Update from the AASP-TC

Published in TC News on 1 May 2016 (Reposted from the AASP News Page)

by Ivan Tashev (AASP-TC Member) and Patrick A. Naylor (AASP-TC Chair)

The AASP TC's mission is to support, nourish and lead scientific and technological development in all areas of audio and acoustic signal processing. These areas are currently seeing increased levels of interest and significant growth providing a fertile ground for a broad range of specific and interdisciplinary research and development. Ranging from array processing for microphones and loudspeakers to music genre classification, from psychoacoustics to adaptive filter theory, from consumer electronics devices to blue-sky research, this remit encompasses countless technical challenges and many hot topics. The TC numbers some 30 appointed volunteer members drawn roughly equally from leading academic and industrial organizations around the world, unified by the common aim to offer their expertise in the service of the scientific community.

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. This is an open call with no deadline. Please email a Stage 1 - Statement of Interest (see below) to the Challenges subcommittee chair (emmanuel.vincent@inria.fr).

1. Stage 1 - Statement of InterestTo 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
   • 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).

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

   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.

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.