shopping, hotels, arts and cultural institutions- with more on the way. There’s never been a more exciting time to visit Dallas than now.  Submission of Papers: Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, to the ICASSP Technical Committee. All ICASSP papers will be handled and reviewed electronically. The ICASSP 2010 website www.icassp2010.com will provide you with further details. Please note that all submission deadlines are strict.  Tutorial and Special Session Proposals: Tutorials will be held on March 14 and 15, 2010. Brief proposals should be submitted by July 31, 2009, through the ICASSP 2010 website and must include title, outline, contact information for the presenter, and a description of the tutorial and material to be distributed to participants. Special sessions proposals should be submitted by July 31, 2009, through the ICASSP 2010 website and must include a topical title, rationale, session outline, contact information, and a list of invited papers. Tutorial and special session authors are referred to the ICASSP website for additional information regarding submissions.  * Important Deadlines *  Submission of Camera-Ready Papers      September 14, 2009  Notification of Paper Acceptance      December 11, 2009  Revised Paper Upload Deadline      January 8, 2010  Author’s Registration Deadline      January 15, 2010  For more detailed information, please visit the ICASSP 2010 official website, http://www.icassp2010.com/.

http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/~glow33/phon.html

 Workshop: Positional phenomena in phonology and phonetics

(Organised by Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

*Date:* 13 April 2010
*Organisers:* Marzena Zygis, Stefanie Jannedy, Susanne Fuchs
*Deadline for abstract submission:* 1st November 2009
*Abstracts submitted to:* zygis@zas.gwz-berlin.de
*Invited speakers:*

  * Taehong Cho (Hanyang University, Seoul) confirmed
  * Grzegorz Dogil (University of Stuttgart) confirmed

*Venue:* /Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuz'nicza 22, 50-138 Wroc?aw/

Positional effects found cross-linguistically at the edges of prosodic
constituents (e.g. final lengthening, final lowering, strengthening
effects, or final devoicing) have increasingly received attention in
phonetic-phonological research. Recent empirical investigations of such
positional effects and their variability pose, however, a great number
of questions challenging e.g. the idea of perceptual invariance. It has
been claimed that acoustic variability is a necessary prerequisite for
the perceptual system to parse segmental strings into words, phrases or
larger prosodic units.

This workshop will provide a forum for discussing controversies and
recent developments regarding positional phenomena. We invite abstracts
bearing on positional effects from various perspectives.The following
questions can be addressed, but are not limited to:

 1. What kind of variability is found in the data, and how does such
    variability need to be accounted for? What positional effects are
    common cross-linguistically and how can they be attributed to
    perceptual, articulatory or aerodynamic principles?
 2. How does positional prominence (lexical stress; accent) interact
    with acoustic and articulatory realizations of prosodic
    boundaries? What are the positional (a)symmetries in the
    realizations of boundaries, and what are the mechanisms underlying
    them?
 3. How does left- and right-edge phrasal marking interact with the
    acoustic and articulatory realizations at these prosodic
    boundaries? How are these interpreted in phonetics and in phonology?
 4. What are the necessary prerequisites for the interpretation of
    prosodic constituents? Which auditory cues are essential for the
    perception of boundaries and positional effects? Are such cues
    language-specific?
 5. To what extent do lexical frequency, phonotactic probability, and
    neighbourhood density contribute to the production and recognition
    of prosodic boundaries in (fluent/spontaneous) speech?
 6. How are positional characteristics exploited during the process of
    language acquisition? How are they learned during the process of
    language acquisition? Are positional effects salient enough for L2
    learners?

Abstracts are invited for a 20-min. presentation (excluding discussion).
Abstracts should be sent in two copies: one with a name and one without
as attached files (the name(s) should also be clearly mentioned in the
e-mail) to: zygis@zas.gwz-berlin.de in .pdf format. Only electronic
submissions will be considered. Abstracts may not exceed two pages of
text with at least a one-inch margin on all four sides (measured on A4
paper) and must employ a font not smaller than 12 point. Each page may
include a maximum of 50 lines of text. An additional page with
references may be included.

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2009.

