CFP: Special Issue on Speech Separation and Recognition in Multisource Environments

COMPUTER SPEECH AND LANGUAGE
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/csl

Special issue on
SPEECH SEPARATION AND RECOGNITION IN MULTISOURCE ENVIRONMENTS

DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 30, 2011

One of the chief difficulties of building distant-microphone speech recognition systems for use in everyday applications is that the noise background is typically `multisource’. A speech recognition system designed to operate in a family home, for example, must contend with competing noise from televisions and radios, children playing, vacuum cleaners, and outdoors noises from open windows. Despite their complexity, such environments contain structure that can be learnt and exploited using advanced source separation, machine learning and speech recognition techniques such as those presented at the 1st International Workshop on Machine Listening in Multisource Environments (CHiME 2011).

This special issue solicits papers describing advances in speech separation and recognition in multisource noise environments, including theoretical developments, algorithms or systems.

Examples of topics relevant to the special issue include:
• multiple speaker localization, beamforming and source separation,
• hearing inspired approaches to multisource processing,
• background noise tracking and modelling,
• noise-robust speech decoding,
• model combination approaches to robust speech recognition,
• datasets, toolboxes and other resources for multisource speech separation and recognition.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:
Manuscript submissions shall be made through the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) at
http://ees.elsevier.com/csl/
Once logged in, click on “Submit New Manuscript” then select “Special Issue: Speech Separation and Recognition in Multisource Environments” in the “Choose Article Type” dropdown menu.

IMPORTANT DATES:
November 30, 2011: Paper submission
March 30, 2012: First review
May 30, 2012: Revised submission
July 30, 2012: Second review
August 30, 2012: Camera-ready submission

We are looking forward to your submission!

The guest editors
Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA, France

Lecturer position in systems approaches to biology

UCL is currently advertising for a Lecturer position in systems approaches to biology. The person will have responsibility for coordinating the development and delivery of the Systems training in Maths, Informatics and Computational biology (SysMIC) course being developed by UCL, Birkbeck, Edinburgh University and the Open University, following a £1million award from the BBSRC. The person will also be expected to make a continuing and appropriate contribution to research in their field of expertise.

The advert and job description can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs/ , Reference 1201453. The deadline for applications is 9th September.

Further details about the SysMIC course can be found on the UCL Systems Biology website at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/systems-biology/elsa

PDRA Opportunities at UCL Statistical Science

There are a number of open post-doctoral opportunities in the Department of Statistical Science at University College London, please see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/department/jobs for further details.

Research Associate in Statistics (SILICOTRYP)

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate to work with Professor Mark Girolami on the SilicoTryp project “The Silicon Trypanasome”. The aim of the project is to develop statistical methods to support the study of models of metabolic pathways of the Trypanasome parasite. This research is funded by a grant from the BBSRC.

The post is available from October 2011 (or as soon as possible thereafter) and is initially funded for 24 months.

Candidates should have a PhD (or equivalent qualification) and a research background in Statistics or Systems Biology. It is essential that the successful candidate has extensive experience of Bayesian methods and a strong interest in Biology.

Research Associate in Statistics (ICARUS)

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate to work with Professor Mark Girolami on the ICARUS project “An ICT Enabled Approach to Optimising the Reliability of manual Ultrasonic Non-destructive Testing ”. The aim of the project is to develop statistical methods to increase the probability of detecting weld faults. This research is funded by EU FP7 grant. Candidates should have a PhD and research background in Statistical Pattern Recognition or Machine Learning. It is essential that the successful candidate will have extensive experience of Bayesian methods in pattern recognition. The post is available from October 2011 (or as soon as possible thereafter) for 24 months.

Research Associate in Statistics (ARF)

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate to work with Professor Mark Girolami on the development of theory and methods for geometric Markov chain Monte Carlo. The aim of the project is to study the theory of Riemann manifold Monte Carlo methods. This research is funded by a grant from the EPSRC.

The post is available from October 2011 (or as soon as possible thereafter) and is initially funded for 12 months.

Candidates should have a PhD (or equivalent qualification) and a research background in Mathematical Statistics.

Research Associate in Statistics (CLIMB)

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate to work with Professor Mark Girolami on the development of statistical pattern recognition methods. This research is funded by a grant from the EPSRC.

The post is available from September 2011 (or as soon as possible thereafter) and is funded for 5 months.

