============================================================================ ISCApad number 72 May 12th 2004 ============================================================================ Dear ISCA members, I hope most of you got their previous issue with its new design thanks to our secretary Many Foxonet. However it caused some delay in issuing the April 2004 issue. Sending ISCApad to all members from her low speed connexion has showed to cause some trouble in distribution and also some servers have now a severe filtering that considers mails coming from individual senders as spam. This issue and the next ones if successful will be sent from my place where I keep an updated mailing list of all our members. As usual, 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 ================= *ISCA News *COurses, internships, data bases, softwares *Job openings *Journals and Books *Future ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshops (ITRW) *Future ISCA supported events *Future Speech Science and technology events ============================================================================= ISCA NEWS ========= - 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 ================================================================ -New development on 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 ============================================================= -ISCApad publishes now a list of accepted papers for publication in Speech Communication. These papers can be also viewed on the website ofb bScienceDirect (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 ============================================================================== COURSES, DATABASES, SOFTWARES ============================= - 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 (see ISCApad 69) -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 -LingCom News - new release and free test for speech signal analysis software lingWAVES standard The new release (2.30) of the speech signal analysis software lingWAVES is now available. The software comes now with some new and improved features: o new print module (preview, head and bottom lines, color/b&w, ...). o copy, cut, paste and delete functions are now available for comfortable signal work/edit. o undo and undo-list function o improved record module o beside the aligner module we offer now also a batch-aligner including a new dictionary and text-to-transcription function for automatic transcription. A test version of the modular speech signal analysis software is available. The downloadable standard test version includes basic analysis and processing funktions (F0, FFT, Jitter, spectrogram, ...) and also some functions like: o phonetogram standard o phonetogram pro with DSI (Dysphonia Severity Index) o label o generator lingWAVES runs on Windows 32bit systems (Win98SE, WinME, Win2000, WinXP). Please feel free to download the test version (9MB): http://www.lingcom.com/download/lingWAVES_2_30.zip (If you have already tested version 2.29 please uninstal this version and delete the LingCom/lingWAVES directory in the program folder) For more informations about lingWAVES and the included modules look at: http://www.lingcom.com/english/products/lingWAVES/lingWAVES_description.htm A test version of the module aligner (German, UK and US Englisch, Spanish, French, Italian) is also available for interested users. Please contact us for a demo download. =========================================================================== JOB OPENINGS (have also a look at http://www;isca-speech.org Jobs as well as http://www.elsnet.org Jobs) =========================================================================== 1.RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE AMI TRAINING PROGRAMME AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction, www.amiproject.org) is an integrated project funded by the EC Framework 6 programme from January 2004 for 3 years. AMI is concerned with multimodal technologies to support human interaction, in the context of smart meeting rooms and remote meeting assistants. The project aims to develop new tools for understanding, searching and browsing meetings data captured from a wide range of devices, as part of an integrated multimodal group communication. AMI will thus address a range of multidisciplinary research including natural speech recognition, speaker tracking and segmentation, visual shape tracking, gesture recognition, multimodal dialogue modelling, meeting dynamics, summarisation, browsing and retrieval. AMI supports a training programme whose objective is to provide opportunites for undergraduates, masters students, Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers to take part in AMI. * The training programme funds internships and exchanges. * Visits typically occupy at least 3 months for undergraduates and masters students and at least 6 months for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. * Funding covers travel and living expenses, but not salary. Living expenses will typically be 1250 Euro/month. * The programme is open to all, but priority is given to researchers who are members of AMI teams, researchers who intend to visit AMI teams, researchers who can demonstrate close connections with AMI research, proposals with an industrial component,. * A specific programme funds visits of 6 months or more to the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In this case typical living expenses are 2000 Euro/Month. For Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers, visits to ICSI will typically be at least 6 months. Senior scientists are also encouraged to apply, in which case proposals for shorter visits will also be entertained. HOSTING SITES AMI's 15 partners and associated companies and institutions (details on www.amiproject.org) will act as hosts for the training programme. The project is jointly managed by IDIAP (CH) and The University of Edinburgh (UK). The training programme is managed by the University of Sheffield (UK). HOW TO APPLY The application form can be downloaded from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~linda/AMI/training.htm. You will need the written support of your home institution and the host institution. You will also need an academic reference. Enquiries may be addressed to Linda Perna, AMI training programme administrator, l.perna@dcs.shef.ac.uk. WHEN TO APPLY