Welcome to the AVISA website!
AVISA (the Auditory-Visual Speech Association), which is the second
ISCA Special Interest Group,
started its official business on December 5, 1998, at the
AVSP'98
(Auditory Visual Speech Processing) meeting in Terrigal, New
South Wales, Australia. AVISA was first conceived by
Christian Benoît,
who wanted to see the auditory-visual speech community come together
in a more formal way. Before his untimely death,
Christian drafted a proposal to create AVISA.
We are proud to dedicate this SIG to Christian's memory.
AVISA was created to promote interest and activity in auditory-visual
speech processing and related areas. The AVISA objectives are to:
-
create a scientific link between researchers and others working in
the various disciplines associated with audio-visual speech
processing by humans or by machines;
-
facilitate better understanding of the cognitive processes involved
in the production and perception of audio-visual speech
communication through the audible and visible gestures of the vocal
tract and of associated body gestures;
-
facilitate the modeling of speech gestures for realistic animation
of synthetic actors and for automatic recognition of linguistic and
communicative gestures transmitted through the auditory and visual
modalities;
-
share linguistic knowledge through the study of audio-visual speech
in as many languages as possible, including sign languages and cued
speech;
-
favor the worldwide dissemination of knowledge, and make it
available to the international community, in particular to students of
speech science, clinicians and industrialists.
To attain these goals, AVISA will:
-
organize and support scientific events (workshops, special sessions
in conferences, summer schools); in particular, AVISA will support the
continuation of the AVSP meetings, and
will sponsor sessions at other meetings, such as
EUROSPEECH and ICSLP (see below);
-
publish or help publish scientific articles in the proceedings of
conferences, in special issues of international journals, books,
etc.;
-
disseminate or help disseminate scientific articles, computer
resources, audio-visual data, video tapes, and other relevant
material;
-
keep its members informed of the AVISA activities and of any
relevant information on audio-visual speech research and techniques
through the AVISA websites, electronic mailing, newsletters of
related associations, and journals.
We are open to suggestions from all who are interested in
participating. Please join us and provide us with feedback, news,
opinions, etc., related to AV speech. To join AVISA and be placed on
the AVISA mailing list, contact Philip Rubin at:
rubin@haskins.yale.edu .
Any questions about SIGs should be addressed to
Gerrit Bloothooft (ISCA Groups and Branches Coordinator):
sig@isca-speech.org.
Officers:
Philip Rubin, Chairman
Denis Burnham, Vice-Chairman
Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, Secretary/Treasurer
Christian Abry, liaison to ISCA.
These officers will serve for a period of two years. At the inaugural
meeting, the officers appointed a Advisory Committee to assist the
officers with various issues and to provide guidance and input
regarding any matters of potential interest to the group.
Note:The terms of office of all of the officers listed above are expiring
in December 2000. If you have nominations for new officers, please send them to
Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson as soon as possible.
The Advisory Committee members are:
Lynne Bernstein,
Michael Brooke,
Ruth Campbell,
Bjorn Granstrom,
Dominic Massaro,
Shigeo Morishima, and
Jean Vroomen.
Constitution:
The AVISA Constitution
was drafted on September 17, 1998. If was revised on
March 8, 2000 to change references from ESCA to ISCA.
Membership:
All attendees of the AVSP'98 meeting were inducted as
members of AVISA. Membership in AVISA is open to all those who are
interested in auditory-visual speech processing. At present there are no
AVISA dues. If you wish to join AVISA, please contact Philip Rubin
(rubin@haskins.yale.edu).
We encourage all those who plan to join
AVISA to also join ISCA.
The first official AVISA meeting was
held at the AVSP'98 meeting.
This brief meeting included information about the SIG's purpose
(see above) and structure, including the naming of Officers and
Advisory Committee members. A special issue of
Speech Communication
was distributed to the AVISA members. This issue, Volume 26, Nos. 1-2,
October 1998, contains selected papers from the AVSP'97 meeting in
Rhodes. Also announced were support for the Christian Benoît Award (see
below), the release of the
Talking Heads website
(see below); and
details on upcoming meetings (again, see below).
During the past year, a number of meetings took place that
included AV-related sessions or papers.
If you attended any of these meetings,
we would appreciate receiving brief descriptions, highlights,
etc. Contact Philip Rubin at:
rubin@haskins.yale.edu
If you have any other AV related news, please contact
Philip Rubin.
IMPORTANT:
The terms of office of all of our officers expire
in December 2000. If you have nominations for new officers, please send them to
Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson as soon as possible.
Acoustical Society of America
140th Meeting, Newport Beach, California, 4--8 December 2000
141st Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, 4--8 June 2001
ICSLP 2000, the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language
Processsing will be held in Beijing, China (16-20 October, 2000).
For information send email to: Dr. Min Chu (Conference Secretariat)
at: mchu@plum.ioa.ac.cn
SST-2000,
the 8th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology,
will be held in Canberra, Australia, 4-7 December 2000.
Eurospeech 2001,
the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology,
will be held September 3-7, 2001 in Aalborg, Denmark.
For information send email to:
eusp2001@cpk.auc.dk .
The Christian Benoît Award and the
Association Christian Benoît (ACB)
were initiated to honor the memory of
Christian Benoît.
The Award is intended to be given to a young researcher whose work
shows great promise and will be given to
a doctoral graduate whose PhD and further scientific work is in the
Speech Communication domain.
The award provides financial support for the development of a multi-media
product promoting his/her work. Preference will be given to scientists
whose thesis was awarded within the five years prior to the application deadline.
Over the next five years, the
ICP,
in Grenoble, France, in conjunction
with AVISA and other organizations, intends to present the
Christian Benoît Award several times.
AVISA will provide input during the selection process.
In addition, AVISA has made a substantial contribution to the monetary award.
For further details, contact
Pascal Perrier .
At the AVSP'97 meeting in Rhodes, Philip Rubin promised to create a
website related to the meeting. Working with Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson,
and barely keeping the promise, the
Talking Heads website was formally
unleashed at AVSP'98.
The URL is:
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/haskins/heads.html
In addition, the website is a "Work In Progress" in the "Library"
section on the MIT COGNET site at:
http://cognet.mit.edu/.
RO-MAN2000
Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan , Sep. 27-29, 2000.
Humanoids2000
MIT, Cambridge, Mass, Sep. 7-8, 2000.
SCI 2000.
There was an Invited Session on Audio-Visual Speech Processing at
this meeting, the 4th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and
Informatics, to be held July 23-26, 2000, Orlando, Florida.
5th Seminar on Speech Production: Models And Data
Kloster Seeon, Bavaria, Germany, on May 1st to 4th, 2000.
EUROSPEECH'99,
the 6th European Conference on Speech Communication
and Technology was held in Budapest, Hungary, on September 5-10,1999.
AVSP'99,
the fourth annual Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
conference, was held on the campus of the University of
California at Santa Cruz (7-9 August, 1999). It was a satellite
of the ICPhS '99 conference in San Francisco, CA.
BBS Book Review
Please contact Dominic Massaro (
massaro@fuzzy.ucsc.edu) regarding a
"Call for Book Nominations for Behavioral and Brain Sciences Mutiple
Book Review".
The AVISA SIG website is now located at:
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/AVISA/AVISA.html.
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