Contact person: Marzena Zygis

Speech Prosody 2010 Satellite Workshop May 10th, 2010, Chicago, Illinois   Description of the workshop: Efficient tools for (semi-)automatic prosodic annotation are becoming more and more important for the speech community, as most systems of prosodic annotation rely on the identification of syllabic prominence in spoken corpora (whether they lead a phonological interpretation or not). The use of automatic and semi-automatic annotation has also facilitated multilingual research; many experiments on prosodic prominence identification have been conducted for European and non-European languages, and protocols have been written in order to build large databases of spoken languages prosodically annotated all around the world. The aim of this workshop is to bring together specialists of automatic prosodic annotation interested in the development of robust algorithms for prominence detection, and linguists who developed methodologies for the identification of prosodic prominence in natural languages on perceptual bases. The conference will include oral and poster sessions, and a final round table.   Scientific topics: 1. Annotation of prominence 2. Perceptual processing of prominences: gestalt theories’ background 3. Acoustic correlates of prominence 4. Prominence and its relations with prosodic structure 5. Prominence and its relations with accent, stress, tone and boundary 6. The use of syntactic/pragmatic information in prominence identification 7. Perception of prominence by naive/expert listeners 8. Statistical methods for prominence’s detection 9. Number of relevant prominence degrees : categorical or continuous scale 10.Prosodic prominence and visual perception   Submission of papers: Anonymous four-page papers (including figures and references) must be written in English, and be uploaded as pdf files here: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=prom2010. All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the scientific committee. Accepted four-page papers will be included in the online proceedings of the workshop published on the workshop website. The publication of extended selected papers after the workshop in a special issue of a journal is being considered.   Organizing Committee: Mathieu Avanzi (Université de Neuchâtel, CH) Anne Lacheret-Dujour (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre) Anne-Catherine Simon (Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve)  Scientific committee: the names of the scientific committee will be announced in the second circular.   Venue: The workshop will take place in The Doubletree Hotel Magnificent Mile, in Chicago. See the Speech prosody 2010 website (http://www.speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/index.html) for further information.   Important deadlines: Submission of four-page papers: November 15, 2009 Notification of acceptation: January 15, 2009 Author's Registration Deadline: March 2, 2010 Workshop: March 10, 2010    Website of the workshop: http://www2.unine.ch/speechprosody-prominence

SPEECH PROSODY 2010
===============================================================
Every Language, Every Style: Globalizing the Science of Prosody
===============================================================
Call For Papers
===============================================================

Prosody is, as far as we know, a universal characteristic of human speech, founded on the cognitive processes of speech production and perception.  Adequate modeling of prosody has been shown to improve human-computer interface, to aid clinical diagnosis, and to improve the quality of second language instruction, among many other applications.

Speech Prosody 2010, the fifth international conference on speech prosody, invites papers addressing any aspect of the science and technology of prosody.  Speech Prosody is the only recurring international conference focused on prosody as an organizing principle for the social, psychological, linguistic, and technological aspects of spoken language.  Speech Prosody 2010 seeks, in particular, to discuss the universality of prosody.  To what extent can the observed scientific and technological benefits of prosodic modeling be ported to new languages, and to new styles of spoken language?  Toward this end, Speech Prosody 2010 especially welcomes papers that create or adapt models of prosody to languages, dialects, sociolects, and/or communicative situations that are inadequately addressed by the current state of the art.

=======
TOPICS
=======

Speech Prosody 2010 will include keynote presentations, oral sessions, and poster sessions covering topics including:

* Prosody of under-resourced languages and dialects
* Communicative situation and speaking style
* Dynamics of prosody: structures that adapt to new situations
* Phonology and phonetics of prosody
* Rhythm and duration
* Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
* Meta-linguistic and para-linguistic communication
* Signal processing
* Automatic speech synthesis, recognition and understanding
* Prosody of sign language
* Prosody in face-to-face interaction: audiovisual modeling and analysis
* Prosodic aspects of speech and language pathology
* Prosody in language contact and second language acquisition
* Prosody and psycholinguistics
* Prosody in computational linguistics
* Voice quality, phonation, and vocal dynamics

====================
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
====================

Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length, four-page papers, including figures and references, at http://speechprosody2010.org. All Speech Prosody papers will be handled and reviewed electronically.

===================
VENUE
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The Doubletree Hotel Magnificent Mile is located two blocks from North Michigan Avenue, and three blocks from Navy Pier, at the cultural center of Chicago.  The Windy City has been the center of American innovation since the mid nineteenth century, when a railway link connected Chicago to the west coast, civil engineers reversed the direction of the Chicago river, Chicago financiers invented commodity corn (maize), and the Great Chicago Fire destroyed almost every building in the city. The Magnificent Mile hosts scores of galleries and museums, and hundreds of world-class restaurants and boutiques.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Submission of Papers (http://speechprosody2010.org): October 15, 2009
Notification of Acceptance:                                           December 15, 2009
Conference:                                                                    May 11-14, 2010

