ISCApad number 71

April 27th 2004


Dear ISCA members,

The regular date of issue is the first week of each month.
Do not forget to send the information you want to display for the members in time to be included (last week of each month). I draw your attention on our secretary's request
for your help in commenting our new web site (see ISCA News).

Chris Wellekens


TABLE OF CONTENTS


1- ISCA NEWS
- New membership services : online access to the Speech Communication journal at a discounted rate. 
The online subscription gives members access not only to the current year's volumes but also to the Speech Communication archive dating back to 1995. If you are interested in subscribing either to the paper version alone or to the paper version+online access, please indicate this on the renewal form : (http://www.isca speech.org/Apply_member.html) and will be billed directly by Elsevier.

Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version only: 85 EUR 
Individual, FULL member and STUDENT : paper version + online access: 95 EUR 
Institutional Member, paper version only : 600 EUR

- 3rd CHRISTIAN BENOIT AWARD : deadline April 30th, 2004

The Christian Benoît Award is delivered periodically by the Association Christian Benoit (**). It is given to promising young scientists in the domain of Speech
Communication. The Award provides financial support for the development of a multi-media project promoting the work of these young scientists, and is valued at 7,622 Euros. The first award was delivered to Tony Ezzat from MIT in June 2000, for his research in Audiovisual Speech Synthesis, and the second award to Johanna Barry from University of Melbourne in September 2002 for her work on the acquisition of lexical tones in profoundly hearing-impaired speakers using a cochlear implant. The third award will be delivered this year to ANY PROJECT IN THE FIELD OF AUDIO VISUAL SPEECH COMMUNICATION. Candidates should be in the final stages of their doctoral research or within the five years following their PhD. The Prix Benoît award will offer financial support to develop a multi-media project which (a) demonstrates the candidate's research in a way that helps launching that candidate's career, and (b) leverages electronic publishing technologies intelligently so as to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of this content.

In the application, the candidate should provide a statement of research interest, a detailed curriculum vitae, and a description of the proposed multi-media project.
If the project already exists, a copy or link should be provided along with the application.

Applications should be sent to Pascal Perrier (
perrier@icp.inpg.fr ) and received by Friday April 30th, 2004. Electronic submissions are mandatory.

The successful candidate will be notified by June 1st and invited to make a brief presentation of his/her work at the ICSLP'2004 Conference in Jeju (Jeju Island, Korea). Travel expenses for attendance at the Award ceremony will be provided by the Christian Benoît Association.
For further information, please contact Pascal Perrier.
(**) The Christian Benoît Association is a nonprofit organization, whose purpose is to facilitate the development of research projects in the field of speech communication. Established in honor of Christian Benoît, French CNRS researcher in the field of speech communication who died on the 26th of April, 1998, at the age of 41, the Award places special emphasis on multimedia representations of ongoing research
- CALL TO ALL MEMBERS: ISCA is looking to improve its website
(
www.isca-speech.org) and would very much welcome feedback from its members. If you have a few minutes to spend browsing through the current site, we'd be very grateful for any feedback that you could provide on its style and content. Please send your comments by email to the ISCA Secretary, Valerie Hazan, at the following address: val@phon.ucl.ac.uk

- ISCApad publishes now a list of accepted papers for publication in Speech Communication. These papers can be also viewed on the website of ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com) if your institution has subscribed to Speech Communication.

- ISCA Grants are available for students attending meetings.
Even if no information on the grants is advertised on
the conference announcement,students may apply.
For more information:
http://www.isca-speech.org

- German-French Summerschool on Cognitive and physical models of speech production, perception and perception-production interaction
sponsored by the German French University (DFH) Saarbrucken. 19th-24th of September 2004 in Lubmin, Germany (Baltic Sea). Contact:
sommer_org@zas.gwz-berlin.de
.

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2- COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES

- Information on on-going theses could be very useful for thesis supervisors, researchers as well as PhD students.
A list of speech theses is available at
http://HLTheses.elsnet.org

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3- ISCA JOB OPENINGS

Latest opportunities :
- Speech Tech Positions at Multitel (http://www.multitel.be), Belgium (Junior speech technologies engineer, Experienced speech technologies engineer)
- PhD positions at the Computer Science Dpt of the University of Sheffield (UK) (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martin/rs2004.pdf)
- Research oppotunities in the AMI TRAINING PROGRAMME (www.amiproject.org) ; (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~linda/AMI/training.htm)
-
New Job Opportunities at ELRA/ELDA EVALUATION DEPARTMENT (Department director, Junior Engineers) www.elda.fr or www.elra.info
-
Postdoctoral researcher(s) & Predoctoral researcher(s), The Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) Laboratory, Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (costas@zeus.csd.auth.gr)

