MMUA and ICASSP 2006
Posted on July 4, 2006
I recently attended two signal processing conferences in Toulouse, France, so I thought I’d throw a little writeup here to let everyone know what it was like. The Second Workshop on Multimodal User Authentication (MMUA 2006), which I submitted my paper to, was a small intimate workshop, while the 31st International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2006) was a huge impersonal conference. Both were useful in their own way to my research.
The MMUA workshops were focused on using multiple modalities for authenticating subjects. Some of the examples of modalities used for authentication were 2D and 3D face, speech, ear, gait and even heart noise. In particular the invited conferences by Kevin Bowyer and Mark Nixon were very interesting. Because of the single track and the small number of participants of the workshop (there were only 24 papers presented) I had a great opportunity to keep up-to-date with current research without having to worry about prioritizing competing tracks as I would at a larger conference. Along with the invited conferences, there were two orals and one poster session on each of the two days of the conference. A fellow researcher from QUT, Chris McCool presented an oral on the first day and I presented my oral “An Examination of Audio-Visual Fused HMMs for Speaker Recognition” on the second and final day of the workshop.
MMUA was held at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse located at University Paul Sabatier a few kilometres out of Toulouse, France. We were provided food during the days and sitting at the same table as Kevin Bowyer and Mark Nixon (see above) over lunch lead to some really interesting discussions about where biometrics (single or multimodal) are heading in research and commercial implementation. The ability to have lengthy discussions with the keynote speakers over lunch really shows the benefit of a workshop over a large conference (Don’t worry, I’ll get on to ICASSP soon). MMUA also sent us on a canal/river cruise of Toulouse, which was quite nice, and gave another opportunity to talk to fellow researchers.
I found attending the MMUA workshop a very useful experience for myself and my research, and the intimacy of the event allowed my to receive good feedback on my research. The only real downside was that the university was not convenient to downtown Toulouse, and although the organisers provided a bus to the university and back on the first day, they did not provide a bus to leave on the final day, and we had to work out the public transport to get back to our hotel.
After MMUA had finished, and after a weekend of seeing the sights in Toulouse, I attended ICASSP 2006. It was quite a contrast. ICASSP is the largest technical signal processing conference in the world, and there were at least a dozen simultaneous oral and poster sessions at any one time. The main difficulty of a large conference like ICASSP is deciding which lecture to go to for each session. I was not presenting a paper at ICASSP myself, but another QUT researcher, Robbie Vogt did present a poster. While there was only one session directly related to my research area (being multimodal speaker authentication), I found that many of the speaker recognition sessions helped me get a broader background view on current research in my area.
Toulouse itself was a very nice city to visit, although the 21:30 sunsets were a bit difficult to get used to for a Queenslander. One of the nice things about Toulouse was that the downtown area had no tall buildings which made it feel more like a small town than the fourth largest city in France.
Finally, I would like to thank ASSTA for providing me with a travel scholarship to help fund my trip.
» Filed Under biometrics, conference, research, speech
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2 Responses to “MMUA and ICASSP 2006”
[...] But David Dean works there. He works at the Laboratoire Physique Quantique at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, which was where I went for MMUA 2006. He lists his research areas on his CV as [...]
[...] recently attended two speech related conference over in Europe. It seems I like my international conferences in twos. The first conference was the Interspeech 2007 conference in Antwerp, Belgium, and the second was [...]