SIG-SpLC report
2012
1. Odyssey 2012 Final
Report
2. SpLC SIG committee
meeting
3. Odyssey 2014 Update
Speaker and Language
Characterization Special
Interest Group
ODYSSEY 2012
The Speaker and Language
Recognition Workshop
http://www.odyssey2012.org/index.html
25 - 28 June 2012
Singapore
Final report
Haizhou Li, July 2012
Introduction
The need for fast, efficient, accurate, and robust means of recognizing people and
languages is of growing importance for commercial, forensic, and government
applications. The aim of this workshop is to continue to foster interactions among
researchers in speaker and language recognition.
The Odyssey 2012 Workshop on Speaker and Language Recognition was held on 25-28
June 2012 in Biopolis, Singapore. This Odyssey was an ISCA Tutorial and Research
Workshop of the ISCA Speaker and Language Characterization SIG. It is held every two
years and Odyssey 2012 is held for the first time in Asia.
Previous Editions
o Odyssey began in Martigny (Switzerland) on April 5-7, 1994, with the
Workshop on Automatic Speaker Recognition, Identification, Verification.
o Then it moved to Avignon (France) on April 20-23, 1998, with the RLA2C,
Speaker Recognition and its Commercial and Forensic Applications.
o And then to Crete (Greece) on June 18-22, 2001, with the Odyssey 2001, The
Speaker Recognition Workshop.
o In 2004 Odyssey expanded to include language as the Odyssey 2004, The
Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop and took place on May 31 –
June 3 in Toledo, Spain.
o In 2006, Odyssey was organized with the sponsorship and support of IEEE in
San Juan, Puerto Rico, as ODYSSEY 2006: The ISCA/IEEE Speaker and Language,
and took place from June 28–30, 2006
o In 2008 edition of Odyssey was held in Stellenbosch, South Africa from 21-25
January 2008 as Odyssey 2008: The Speaker and Language Recognition
Workshop
o In 2010, Odyssey was held in Brno, Czech Republic, in conjunction with the
National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Speaker Recognition
Evaluation Workshop
Participants in Odyssey 2012
A total number of 109 people from 16 countries participated in Odyssey 2012; more
than half of the participants are from Asia. All 51 accepted papers were presented in
11 technical sessions, together with 3 invited talks. The workshop was run in a single
oral track.
Italy (1%) Turkey (1%)
Finland (2%)
Germany (1%)
Hong Kong (2%)
Israel (2%)
India (2%)
Canada (3%)
Czech (3%)
Singapore (37%)
Nederlands (3%)
China (4%)
Australia (6%)
Spain (6%)
France (6%)
United States (22%)
Technical Sponsorship
The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) continued its long-term
support as the technical sponsor of Odyssey 2012, specifically through its Speaker and
Language Characterization (SpLC) Special Interest Group (SIG). Reduced fee was
charged both to ISCA members.
Financial Support
Although not in form of cash, Odyssey 2012 obtained great support from Institute for
Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR. The venue at Bioplois was charged at a discounted
rate. In addition, three organizations provided financial support:
o Temask
Laboratories
@
NTU
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/temaseklabs/index.html, provided cash support of $8000 SGD.
o Lee Foundation in Singapore, provided cash support of $2500 SGD.
o ISCA provided three student grants, each at $650 Euros.
Website and Logo
A website for Odyssey 2012 was developed and will be maintained till Odyssey 2014 by
COLIPS in Singapore. (http://www.odyssey2012.org) Odyssey 2012 adopted START
paper management system from SoftConf for submission and review, which was a
smooth process. During Odyssey 2012, a new logo for SpLC was designed by Adrian Tay
of I2R.
Odyssey 2012 team also designed a web portal dedicated to the SpLC
http://www.speakerodyssey.com, currently hosted by BUT. All past Odyssey
workshops information including Odyssey 2012 can be accessed from here.
