After a lovely 20 hour flight from Brisbane, with stop-overs at every corner of the globe (it seemed), I arrived in Antwerp for the eight annual Interspeech conference. The Interspeech conferences replace the Eurospeech and ICSLP conferences, which used to alternate year-by-year. It is now considered taboo to mention these earlier names, as it is just Interspeech – at least this is what we were told at the welcome lecture.

Although speech is a fairly focussed area of signal processing, there is still a lot of topics that can be covered under Interspeech’s umbrella, and some of them weren’t of much interest to me. However, I did manage to attend a number of sessions on most of the 5 days of the conference. I was a little dissapointed that my area of research, multi-modal speech processing, had it’s only oral and poster session on at the same time!. That was quite annoying, but I did manage to see most of both sessions, even though I was presenting an oral in one of them. In particular I found some of the research into recognising speech with infrared sensors by Bo Zhu at MIT interesting.

The social program of Interspeech was quite nice, with lots of free food and Belgium beer available at various social events on most of the nights of the conference. Entrance to the Antwerp Zoo, next door to the conference venue, was also included in the conference registration, although all those animals in such a small area seemed a little sad to me.

On the final day of the Interspeech conference, I had to pack my bags and catch a hour or so train to Tilberg, Netherlands where I could catch an expensive taxi to Kasteel Groenendael in Hilvarenbeek for AVSP 2007. It probably would have been nice if AVSP had arranged a shuttle bus, as the taxi to Hilvarenbeek cost more than the train trip from Belgium, although I did get to share the cost with some other attendees on the way back.

The AVSP 2007 conference was a small workshop style conference specifically devoted to my area of research, although it does focus on human perception as well as automatic, which is more my style. I got to see a lot of interesting research at the AVSP workshop, although did seem to be a little perception heavy. However, I found the studies of how humans do what I am trying to perform with computers provided a good perspective on my research that I don’t normally encounter. Although even further away from my area of research, I found invited speaker Asif Ghazanfar’s talk on speech perception in monkeys (that is monkey-speech perception) to be very well presented and quite interesting.

Kasteel Groenendael is Philip Electronic’s executive training centre just outside the small village on Hilvarenbeek. Seeing what their executive training centre is like, I don’t think I’d mind working for Philips. Everything was provided for us at the workshop, and I’d probably even say it was worth loosing my weekend. I also got to meet and discuss research with a lot of interesting people over breakfast, lunch and dinner over the two days, and I hope to keep in touch with many of them.

Finally, I’d like to thank QUT and ASSTA for supplying the funding to travel to Europe and attend these conferences.

1. Make sure the harvard package is installed in Latex.
2. Copy the CRPITStyle.cls class file available here to your localtexmf/tex/latex, and make sure you refresh the Latex database
3. Copy CRPITStyle.layout into Lyx’s layout folder (C:\Program Files\LyX141\Resources\layouts for me)
4. Open Lyx, Run Tools -> Reconfigure (you may also need to use Tools -> Tex Information -> Rescan)
5. Unzip this file somewhere
6. Open CRPITPaper.lyx
7. Modify the file to your hearts content (this one is setup for VisHCI 2006)

Let me know if this doesn’t work for you, as it took me some mucking with refreshing Latex and Lyx to get it to work, so I may have missed something in my re-telling.

First Create a new layout file called spconf.layout in your Lyx layouts folder (in my case “C:\Program Files\LyX141\Resources\layouts”) with the following contents:

#% Do not delete the line below; configure depends on this
#  \DeclareLaTeXClass[article,spconf.sty]{article (spconf)}

Input article.layout

Preamble
        \usepackage{spconf}
EndPreamble

This will create a new document layout in lyx called “article (spconf)” that will be identical to article, but adds \usepackage{spconf} in the document preamble.

Now we need to fix up some of the header information. spconf uses \name instead of \author, so we’ll add that to our file:

Style Author
        LatexName       name
End

And finally, we need to add an affiliation section that uses \address in LaTex, and is used when the \maketitle command is used:

Style Affiliation
        LatexType       Command
        LatexName       address
        InTitle         1
End

There, that should work. Make sure that spconf.sty is stored where latex can find it (normally the same folder as your lyx file). If you want to download the entire spconf.layout file it is available here.

The Tenth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2008 ~ ICSLP) will be held in Brisbane, Australia, under the sponsorship of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). Interspeech 2008 ~ ICSLP, follows on from Interspeech 2006 in Pittsburg, USA, Interspeech 2004 ~ ICSLP, in Jeju, Korea, October 2004 and Interspeech 2005 ~ Eurospeech Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005. Today INTERSPEECH, the continuation of the ICSLP and Eurospeech conferences, enjoys ever-increasing impact and influence as the focal point for the exchange of ideas in a broad array of fields centered around human-human and human-machine speech communication.

Link.

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.