 Candidates should have a PhD (or equivalent qualification) and a research background in Statistical Pattern Recognition or Machine Learning.

Open position: PhD student at K.U.Leuven

The Department of Computer Science of K.U.Leuven has an open position for a PhD student in the context of the interdisciplinary project “Elaboration of the CellPhInDER platform”. The goal of this project is to develop the next-generation screening and analysis tool for cell biologists by purposefully elaborating and combining expertise in cell biology, micro- and nanofluidics, nanobiotechnology, time-lapse microscopy, image analysis and data mining.

Within the project, we are looking for a PhD student with a strong background in computer science, and particularly knowledgeable in (most of) the areas of machine learning, data mining, image recognition, information extraction from images and video, and databases. The student will contribute to the CellPhInDER platform by performing research on, and creating software for: automatic extraction of features from video images, storage of such features in a form suitable for analysis with data mining methods, and the creation of a user interface that allows for query-oriented data mining.

The ideal candidate will possess a master degree in computer science, AI, or a closely related discipline, a strong background in computer science and mathematics, a scientific attitude and the ability to reason through problems, excellent programming skills, the ability to communicate written and orally in English in a clear and precise manner, a pro-active and independent attitude as well as the ability to function well in a team environment and a strong motivation.

Interested candidates should apply before September 12 to receive full
consideration, by following the instructions at https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/ml/170-jobs-information-for-prospective-ml-phd-students, mentioning specifically the CellPhInDER project in their application.

Faculty Positions – IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca

IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca (www.imtlucca.it) has opened a competitive international scouting procedure for the recruitment of tenured faculty positions in the following field:

Computer Science, Mathematical Statistics, Machine Learning, Large Scale Data Mining

We will consider highly qualified candidates working at the intersection between computer science, physics, information theory, and mathematics, who combine a strong theoretical background with an orientation towards research on processing huge amounts of complex data in the analysis of socio economic, technical, or biological. Candidates must have an excellent record of high-impact international publications. They should have demonstrated remarkable ability in leading research groups, as well as experience in conducting/coordinating international projects.
Preference will be given to candidates active at the intersection between algorithms, theory and applications, in the following fields: analysis and modeling of massive data structures; graph theory and random structures; analysis and modeling of complex networks; machine learning, large scale data mining.

Submit your confidential expression of interest at: http://www.imtlucca.it/faculty/positions/professors_positions.php#tenured_ongoing_recruitment.
The deadline is August 30th 2011.

PhD positions – IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca

IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca (www.imtlucca.it) has opened the call for 12 PhD positions within the Computer Science and Engineering Program.

The doctoral program aims at preparing researchers and professionals with a wide knowledge about the foundations of informatics and information engineering, and about their application to a variety of systems in many different domains. The program introduces new perspectives in formulating and solving technical challenges that are currently a target of very active research areas. The research activity focuses on key aspects of informatics and information engineering such as open-endedness, dynamics and control, autonomy, security, concurrency, cost-effectiveness, quality of services, dependability, optimization, and is concerned especially with the application to networked and large-scale systems with high degrees of interaction.
More information can be found on our website.

Applications are accepted (http://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/call_for_applications/index.php) until September 28th 2011.

2 post docs positions – Oxford Brookes University, UK

Two 2 year research fellowship to work with Philip Torr at Oxford Brookes vision research group http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/research/visiongroup/.

You will engage in state-of-the-art research in computer vision. In particular the work will be an EPSRC & Google grants on “Scene Understanding using New Global Energy Models”. To work on recognizing and reconstructing street view imagery, experts sought in SLAM, energy minimization and recognition!

The vision group at Oxford Brookes has won numerous awards including paper prizes at ECCV, CVPR, NIPS, BMVC and ICCV, and has strong connections internationally with academia and industry.

This proposal concerns scene understanding from video. Computer vision algorithms for individual tasks such as object recognition, detection and segmentation has now reached some level of maturity. The next challenge is to integrate all these algorithms and address the problem of scene understanding. The problem of scene understanding involves explaining the whole image by recognizing all the objects of interest within an image and their spatial extent or shape in 3D.