Odyssey 2012 Organizing Committee
The Odyssey 2012 Organizing Committee consists of:
o Haizhou Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Chair
o Kay Berkling, Inline Internet Online Dienste GmbH, Germany
o Jean-François Bonastre, University of Avignon, France
o Niko Brümmer, Agnitio, South Africa
o Lukáš Burget Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
o Joseph Campbell, MIT Lincoln Lab, USA
o Jan “Honza” Černocký, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
o Alvin Martin, NIST, USA
o Douglas Reynolds, MIT Lincoln Lab, USA
At the end of Odyssey 2012, Odyssey 2014 was announced with a Organizing
Committee including the previous chairs to ensure continuity of our workshops.
Scientific and Review Committee
The primary function of the Scientific Committee is to review and oversee the technical
program including invited talks and papers submitted to Odyssey. The Odyssey
Scientific Committee was comprised of 32 members. The Scientific Committee were
also asked to participate in the reviews and chairing of plenary and technical sessions.
Some other experts in the related fields were also invited to take part in the paper
review. Out of these, 52 reviewers were registered (announced as Review Committee
in Odyssey 2012), the number of reviews per person ranged from 1 to 5 papers.
Local Organizing Committee
The Local Organizing Committee consists of staff from Institute for Infocomm Research
(I2R) and Temask Laboratories at Nanyang Technological University (NTU):
o Nancy Chen (I2R) – sponsorship, publicity, booklet compilation
o Anthony Larcher (I2R) – social program, art design
o Kong Aik Lee (I2R ) – web, paper review system
o Cheung-Chi Leung ( I2R) – venu, logistics, catering
o Bin Ma (I2R ) – technical program, administrative management
o Swee Lan See (I2R ) – finance, administrative management
o Hangwu Sun (I2R ) – photography
o Rong Tong (I2R ) – registration
o Xiong Xiao (NTU) – student volunteer support
o Changhuai You (I2R ) – publication and video archiving
Student volunteers from National University of Singapore and NTU also provided great
support.
Scientific Papers
A total number 65 papers were submitted to Odyssey 2012, scientific review process.
Compared to previous editions (39 papers in Martigny-94, 49 in Avignon-98, and 44 in
Crete-01, 79 in Toledo-04, 80 in San Juan in 2006, 41 in Stellenbosch 2008, and 55 in
Brno 2010), this is above the average of 55 submissions from past years.
Each paper was reviewed at least by 3 members of the Review Committee 3), and the
final number of accepted papers was 51, so the rejection rate was 22%, which is a
rather high rate compared with the previous editions (10.0% rejection rate in
Martigny-94, 10.5% in Avignon-98, and 9.1% in Crete-01, 22.7% in Toledo-04, 25% in
San Juan-06 and 24.4% in Stellenboshch-08). This indicates increasing selectivity and
helps to improve the scientific quality of the accepted papers.
Odyssey 2012 Topics
Topics of interest include speaker recognition (verification, identification,
segmentation, and clustering); text-dependent and -independent speaker recognition;
multi-speaker training and detection; speaker characterization and adaptation;
features for speaker recognition; robustness in channels; robust classification and
fusion; speaker recognition corpora and evaluation; use of extended training data;
speaker recognition with speech recognition; forensics, multimodality, and multimedia
speaker recognition; speaker and language confidence estimation; language, dialect,
and accent recognition; speaker synthesis and transformation; biometrics; human
recognition; and commercial applications.
The following table shows the authors’ declared prime topic area distribution of the 51
accepted papers for Odyssey 2012.
Odyssey 2012 Invited speaker and Sessions
Topic
Count
Speaker confidence measure and fusión
1
Text-dependent speaker recognition
1
Audio characterization
2
Forensic speaker recognition
3
Language recognition
9
Speaker clustering and diarization
6
Text-independent speaker recognition
29
Evaluation
4
Neural Network (bottleneck feature, DBN)
5
Channel robustness
5
Features
6
Compact representation
9
Odyssey 2012 features three excellent invited speakers:
o Dr. Niko Brummer, Chief Scientist at AGNITIO Corp., South Africa: The Role of
Proper Scoring Rules in Training and Evaluating Probabilistic Speaker and
Language Recognition
o Dr. Li Deng, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, USA: Being Deep and
Being Dynamic – New-Generation Models and Methodology for Advancing
Speech Technology
o Dr. Alvin Martin, Mathematician at National Institute of Standards and
Technology, USA: The NIST Speaker Recognition Series.
o
Their talks took place at the beginning of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday program.
The rest was divided into 11 regular sessions, all of them oral. Sessions usually had 120
minute duration, with 4 talks, usually of 20 minutes + discussion. Odyssey 2012 did not
include poster sessions.
Odyssey 2012 opening included welcome from Dr. Geok Leng Tan (Acting Executive
Director of Institute for Infocomm Research, I2R) and Prof. Haizhou Li (Head of Human
Language Technology Department at I2R and Professor at NTU).
Odyssey 2012 technical sessions are well-received.
Social Program
Welcome Reception
Monday 25 June 2012, 17:45 – 22:00
The Welcome Reception took place at TAVERN @ THE TIGER BREWERY, immediately after the
last technical session on Monday. After a short tour of the Tiger Brewery, there was a buffet
dinner with a tasting session of 7 types of freshly-brewed beer. Karaoke, pool table and dart
board will also be available.
The Welcome Reception was included as part of the Odyssey 2012 registration. On the way
back, buses were chartered to reach four MRT stations (Buona Vista, Outram Park, City Hall
and Bugis). There are two departures from the brewery, the first at 21:00 and the second at
22:00.
Odyssey 2012 Social Event – Singapore Marina Sightseeing & Banquet
Wednesday 27 June 2012, 15:35 - 22:00
The Social Event took place at Singapore central area. The event began right after the last
technical session on Wednesday. Buses took all to the Singapore River side, from where people
boarded the boats to cruise along the Singapore River all the way to the Singapore Flyer – the
world largest observation wheel. After enjoying the panoramic view over the Marina Bay,
dinner was served at the Megu Restaurant located next to the Flyer. There was live Jazz music
played by Fuchsia with the following schedule
15:35
End of technical sesión
16:00
16:30
17:00
17:45
18:30
Depart from the Matrix building at Biopolis
Arrive at the Merlion Esplanade
Board Singapore River cruise boats
Arrival at Singapore Flyer, ride the giant observation wheel
Welcome drink at Megu restaurant (within the Flyer's building), enjoy the
view at the Marina Bay
Banquet at the Megu Restaurant
Depart from the Megu Restaurant, buses are chartered to reach four MRT
stations (Bugis, City Hall, Outram Park and Buona Vista)
19:00
22:00
The Social Event was included as part of the Odyssey 2012 registration.
Participants touring the Tiger Brewery at the welcome reception.
Video Archive
All presentations at Odyssey 2012 have been recording for the speakers who agreed to
be filmed. The video is further produced by Superlectures.com and made available
through ISCA Video Archive at www.isca-speech.org/. This is the 2nd edition of
Odyssey to go on ISCA Video Archive. We hope that this arrangement can continue to
benefit the community.
Financial Accounts
The accounting of Odyssey 2012 is closed with a small surplus. The current income
from 100 paid registrations is $75,484.20 SGD. The amount of sponsorship received is
$10,500 SGD, making the total income at $85,984.20 SGD. Odyssey 2012 has decided
to donate 2,000 EURO to ISCA for future Odyssey workshops. The table below is a
summary of the income and the estimated expenses of the financial account.
Income:
Registration: S$75,484.20
Sponsorship: S$10,500
Total: $85,984.20
Expense:
Venue: S$11,812.80
Onsite Catering: S$12,074.95
Social Events: S$25,431.93
Paper management system: S$1,274.70
Event Management and Misc: S$31,679.62
Total: $82,274.00
Balance: S$3,710.20
Donation: 2,000 Euro will be donated to ISCA for future Odyssey, 1 Euro = 1.5281083
Singapore dollars as of 31 July 2012.
============
All Odyssey 2012 registrations were paid in Singapore Dollar (S$), US$ 1 = S$ 1.2569 as
of 1 April 2012.Each accepted paper must have at least one uniquely registered author.
Five people requested waiver of registration, which was granted.
Registration Type
Early (by April 30)
Regular (by May 31)
Late/Onsite
Non-ISCA member
S$760
S$920
S$1150
ISCA member
S$690
S$830
S$1050
Non-ISCA student
S$560
S$620
S$770
ISCA student
S$510
S$550
S$690
Conference fee includes the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Lunch and two tea breaks daily
One ticket to attend welcome reception at the Tiger Brewery
One ticket to attend dinner banquet and city tour
One set of conference proceeding (soft copy)
One conference bag and souvenir
SpLC SIG
Committee Meeting
1. A SpLC SIG committee meeting was held on 26 June 2012 at Equinox, Swissotel
at 7:00-9:30pm.
2. The meeting was attended by the following members of Odyssey 2012
organizing committee
a. Douglas Reynolds
b. Alvin Martin
c. Jean-Francois Bonastre
d. Haizhou Li
e. Jan “Honza” Černock
f. Tomi Kinnunen (Odyssey 2014)
3. Agenda
a. Report from Odyssey 2012
Haizhou Li presented the organization of the workshop, the financial status of
the workshop. Odyssey 2012 was financially healthy due to 3 financial sponsors
from Singapore. There were several discussions and recommendations for
actions by the next Odyssey organizer.
a) Some members in the organizing committee are no longer active in SpLC. It
is suggested to refresh the list by seeking their confirmation.
b) Some members in the current list of scientist committee didn’t respond to
the request for review. It is suggested to refresh the list by inviting
organizing committee to nominate new members. Scientific committee will
serve as the paper review committee.
c) It is suggested that organizing committee and local organizers work on
invited speakers early to avoid a last minute rush.
b. Proposal to host Odyssey 2014
a) Tomi Kinnunen presented Joensuu Finland’s bid to host Odyssey 2014. Five
committee members unanimously supported the bid. Odyssey 2014 will be
held in June 2014 in Joensuu, Finland. June in Finland is known for its
“white nights” with a day temperature of 22 degree Celsius.
b) Honza will add Tomi Kinnunen and Pasi Franti into the Google email group.
c) Haizhou will pass on the contacts of committee and participants to Tomi.
ODYSSEY 2014
The Speaker and Language
Recognition Workshop Update
Odyssey 2014 will be held in Joensuu, Finland.
Organizers: Dr. Tomi Kinnunen and Prof. Pasi Fränti
Venue: Joensuu, FINLAND (UEF campus facilities)
Date: Towards the end of June 2014, e.g. the week 16.6 – 19.6.2014 (midsummer,
"Juhannus" (to be further discussed by SpLC)
The conference will be organized by the School of Computing (SoC), University of
Eastern Finland (UEF), with the following local organizing team:
Dr. Tomi Kinnunen, UEF
Dr. Pasi Fränti (professor), UEF
Dr. Ville Hautamäki, UEF
Dr. Padmanabhan Rajan, UEF
Dr. Rahim Saeidi, Radboud Univ. Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Dr. Cemal Hanilci, Uludağ Univ., Turkey
+ 4 to 8 doctoral students (Mikko Malinen, Karol Waga, Mohammed Rezaei, Andrei
Tabarcea, Rosa Gonzales-Hautamäki, Ilja Sidoroff)
Photos for social program:
Excursion:
Koli National Park
Restaurant at Joensuu city hall:
Welcome reception or banquet
Huhmari resort: an alternative venue for the banquet
Lakes, forest, sauna will be an inevitable part of at least one of the social events
(there are nearly 190,000 lakes and more than 2 million saunas in Finland)