All positions are on the isca website:  http://www.isca-speech.org/jobs


More positions on :                            
http://www.elsnet.org

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4- JOURNAL AND BOOKS

- Call for Papers IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue on Speech Technology and Systems in Human-Machine Communication

Over the past two decades, significant progresses are made in advancing speech technologies in multimodal/multimedia and human-machine communication. As the era of information age continues, the research in speech technologies is further acclerated by the advance of powerful computing devices, the data driven pattern recognition methods, and the need to generate machine understandable metadata for web cotents and other information sources. Although various speech systems are built and applied in numerous applications, the full potential of speech technologies in multimodal/multimedia communication still remains to be uncovered. This special issue is to fill the need of a comprehensive review of new approaches and advances of speech technologies under the broad perspective of intelligent human-machine communication. Speech technologies and systems touch upon many essential signal processing techniques, and they are in the core of multimodal/multimedia communication research. It is hoped that such a systematic and up-to-date overview of the field, including tutorials to well established or new techniques, can bring the awareness and applications of speech technologies closer to the general signal processing community. Review papers are solicited from the following non-exhaustive list of topics. The emphasis is on recent advances in current technologies and directions in furture research. Other related work is also welcome.

Scope of Topics:
+ Novel speech recognition techniques and systems
+ Novel speech understanding techniques and approaches in language modeling
+ Dialogue system design and architecture
+ Spoken document retrieval systems and their underlying technologies
+ Speech technologies in multimodal interaction and multimedia communication
+ Novel signal processing techniques for robust speech recognition (e.g., distant talker speech recognition)
+ Novel techniques for audio-visual and multi-sensor, multimodal speechrecognition
+ Facial animation synthesis and recognition

Submission Procedure:
Prospective authors should submit their white papers to the web submission system at
http://www.cspl.umd.edu/spm/, according to the following timetable. The desired length of white papers is 5 to 10 pages.
White paper due: May 1, 2004 - Invitation notification: June 1, 2004 - Manuscript due: September 1, 2004 - Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2004 - Final Manuscript due: January 15, 2005 - Publication date: May, 2005
Guest Editors:
Li Deng,Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA,
deng@microsoft.com
Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA,
kuansanw@microsoft.com
Wu Chou, Avaya Labs Research, Rm. 2D34, 233 Mt. Airy Rd., Basking Ridge, NJ 07920,
wuchou@avaya.com

- Elsevier, the publisher of the official ISCA journal Speech Communication, has one series of print copies of all volumes of Speech Communication available for a research institute that is active in speech research, but is not in a position to acquire the full archive itself. Parties who are interested in this offer are requested to state their interest to Hilde van der Togt (h.togt@elsevier.com), who is as a Publishing Editor responsible for the journal in Elsevier. ISCA and the Speech Communication Editors will collaborate with Elsevier to select the deserving institute amongst applicants.

- IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing is preparing a special issue on Data Mining of Speech, Audio and Dialog.
Submission deadline: July 1st, 2004
- Papers accepted for future publication in Speech Communication.
Full text available on
http://www.sciencedirect.com for Speech Communication subscribers and subscribing institutions. Click on Publications, then on Speech Communication and on Articles in press.
The list of papers in press appear and a .pdf file for each paper is available.1.Kalle J. Palomäki , Guy J. Brown and Jon Barker, Techniques for handling convolutional distortion with 'missing data' automatic speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 13 March 2004.

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5- FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES

All the forthcoming conferences organized by isca are presented on the isca website : http://www.isca-speech.org/conferences

- Interspeech (ICSLP)-2004 , Jeju, KOREA, OCTOBER 5-9, 2004 (http://www.icslp2004.org/)


- Interspeech (Eurospeech)-2005, Lisbon, Portugal,September 4-8, 2005
(http://www.interspeech2005.org/)

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6-FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKSHOP (ITRWs)


All the forthcoming event organized or sponsored by isca are presented on the isca website :
http://www.isca-speech.org/workshops

- Supported by ISCA

- 2004: A Speaker Odyssey

Toledo - Spain, 31May/4June 2004
http://www.odyssey04.org/img/Odyssey04CFP030603.pdf

- 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg USA, June 14-16 2004
http://www.ssw5.org

- InSTIL/ICALL Symposium 2004
NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems
17-19 June 2004 Venice, Italy, Submission deadline: February 21st, 2004
http://sisley.cgm.unive.it/ICALL2004/index.htm

-Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing

October 2-3, 2004 Jeju, Korea, Extended deadline: April 21st, 2004
http://journal.speech.cs.cmu.edu/SAPA2004/

- NOLISP'05: Non linear speech processing,
April 19-22 April 2005, Barcelona, Spain
organized by Cost 277
Contact person: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy (
faundez@eupmt.es)