The first application to drive the research will be the problem of automated understanding of cities from video using computer vision, inspired by the availability of massive new data sets such as that of Google’s Street View http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
, Yotta http://www.yotta.tv/index.php
(who have agreed to supply Oxford Brookes with data) and Microsoft’s Photosynth http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
. The scenario is as follows: a van drives around the roads of the UK, in the van are GPS equipment and multiple calibrated cameras, synchronized to capture and store an image every two metres; giving a massive data set. The task is to recognize objects of interest in the video, from road signs and other street furniture, to particular buildings, to allow them to be located exactly on maps of the environment. A second scenario would be to perform scene understanding for indoor scenes such as home or office, with video taken from a normal camera and Z-cam.

For further information contact philiptorr(at)brookes.ac.uk

Useful links
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/about/vacancies
http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/staff/PhilipTorr/

Win a free Kinect by donating gesture data

GESTURE RECOGNITION CHALLENGE

sponsored by Pascal2
http://gesture.chalearn.org

Whether you are a computer vision researcher, want to become one, or just want to have some fun, we are preparing a fun series of events for you.
Our first step is a data exchange ending September 7, 2011.
Hurry: if you are among the first few qualifying entrants, you win a free Kinect sensor!

Participating is easy:
1) Subscribe at http://groups.google.com/group/gesturechallenge/subscribe?note=1&pli=1 (you will need to create a Google account if you do not have one).
2) Mail us some data recorded on a hard drive:
* Send us the gesture data you already recorded, OR
* Collect new data following our specifications:
– Choose a gesture lexicon (from the list we provide).
– Download a script (determining which gestures you will play and in which order).
– Practice in front of a mirror.
– Record your videos following the script.
If you are a Matlab user, you may use our data recording software.

See detailed instructions at https://sites.google.com/a/chalearn.org/challengedata/ (accessible only to subscribers of the gesturechallenge Google group).

Thank you in advance for your participation!

Isabelle Guyon and Vassilis Athitsos

RESTATE 2011 – Marie Curie Grant

Research grants are available as Marie Curie Actions of VII European Framework Programme. The call is part of the International Programme COFOUND where research grants are co-funded by the European Union and the Regional Government, namely the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, Italy. The Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) will manage the research grants on behalf of the European Union. The submitted proposals will undergo to a selective evaluation process.

Research topics include neuroinformatics and more in general machine learning methods for neuroscience. The candidate has to submit a research proposal in the areas of brain decoding, brain mapping or brain connectivity. Proposals concerned with the development of software tool for data analysis in neuroscience are equally welcome.

The research activity will take place at NILab, a research laboratory between information technology and cognitive neuroscience raised as a joint initiative of FBK and the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento.

The official call will be published at the beginning of November 2011 on the FBK website (www.cofund.fbk.eu) and will be closed at the end of January 2012. Notification will be provided before the end of April 2012. The research grants will begin either on June 2012 or September 2012 and last two or three years.

PhD is required. Researchers who apply have to have worked outside Italy for at least 24 months over the previous 36 months.

The grant amount is around 30.000 euro per year after tax.

If you are interested, please contact us in advance at the follwoing address: info.nilab(at)nilab.fbk.eu.

Links
– FBK: http://www.fbk.eu
– NILab: http://nilab.fbk.eu
– CIMeC: http://www.cimec.unitn.it

ESANN 2012: call for papers and for special sessions

ESANN 2012: European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks,
Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning
Bruges, Belgium, 25 to 27 April 2012 -20th anniversary !-
http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/

First announcement and call for papers and
Call for proposals for special sessions

We are pleased to inform you that preliminary information about ESANN 2012 is available: see http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/. ESANN 2012 will take place in Bruges, Belgium from 25 to 27 April 2012.

The call for papers is available at http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/index.php?pg=cfp.

You will find at http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/esann/index.php?pg=cfss a call for special session proposals. If you are interested in organizing a special session at ESANN 2012, please send an e-mail to esann(at)uclouvain.be, and we will send you the guide for session organizers. The deadline for submitting special session proposals is August 15th, 2011.

ESANN 2012 builds upon a successful series of conference organized each year since 1993. ESANN has become a major scientific event in the machine learning, computational intelligence and artificial neural networks fields over the years.

The conference will be organized in Bruges, one of the most beautiful medieval towns in Europe. Designated as the “Venice of the North”, the city has preserved all the charms of the medieval heritage. Its centre, which is inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage list, is in itself a real open air museum.

We hope to receive your submission to ESANN 2012 and to see you in Bruges next year!