Odyssey 2016: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop: First Call for Papers

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ODYSSEY 2016:
THE SPEAKER AND LANGUAGE RECOGNITION WORKSHOP
June 21-24, 2016, Bilbao, Spain

http://www.odyssey2016.org

IMPORTANT DATES:

- Regular paper submissions: January 24, 2016
- Industry track and demos: February 15, 2016
- Notifications: March 15, 2016
- Final papers: April 1, 2016

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CONFERENCE TOPICS:

The general themes of the conference include speaker and
language recognition and characterization. The specific topics
include, but are not limited to, the following:

o Speaker and language recognition, verification, identification
o Speaker and language characterization
o Features for speaker and language recognition
o Speaker and language clustering
o Multispeaker segmentation, detection, and diarization
o Language, dialect, and accent recognition
o Robustness in channels and environment
o System calibration and fusion
o Speaker recognition with speech recognition
o Multimodal and multimedia speaker recognition
o Confidence estimation for speaker and language recognition
o Corpora and tools for system development and evaluation
o Low-resource (lightly supervised) speaker and language recognition
o Speaker synthesis and transformation
o Human and human-assisted recognition of speaker and language
o Analysis and countermeasures against spoofing and tampering attacks
o Forensic and investigative speaker recognition
o Systems and applications

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REGULAR PAPER SUBMISSIONS:

All regular submissions (max 8 pages) will be reviewed by at least
three members of the scientific review committee. The regular
submissions must include scientific or methodological novelty;
the paper has to review the relevant prior work and state clearly
the novelty in the Introduction part. The accepted papers will appear
in electronic proceedings.

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INDUSTRY TRACK AND DEMOS:

The Odyssey Organizing Committee recognizes a large gap between
theoretical research results and real-world deployment of the methods.
To foster a closer collaboration across industry and academia,
an industry track was introduced in Odyssey 2014 and will be
continued in Odyssey 2016.

Submissions to this track may include a description of your target
application, a product, a demonstrator or any combination of them.
In addition to voice biometrics providers, we encourage submissions
from companies who are in need for speaker or language recognition
technology. The industry paper submissions do NOT have to present
methodological novelty, but MUST address one or all of the following
aspects:

- Description of the application, role of speaker/language recognition
- Research results and methods that worked well in your application
- Negative research results that have NOT worked in practice
- Unsolved problems 'out-in-the-wild' that deserve attention

The industry submissions will NOT undergo full peer review nor will be
included in the proceedings. A poster session will be allocated for the
industry track presentations and demos, with auxiliary equipment (tables,
plugs, etc.) available if requested. The organizing committee may select
the most interesting submissions for oral presentation.

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AWARDS:

Odyssey 2016 will feature two awards:

- A best paper award
- A best student paper award

All regular papers and all special session papers (if any is scheduled)
are candidates for the awards. The awards are given based on the review
reports AND the presentation at the conference. For the best student
paper award, the first author must be a student (meaning that she/he
does not yet hold a PhD degree) at the time of paper submission.

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Luis J. Rodríguez-Fuentes, chair University of the Basque Country, Spain
Eduardo Lleida, co-chair University of Zaragoza, Spain
Jean-Francois Bonastre University of Avignon, France
Niko Brümmer Agnitio, South Africa
Lukáš Burget Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Joseph Campbell MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
Jan "Honza" Černocký Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Tomi Kinnunen University of Eastern Finland, Finland
Haizhou Li Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
Alvin Martin NIST, USA
Douglas Reynolds MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA

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VENUE AND TRAVEL:

Odyssey 2016 will be hosted by two Spanish groups: GTTS (http://gtts.ehu.es),
from the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of the Basque Country,
and ViVoLab (http://vivolab.unizar.es/), from the School of Engineering and
Architecture of the University of Zaragoza.

The workshop will be held in Bilbao, a medium-size city in the north of Spain,
with about 350,000 inhabitants. The venue, Bizkaia Aretoa, is located in the heart
of the city. The building, designed by the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza,
hosts all kind of social, cultural, academic and scientific events, most of them
organized by the University of the Basque Country.

Bilbao is the commercial and administrative head of a large area of about
one million people living by the Ibaizabal-Nervion estuary. After centuries
of trading and iron industry, in the last decades Bilbao has become a service town,
supported by a huge investment in infrastructure and urban renewal, that started
with the construction of an underground network (Metro Bilbao) in 1995 and
the opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in 1997.

The Bilbao airport can be easily reached from several European airports,
including international hubs such as Frankfurt, London, Paris, Amsterdam or Madrid,
which provide worldwide connectivity. The city is connected to the European
road network by the AP-8 toll motorway, to the north of Spain by the A-8 motorway
and to the rest of Spain by the AP-68 toll motorway.

Located in a hilly countryside, Bilbao offers many outdoor activities.
Hiking is very popular as well as rock climbing in the nearby mountains.
Mount Artxanda, easily accessible from the town centre by a funicular railway,
features a recreational area at the summit, with restaurants, a sports complex
and a balcony with panoramic views. In the south, the natural wonders of
Mount Pagasarri receive hundreds of hikers every weekend.

A few minutes away by public transport, the Bizkaia Bridge, declared World Heritage
in 2006, connects Portugalete and Las Arenas at the left and right banks of the estuary.
In the coast, old fishing villages like Plentzia, Mundaka or Lekeitio have become
touristic spots due to the nearby beaches, where watersports, especially surfing,
are practiced. Just an hour away by car, the beautiful city of San Sebastian,
as well as the vineyards and wineries of La Rioja, are worth a visit.

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For more details:

Website (under construction): http://www.odyssey2016.org
Email: info@odyssey2016.org

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