- Sponsored by ISCA

- The XXVth Journées d'Etude sur la Parole (JEP)
Fes, Morocco, April 19-22 2004. (in conjunction with TALN 2004 (Traitement
automatique des langues naturelles)).
contact: Noel Nguyen (
mailto:jep-taln@lpl.univ-aix.fr)
URL:
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/

- 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue <
http://sigdial04.eml-research.de/>
April 30 - May 1, 2004, Boston, USA

- COST278 Workshop on Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction
30th and 31st August 2004, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Further details are available on
www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/robust2004

- ICA 2004 International Congress on Acoustics
April 4-9, 2004 Kyoto Japan
Theme: Acoustic science for quality of life
http://www.ica2004.or.jp/

- HLT-NAACL Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Speech Indexing and Retrieval
Boston, May 6
http://www.hlt-naacl04.org/

- LREC2004
Lisbon (Portugal) 24-30 May 2004
http://www.lredc-conf.org

- 4th International SALTMIL (ISCA SIG) LREC workshop on First Steps for Language Documentation of Minority Languages: Computational Linguistic Tools for
Morphology, Lexicon and Corpus Compilation
24 May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal

- Affective Dialog Systems (ADS'04)
Kloster Irsee, Germany
June 14-16, 2004
http://www.sigmedia.org/ADS04

-International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation
Evaluation campaignon spoken language translation
A satellite event of INterspeech-ICSLP 2004
September 30 - October 1, 2004, Kyoto, Japan
http://www.slt.atr.jp/IWSLT2004/

-4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'04)
December 16-18, 2004, Hong Kong, China
http://www.iscslp2004.com/

- Future Speech Science and Technology events

- UK Speech Meeting Announcement and Call for Abstracts
One Day Meeting for Young Speech Researchers
Thursday 22nd April 2004, University College London
www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/sjc/one-day-meeting/
Organizers: Prof Stephen Cox and Dr M. Huckvale

- HLT/NAACL 2004
Human Language Technology Conference of the
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
May 2-7, 2004, Boston, Mass USA
http://www.hlt-naacl04.org

- HLT/NAACL 2004 Workshop on Spoken Language Understanding for Conversational Systems
http://www.research.att.com/~dtur/NAACL04-Workshop/
The Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, May 7, 2004

- HLT/NAACL 2004 Student Research Workshop at The Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2-7, 2004 Boston, Massachusetts, USA
http://inismor.ucd.ie/~nstokes/hlt-naacl04-student
Submission deadline: February 8th, 2004 (extended), Notification: March 1, 2004, Camera-ready papers: March 15, 2004
Tentative workshop date: May 2, 2004 (final date will be posted on web site)

- Voice World Europe
3rd annual conference and exhibition
5 - 6 May 2004
http://www.voice-world.com/

- HIGHER-LEVEL LINGUISTIC AND OTHER KNOWLEDGE FOR AUTOMATIC SPEECH PROCESSING
(Workshop in conjunction with NAACL/HLT 2004)
The Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts
Thursday, May 6, 2004 (see ISCApad 68)

- ICASSP 2004, Montreal, CANADA, MAY 17-21, 2004
http://icassp2004.org

- Workshop: User Oriented Evaluation of Knowledge Discovery Systems
Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal., 25th May, 2004, afternoon
in association with the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation: LREC 2004 - Main conference May 26th 28th, 2004
(see ISCApad 70)

- From sound to sense: Fifty+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication
12-13 June at MIT Cambridge , MA, USA
http://www.rle.mit.edu/soundto sense/

- Incremental parsing: bringing engineering and cognition together
Workshop at ACL 2004
Barcelona Spain
25 july 2004 (see ISCApad 68)

- Inter-Noise 2004, 33rd International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering,
Prague, Czech Republic, 2004, August 22 - 25.
http://www.internoise2004.cz

- EUSIPCO 2004. 12th European Signal Processing Conference.
September 7-10, 2004 Vienna, Austria
http://www.nt.tuwien.ac.at/eusipco2004/
Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology

- Seventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE
(TSD 2004)
http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/tsd2004/ Brno, Czech Republic, 8-11 September 2004
DEADLINE EXTENSION: March 29,2004

- CLEF 2004 Workshop 16-17 september 2004 (see ISCApad 68)
Evaluation campaign.

- 2004 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing
(MMSP 04)
http://mmsp.unisi.it
September 29-October 1 2004, Sienna Italy

- ACM Multimedia 2004
October 10-15, New York, NY USA
http://www.mm2004.org

-6th International Conference
on Multimodal Interfaces(ICMI'04)
October 13-15, 2004
The Atherton Hotel/State College, PA, USA
http://www.icmiplace.org


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