------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ For more details: Website (under construction): http://www.odyssey2016.org Email: info@odyssey2016.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------