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: