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 Workshophttp://www.odyssey2012.org/index.html

25 - 28 June 2012Singapore

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.

Germany (1%)Italy (1%) Turkey (1%)

Finland (2%)Hong Kong (2%)

Israel (2%)India (2%)

Canada (3%)

Czech (3%)

Nederlands (3%)

China (4%)

Australia (6%)

Spain (6%)

France (6%)

United States (22%)

Singapore (37%)

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/temasek-labs/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, Chairo Kay Berkling, Inline Internet Online Dienste GmbH, Germanyo Jean-François Bonastre, University of Avignon, Franceo Niko Brümmer, Agnitio, South Africao Lukáš Burget Brno University of Technology, Czech Republico Joseph Campbell, MIT Lincoln Lab, USAo Jan “Honza” Černocký, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republico Alvin Martin, NIST, USAo 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 compilationo Anthony Larcher (I2R) – social program, art designo Kong Aik Lee (I2R ) – web, paper review systemo Cheung-Chi Leung ( I2R) – venu, logistics, catering o Bin Ma (I2R ) – technical program, administrative managemento Swee Lan See (I2R ) – finance, administrative management o Hangwu Sun (I2R ) – photographyo Rong Tong (I2R ) – registrationo Xiong Xiao (NTU) – student volunteer supporto 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

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.

oTheir 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.

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 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 ReceptionMonday 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 & BanquetWednesday 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 Depart from the Matrix building at Biopolis16:30 Arrive at the Merlion Esplanade17:00 Board Singapore River cruise boats17:45 Arrival at Singapore Flyer, ride the giant observation wheel 18:30 Welcome drink at Megu restaurant (within the Flyer's building), enjoy the

view at the Marina Bay19:00 Banquet at the Megu Restaurant22:00 Depart from the Megu Restaurant, buses are chartered to reach four MRT

stations (Bugis, City Hall, Outram Park and Buona Vista)

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$75,484.20Sponsorship: S$10,500Total: $85,984.20

Expense: Venue: S$11,812.80Onsite Catering: S$12,074.95Social Events: S$25,431.93Paper management system: S$1,274.70Event Management and Misc: S$31,679.62Total: $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/OnsiteNon-ISCA member S$760 S$920 S$1150ISCA member S$690 S$830 S$1050Non-ISCA student S$560 S$620 S$770ISCA student S$510 S$550 S$690

Conference fee includes the following:

1. Lunch and two tea breaks daily2. One ticket to attend welcome reception at the Tiger Brewery3. One ticket to attend dinner banquet and city tour4. One set of conference proceeding (soft copy)5. 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 Reynoldsb. Alvin Martinc. Jean-Francois Bonastred. Haizhou Lie. Jan “Honza” Černockf. Tomi Kinnunen (Odyssey 2014)

3. Agendaa. 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 UpdateOdyssey 2014 will be held in Joensuu, Finland.

Organizers: Dr. Tomi Kinnunen and Prof. Pasi FräntiVenue: 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, UEFDr. Pasi Fränti (professor), UEFDr. Ville Hautamäki, UEFDr. Padmanabhan Rajan, UEFDr. Rahim Saeidi, Radboud Univ. Nijmegen, the NetherlandsDr. 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: Restaurant at Joensuu city hall:Koli National Park 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)