NIPS WORKSHOP ON AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS

[Guy Brown <G.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                         WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT

                   NIPS'96 Postconference Workshop


           CONNECTIONIST MODELLING OF AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS

                   Snowmass (Aspen), Colorado USA
                       Friday Dec 6th, 1996
                http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~guy/NIPS/

        Guy J. Brown                          DeLiang Wang
Department of Computer Science   Department of Computer & Information
   University of Sheffield         Sci. and Center for Cognitive Sci.
Regent Court, 211 Portobello St.      The Ohio State University
    Sheffield S1 4DP, U.K.           Columbus, OH 43210-1277, USA
   Fax: +44 (0)114 2780972               Fax: (614)2922911
   Email: guy@dcs.shef.ac.uk       Email: dwang@cis.ohio-state.edu


OUTLINE

Since Albert Bregman published his book "Auditory Scene Analysis" in
1990, there has been significant interest in neural modelling of
auditory scene analysis. This workshop seeks to bring together a
diverse group of researchers to critically examine the progress made
so far in this challenging research area, and to discuss unsolved
problems. In particular, we intend to address the following issues:


* The role of attention in primitive (bottom-up) auditory scene
analysis

* How primitive auditory scene analysis is coupled with schema-based
(knowledge-based) auditory scene analysis
* The utility of the neural oscillator approach

In addition to reviewing these issues, we would like to chart, if
possible,

a neural network framework for segmenting simultaneously presented
auditory

patterns.


WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

This one-day workshop will be organised into two three-hour sessions,
one in
early morning and one in late afternoon. The intermitting time is
reserved for
skiing or free-wheeling interactions between participants. Each
session consists of 2 hour oral presentations and 1 hour panel
discussion. The presentations are as follows:

"Synchronized attentional processing streams, rhythmic expectation
and auditory scene analysis"
Bill Baird

Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, USA

"The behaviour of the auditory scene analysis system in humans:
constraints on connectionist modelling"
Albert Bregman

Department of Psychology, McGill University, Canada

"A neural oscillator model of concurrent vowel segregation"
Guy J. Brown

Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK
DeLiang Wang

Department of Computer Science and Information Science and Center for
Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, USA

"A model of primitive auditory streaming"
Sue McCabe

School of Computing, University of Plymouth, UK

"Advantages and disadvantages of emergent models for computational
auditory scene analysis"
Dan Ellis

ICSI, Berkeley, USA

"Real neurons as elements in auditory connectionist models"
Ray Meddis

Department of Psychology, Essex University, UK

"Correlograms: a connectionist update"
Malcolm Slaney

Interval Research, USA

"Attention-based auditory segmentation by pulse propagating neural
networks"
Thomas Zahn

Department of Neuroinformatics, Technical University of Ilmenau, FRG

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Besides the speakers, the following groups of participants are the
targeted

participants: (a) Auditory psychophysicists; (b) Auditory
neurobiologists;

(c) Computational modellers and engineers (including those interested
in

VLSI implementation); (d) Researchers who work on visual perception
but

have an interest in auditory scene analysis.

HOW DO I REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP?

Registration details for the NIPS-96 workshop, including an
application form, are available through the 1996 Neural Information
Processing Systems Conference Home Page:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/NIPS/

Details of accommodation at the Snowmass resort are also available
from the NIPS home page. If you do not have WWW access, please
request a registration form from one of the workshop co-chairs.

FURTHER INFORMATION

We have a WWW page for the NIPS-96 Workshop on Connectionist
Modelling of Auditory Scene Analysis, which includes abstracts for
each talk, background information and links to related sites:

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~guy/NIPS/