You can apply at any time but applications will be considered on a quarterly basis, with deadlines of 31st March, 15th June, 15th September and 15th December. Professor Phil Green AMI Training Manager Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield Regent Court 211 Portobello St., Sheffield S1 4DP UK phone: (44) 114 22 21828 fax: (44) 114 22 21810 email: p.green@dcs.shef.ac.uk www: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/P.Green/ 2. The Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) Laboratory at the Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Director Prof. Ioannis Pitas) invites applications from nationals of European Union Member States (Greek nationals are not elligible) or Associated States or any other State that have resided in the European Union for the last five years prior to the appointment for the following vacant research positions: Postdoctoral researcher(s) Predoctoral researcher(s). The applicant can preferably work towards a PhD degree during his/her appointment period. The minimal appointment period is one (1) year. Associated States at the date of this posting are: Bulgaria, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Israel. The applicants are required to prove related research experience in any of the following topics: · speech processing · speech recognition · speech synthesis · development of talking heads The positions are financed partially by the European Union Research and Training Network (RTN) "Multimodal Human Computer Interaction ’’ (MUHCI) and partially from other related FP6 projects. A very good knowledge of English is highly desirable. Prospective applicants should forward their resume (CV) and recommendation letters by fax or email to Assistant Professor Constantine Kotropoulos Department of Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki 54124, Box 451 GREECE Tel: +30-2310-998225 Fax: +30-2310-998225 E-mail: costas@zeus.csd.auth.gr Ph.D.POSITIONS at Research Center on Language and Speech Technologies (TALP) Signal Theory and Communications Department Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) Barcelona, Spain The TALP Research Center offers 4 fellowships to qualified applicants for Ph.D. The research project will focus on: * Statistical spoken language translation (2PhD positions) * Expressive speech synthesis (2PhD positions) The work will mainly take place in the framework of the European project TC-STAR (http://tc-star.itc.it/ ) and the Spanish project (http://gps-tsc.upc.es/veu/aliado). Requirements The ideal Ph.D. candidate should have good background in signal processing and statistical learning theory, speech processing, and computer science. All applicants should be familiar with C/C++ programming under a Unix/Linux environment. More information: http://gps-tsc.upc.es/veu/openpositions Contact person: David Conejero _________________________________________ Computer Science at the University of Sheffield PhD STUDENTSHIP - "Natural Language Generation for dialogue systems" The Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield invites applications for a three-year studentship award to commence in October 2004. The successful applicant will work on Natural Language Generation for dialogue systems and will be jointly supervised by Prof. Marilyn Walker and Dr. Mirella Lapata. Deadline for applications: Thursday 20 May 2004. -------------------------- Bootstrapping Natural Language Generation in Dialogue Systems In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in the use of natural language generation in spoken dialogue. The spoken language generator is a component of the dialogue system that, given a high level goal of what the system is supposed to say, decides what the system should say to achieve the goal (sentence planning) and how to say it (sentence realization). Most current dialogue systems rely on hand-crafted rules or templates for performing the generation task, therefore requiring considerable manual effort to produce meaningful output. These systems tend to be domain- and situation-specific and typically have to be entirely re-engineered when switching to a new application domain. The project will investigate data intensive techniques for automating the task of sentence planning and realization for dialogue systems while avoiding the need for manual hand coding. The general aim is to develop automatic methods for creating natural language generation components that produce quality output efficiently and can be easily adapted to different domains and dialogue situations. Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or Linguistics. Applicants with strong programming skills (e.g., C++, Perl, Java) and expertise in any of the following will be preferred: Dialogue modelling Statistical modelling Natural Language Processing Machine Learning Grammar formalisms (in particular, dependency-based ones) Theories of discourse structure Pragmatics (in particular, speech act theory and implicatures) The successful applicant will be based at the University of Sheffield's Department of Computer Science, internationally recognised for the quality of its research, and will work across the Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech and Hearing (SpandH), and the Machine Learning (ML) research groups (see http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research for details). The Department of Computer Science has close research links with a number of other academic institutions (e.g., University of Edinburgh, MIT) and companies (e.g., AT&T) from which the student will benefit. For more information about the Department see http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/. Information about the PhD Programme, and how to apply for a PhD can be found by following the various links from the following URL: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/admissions/index.html. PLEASE MARK "Bootstrapping Natural Language Generation in Dialogue Systems" ON THE APPLICATION. For additional information on the PhD project, please contact Prof. Marilyn Walker (m.a.walker@sheffield.ac.uk) or Dr. Mirella Lapata (m.lapata@dcs.shef.ac.uk). An application form, and details on the method of application, are at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/admissions/index.html#applying. _____________________________________________ ================================================================================= JOURNALS and BOOKS ==================== - 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. Nancie Davidson, Fergus McInnes and Mervyn A. Jack, Usability of dialogue design strategies for automated surname capture, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 May 2004, . Chung-Hsien Wu and Yeou-Jiunn Chen, Recovery from false rejection using statistical partial pattern trees for sentence verification, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 May 2004, Wolfgang Minker, Udo Haiber, Paul Heisterkamp and Sven Scheible, The SENECA spoken language dialogue system, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 May 2004, Kalle J. Palomäki, Guy J. Brown and Jon P. Barker, Techniques for handling convolutional distortion with 'missing data' automatic speech recognition, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 May 2004, Andrew Pargellis, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Chin-Hui Lee, Alexandros Potamianos and Augustine Tsai, Auto-induced semantic classes, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 5 May 2004, Fergus McInnes and David Attwater, Turn-taking and grounding in spoken telephone number transfers, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 5 May 2004, Julia Hirschberg, Diane Litman and Marc Swerts, Prosodic and other cues to speech recognition failures, Speech Communication, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 28 April 2004, Laila Dybkjær , Niels Ole Bernsen and Wolfgang Minker, Evaluation and usability of multimodal spoken language dialogue systems, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 16 March 2004, . Sung-Wan Yoon , Hong-Goo Kang , Young-Cheol Park and Dae-Hee Youn, An efficient transcoding algorithm for G.723.1 and G.729A speech coders: interoperability between mobile and IP network*1, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 March 2004, Mustafa N. Kaynak , Qi Zhi , Adrian David Cheok , Kuntal Sengupta , Zhang Jian and Ko Chi Chung, Lip geometric features for human-computer interaction using bimodal speech recognition: comparison and analysis, Speech Communication, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 2 March 2004. ============================================================================== FUTURE INTERSPEECH CONFERENCES ================================ -Interspeech (ICSLP)-2004 , Jeju, KOREA, OCTOBER 5-9, 2004 (see CFP in ISCApad 71) -Interspeech (Eurospeech)-2005, Lisbon, Portugal,September 4-8, 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FUTURE ISCA TUTORIAL AND RESEARCH WORKHOPS (ITRW) ================================================== Publication policy: Hereunder, you will find very short announcements of future events. The full call for participation appears in attached files ext#.doc or ext#.pdf only once and later referred to a previous issue of ISCApad. See also our Web pages (http://www.isca-speech.org) on conferences and workshops. - 2004: A Speaker Odyssey, http://www.odyssey04.org/img/Odyssey04CFP030603.pdf Location: Toledo - Spain 31May/4June 2004 - 5th ISCA Speech Synthesis Research Workshop Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg USA June 14-16 2004 http://www.ssw5.org (see ISCApad68) - InSTIL/ICALL Symposium 2004 NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Learning Systems 17-19 June 2004 Venice, Italy Submission deadline: February 21st, 2004 (see ISCApad 66) - 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 Email enquiries can be sent to robust04@cmp.uea.ac.uk Participation to the workshop will be restricted to around 50 people. (see attached files) - Workshop on Nonlinear Speech Processing: Algorithms and Analysis September 13-18 2004 Vietri sul Mare (Salerno), ITALY SUPPORTED BY: The Management Committee (MC) Members of COST ACTION 277: Non linear speech processing. Additional information are available on the web site: http://www.iiass.it/school2004/index.htm (see attached files) -Statistical and Perceptual Audio Processing October 2-3, 2004 Jeju, Korea Extended deadline: April 21st, 2004 (see ISCApad 71) - 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) (see ISCApad 66 ) ============================================================================= FUTURE SPEECH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EVENTS =========================================== - LREC2004 Lisbon (Portugal) 24-30 May 2004 Chairman: Khaled Choukri choukri@elda.fr http://www.lredc-conf.org (see ISCApad 62) - 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 (see ISCApad 68) - 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/ - Affective Dialog Systems (ADS'04) Kloster Irsee, Germany June 14-16, 2004 http://www.sigmedia.org/ADS04 (see ISCApad 66) - 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. Abstract submission with the deadline January 31, 2004. (see ISCApad 68) - EUSIPCO 2004. 12th European Signal Processing Conference. September 7-10, 2004 Vienna, Austria http://www.nt.tuwien.ac.at/eusipco2004/ Chair: Prof. Wolfgang Mecklenbrauker, Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering Vienna University of Technology Gusshausstrasse 25/389 A-1040 Vienna w.mecklenbraeuker@tuwien.ac.at (see ISCApad 63) - Seventh International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2004) http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/tsd2004/ (see ISCApad71) Brno, Czech Republic, 8-11 September 2004 - CLEF 2004 Workshop 16-17 september 2004 (see ISCApad 68) Evaluation campaign. - Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference 22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt The main organizer of the conference is the NEMLAR consortium. The local organizer is RDI Egypt. Venue: Hotel Helnan Shepheard, Cairo, Egypt Project and conference web site: http://www.nemlar.org - 2004 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP 04) http://mmsp.unisi.it September 29-October 1 2004 Sienna Italy - 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 (see ISCApad 71) - ACM Multimedia 2004 October 10-15, New York, NY USA http://www.mm2004.org (see ISCApad68) -6th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces(ICMI'04) October 13-15, 2004 The Atherton Hotel/State College, PA, USA http://www.icmiplace.org (see ISCApad70) -4th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP'04) December 16-18, 2004, Hong Kong, China