Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee

AASP Challenges

The AASP Technical Committee runs a series of ‘Challenges’ in order to encourage research and development with comparable and repeatable results, and to stimulate new ground-breaking approaches to specific problems in the AASP technical scope. This activity is coordinated by the Challenges Subcommittee listed below.

Call for Challenges

Proposals to organize an AASP Challenge are invited. The closing dates for the current call are March 9th, 2012 (Statement of Interest) and April 20th, 2012 (Full Proposal).

1. Stage 1 - Statement of Interest

To propose to organise a Challenge, please send a statement of interest in about 2 pages outlining the aim of the challenge and its value to the community, giving also a preliminary perspective of the practical elements including the planned test data and evaluation methodology.

2. Stage 2 - Full Proposal

If supported by the Subcommittee, a full proposal would be invited. The full proposal should include the following items:

• a textual description of the challenge and its context (1 to 2 pages);
• a clear formulation of the problem to be addressed;
• a specification of the evaluation methodology leading to an objective figure of merit (FoM) and, where appropriate, a software tool to compute the FoM;
• a development dataset which represents the challenge and which will be made public (a public training dataset may also be needed in some challenges);
• a test dataset which also represents the challenge but which will remain private during the challenge;
• a commitment to provide a website to disseminate the challenge itself and, eventually, the results;
• a commitment to evaluate the submitted results and publish the comparison on the website and elsewhere as appropriate;
• a proposed schedule for the challenge (date of publication of the challenge, deadline of results submission, deadline of comparative results publication).

Please send the Statement of Interest and the Full Proposal to the AASP Challenges Subcommittee chair at the address below. All proposals will be considered by the Challenges Subcommittee. The Subcommittee may request modifications to the challenge as a condition of acceptance.

Participation

Researchers entering the challenge are invited to sign up at the challenge website. Participants will address the challenge specification and employ the evaluation methodology and the development dataset to develop their algorithm. Participation is open to all.

Evaluation

At the end of the challenge, the organizers will coordinate a comparative evaluation employing the defined FoM. Evaluation may be done for example by releasing the test dataset and asking the participants to return their results on the test data within a short period of time, typically two weeks. Participants would be honour-bound not to use the test dataset for tuning.

Dissemination

The evaluation results will then be published by the organizers. The Challenges Subcommittee will work with the challenge organizers towards publication of the challenge and its outcome in the IEEE Transactions and appropriate conferences, ICASSP in particular. In addition, the challenge organizers’ website will be linked from the TC webpage. Participants can choose to remain anonymous in publications.

The 'AASP Challenges' Subcommittee

The current membership of the subcommittee is as follows:

For more details as well as a copy of the full proposal of the challenge please visit:
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/sceneseventschallenge/

The challenge organisers,
Dimitrios Giannoulis (QMUL), Emmanouil Benetos (QMUL), Dan Stowell (QMUL), Mathieu Lagrange (IRCAM) and Mark Plumbley (QMUL)

2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge

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Deadline: January 15, 2013
Workshop: June 1, 2013, Vancouver, Canada

http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/

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Following the success of the 1st PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and
Recognition Challenge, we are happy to announce a new challenge
dedicated to speech recognition in real-world reverberant, noisy conditions,
that will culminate in a dedicated satellite workshop of ICASSP 2013.

The challenge is supported by several IEEE Technical Committees and by
an Industrial Board.

FEATURED TASKS

The challenge consists of recognising distant-microphone speech mixed in
two-channel nonstationary noise recorded over a period of several weeks
in a real family house. Entrants may address either one or both of the
following tracks:

Medium vocabulary track: WSJ 5k sentences uttered by a static speaker

Small vocabulary track: simpler commands but small head movements

TO ENTER

You will find everything you need to get started (and even more) on the
challenge website:
- a full description of the challenge,
- clean, reverberated and multi-condition training and development data,
- baseline training, decoding and scoring software tools based on HTK.

Submission consists of a 2- to 8-page paper describing your system and
reporting its performance on the development and the test set. In
addition, you are welcome to submit an earlier paper to ICASSP 2013,
which will tentatively be grouped with other papers into a dedicated
session.

Any approach is welcome, whether emerging or established.

If you are interested in participating, please email us so we can
monitor interest and send you further updates about the challenge.

BEST CHALLENGE PAPER AWARD

The best challenge paper will distinguished by an award from the
Industrial Board.

IMPORTANT DATES

July 2012 Launch
October 2012 Test set release
January 15, 2013 Challenge & workshop submission deadline
February 18, 2013 Paper notification & release of the challenge results
June 1, 2013 ICASSP satellite workshop

INDUSTRIAL BOARD

Masami Akamine, Toshiba
Carlos Avendano, Audience
Li Deng, Microsoft
Erik McDermott, Google
Gautham Mysore, Adobe
Atsushi Nakamura, NTT
Peder A. Olsen, IBM
Trausti Thormundsson, Conexant
Daniel Willett, Nuance

WORKSHOP SPONSORS

Conexant Systems Inc.
Audience Inc.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

ORGANISERS

Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Shinji Watanabe & Jonathan Le Roux, MERL
Francesco Nesta & Marco Matassoni, FBK-IRST