First Call for Papers for Robust2004:
COST278 and ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on
Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction
30th and 31st August 2004
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

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Scope of Workshop
The objective of this two day workshop is to bring together researchers from both universities and industry to consider different methods of achieving robustness in conversational interaction systems. The workshop is aimed at developing robustness against effects which are known to degrade the performance of the individual component of a conversational interaction system. As such areas such as acoustic noise, packet loss, speaker variability are considered important as well as different methods of dealing with them - such as through signal processing methods, inclusion of extra modalities and dialogues.

Scientific Areas

a) Robustness against enviromental noise
	Model adaption
	Feature extraction
	Filtering and transforms
	Enhancement
b) Robustness against unreliable transmission channels
	Distributed approaches to ASR
	Channel protection
	Error concealment - reconstruction of adaption
c) Robust conversational system design
	Utterance verification and confidence mesaures
	Error handling
	Dialogue strategies
	User modelling and adaption
d) Inclusion of non-speech modalities to improve recognition
	Multi-modal interaction
	Modality fusion and synchronisation
	Non-speech audio
	Non-acoustic features
e) Robustness to speaker variablity
	Spontanious speech
	Dialects and non-native speakers
	Speaker adaptation
f) Other
	Applications and implementations
	Databases
	Evaluation

Keynote speakers
Four keynote speakers will be presenting lectures on themes relating to the workshop,

Richard Rose, McGill University, Canada
	Robustness against enviromental noise
David Pearce, Speech and Multimedia Interfaces Group, Motorola, UK
	Robustness against unreliable transmission channels
Lou Boves, Department of Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen, Netherlands
	Robust conversational system design
Phil Cohen, Center for Human-Computer Communication, Oregon Graduate Institute, USA
	Inclusion of non-speech modalities to improve robustness

Submission and further details
Prospective authors are invited to submit four-page papers describing original work in any of the areas relevant to the workshop.
Email enquiries can be sent to robust04@cmp.uea.ac.uk
Participation to the workshop will be restricted to around 50 people.

Important dates
Submission deadline: July 9th 2004
Notification of acceptance: July 23th 2004
Workshop: August 30th and 31st 2004

Supporters of the workshop
COST-TIST - European co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research - Telecommunications, Information Science and Technology.
SCA - International Speech Communication Association
UEA - University of East Anglia