1st Call for Papers  4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2010)  Trier, Germany, May 24-28, 2010  http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2010/  *********************************************************************  AIMS:  LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications that was developed at Rovira i Virgili University (the host of the previous three editions and co-organizer of this one) in the period 2002-2006, LATA 2010 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.).  SCOPE:  Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not limited to:  - algebraic language theory - algorithms on automata and words - automata and logic - automata for system analysis and programme verification - automata, concurrency and Petri nets - cellular automata - combinatorics on words - computability - computational complexity - computer linguistics - data and image compression - decidability questions on words and languages - descriptional complexity - DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing - document engineering - foundations of finite state technology - fuzzy and rough languages - grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.) - grammars and automata architectures - grammatical inference and algorithmic learning - graphs and graph transformation - language varieties and semigroups - language-based cryptography - language-theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life - neural networks - parallel and regulated rewriting - parsing - pattern matching and pattern recognition - patterns and codes - power series - quantum, chemical and optical computing - semantics - string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics - symbolic dynamics - term rewriting - text algorithms - text retrieval - transducers - trees, tree languages and tree machines - weighted machines  STRUCTURE:  LATA 2010 will consist of:  - 3 invited talks - 2 invited tutorials - refereed contributions - open sessions for discussion in specific subfields, on open problems, or on professional issues (if requested by the participants)  Invited speakers to be announced.  PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:  Alberto Apostolico (Atlanta) Thomas Bäck (Leiden) Stefania Bandini (Milano) Wolfgang Banzhaf (St. John's) Henning Bordihn (Potsdam) Kwang-Moo Choe (Daejeon) Andrea Corradini (Pisa) Christophe Costa Florencio (Leuven) Maxime Crochemore (Marne-la-Vallée) W. Bruce Croft (Amherst) Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú (Budapest) Jürgen Dassow (Magdeburg) Volker Diekert (Stuttgart) Rodney G. Downey (Wellington) Frank Drewes (Umea) Henning Fernau (Trier, co-chair) Rusins Freivalds (Riga) Rudolf Freund (Wien) Paul Gastin (Cachan) Edwin Hancock (York, UK) Markus Holzer (Giessen) Helmut Jürgensen (London, Canada) Juhani Karhumäki (Turku) Efim Kinber (Fairfield) Claude Kirchner (Bordeaux) Carlos Martín-Vide (Brussels, co-chair) Risto Miikkulainen (Austin) Victor Mitrana (Bucharest) Claudio Moraga (Mieres) Sven Naumann (Trier) Chrystopher Nehaniv (Hatfield) Maurice Nivat (Paris) Friedrich Otto (Kassel) Daniel Reidenbach (Loughborough) Klaus Reinhardt (Tübingen) Antonio Restivo (Palermo) Christophe Reutenauer (Montréal) Kai Salomaa (Kingston, Canada) Jeffrey Shallit (Waterloo) Eljas Soisalon-Soininen (Helsinki) Bernhard Steffen (Dortmund) Frank Stephan (Singapore) Wolfgang Thomas (Aachen) Marc Tommasi (Lille) Esko Ukkonen (Helsinki) Todd Wareham (St. John's) Osamu Watanabe (Tokyo) Bruce Watson (Pretoria) Thomas Wilke (Kiel) Slawomir Zadrozny (Warsaw) Binhai Zhu (Bozeman)  ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:  Adrian Horia Dediu (Tarragona) Henning Fernau (Trier, co-chair)  Maria Gindorf (Trier) Stefan Gulan (Trier) Anna Kasprzik (Trier) Carlos Martín-Vide (Brussels, co-chair)  Norbert Müller (Trier) Bianca Truthe (Magdeburg)  SUBMISSIONS:  Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0). Submissions have to be uploaded at:  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2010  PUBLICATIONS:  A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.  At least one special issue of a major journal will be later published containing extended versions of the papers contributed to the conference.  Submissions to the post-conference publications will be only by invitation.  REGISTRATION:  The period for registration will be open since September 1, 2009 until May 24, 2010. The registration form can be found at the website of the conference: http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2010/  Early registration fees: 500 Euro Early registration fees (PhD students): 400 Euro Late registration fees: 530 Euro Late registration fees (PhD students): 430 Euro On-site registration fees: 550 Euro On-site registration fees (PhD students): 450 Euro  At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have a registered author by February 15, 2010 will be excluded from the proceedings.  Fees comprise access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings volume, coffee breaks, lunches, excursion, and conference dinner.  PAYMENT:  Early (resp. late) registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before February 15, 2010 (resp. May 14, 2010) to the conference series account at Open Bank (Plaza Manuel Gomez Moreno 2, 28020 Madrid, Spain): IBAN: ES1300730100510403506598 - Swift code: OPENESMMXXX (account holder: Carlos Martin-Vide & URV – LATA 2010).  Please write the participant’s name in the subject of the bank form. Transfers should not involve any expense for the conference.  On-site registration fees can be paid only in cash.  A receipt for the payment will be provided on site.  Besides paying the registration fees, it is required to fill in the registration form at the website of the conference.  BEST PAPER AWARDS:  An award will be presented to the authors of the two best papers accepted to the conference. Only papers fully authored by PhD students are eligible. The award intends to cover their travel expenses.  IMPORTANT DATES:  Paper submission: December 3, 2009 Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: January 21, 2010 Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: February 3, 2010 Early registration: February 15, 2010 Late registration: May 14, 2010 Starting of the conference: May 24, 2010 Submission to the post-conference publications: August 27, 2010  FURTHER INFORMATION:  gindorf-ti@informatik.uni-trier.de  CONTACT:  LATA 2010 Universität Trier Fachbereich IV – Informatik Campus II, Behringstraße D-54286 Trier  Phone: +49-(0)651-201-2836 Fax: +49-(0)651-201-3954