CFP: AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium on auditory issues in robotics

[Derek Brock <brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
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AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium

Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Machine Listening and  
Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems
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Important Dates

Submission deadline: May 1, 2006
Notification to authors: May 22, 2006
Final electronic manuscripts due: August 29, 2006
Symposium held: October 12-15, 2006
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Overview

Robots designed to function as appliances and human surrogates in  
public and private settings are already being moved from research  
projects to fully deployed systems.  In keeping with the goals of  
intuitive human-robot interaction, many of these platforms  
incorporate rudimentary speech communication interfaces, and others  
are engineered for specific types of listening tasks.  Even so,  
aurally informed behaviors in robots, and their integration with  
other perceptual and reasoning systems, remain far behind the broad  
and mostly transparent skills of human beings.

Part of the problem is that while much is known about the human  
physiology of listening, much less is understood about how  
conceptually bounded information is extracted from the mixtures of  
sounds that are typically present in interactive settings.  This is  
the problem of auditory scene analysis—how people make sense of what  
they hear.  Robots must able to converse on the basis of what they  
hear and see and may even have additional, non-speech auditory  
display functions ranging from alerting to the playback of captured  
sounds.  Social settings also raise practical performance issues for  
robots such as being interrupted while speaking, excessive ambient  
noise or quiet, the user's physical listening distance, the  
acceptability of being overheard or disturbing others, and so on.

The purpose of this symposium is to gather together researchers in  
machine listening, speech systems, and general robotics, as well as  
those in other disciplines, including AI, neuroscience, and the  
cognitive and social sciences, who are interested in a collaborative,  
interdisciplinary exploration of the range of issues that concern  
aurally informed performance in robots.   The goal is to share  
results, positions, and insights  across boundaries that concern  
challenges in robotic audition, auditory presentation, and the  
integration of these functions with other sensory and processing  
systems in the context of human-robot interaction and the auditory  
needs and preferences of users.

A sampling of research themes of interest:

Robot audition (multimodal approaches allowed)
- tracking individual sound objects and speakers (talkers) while  
robot is stationary and in motion
- auditory cognition, auditory scene analysis, recognition of  
auditory events, characterization of auditory environments
- speech recognition, identification of talkers, recognition of  
emotional content
- coping with ambient noise
- disambiguating an addressing speaker or speakers in the presence of  
non addressing speech

Robot auditory displays
- presentation of speech and non-speech auditory information
- conveying emotions
- alerting, warning, system state, etc.
- sonification of sensor data and/or telemetry
- novel robotic auditory display applications

Aurally-related and/or informed behavior and additional topics
- socially and environmentally adaptive speech presentations
- attending to people when speaking and listening
- reactive and developmental approaches to robotic auditory performance
- integration of auditory functions with high-level reasoning,  
motoric and physical control mechanisms, and other sensory system  
products

Submissions

Prospective participants are invited to submit a research abstract or  
a position paper.  Submissions that describe computational approaches  
to aurally informed performance and/or, empirical results, work-in- 
progress, speculative approaches, and theoretical issues that bear on  
the topic are all encouraged.  Papers are to be two to six pages in  
length and must be submitted by email in PDF format to  
brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  Please include the phrase "FSS06-submission"  
in the subject line of your email.

More information can be found at http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/ 
fss06.php or by contacting Derek Brock at brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Organizing Committee

Derek Brock (co-chair), Naval Research Laboratory  
(brock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx); Ramani Duraiswami (co-chair), University of  
Maryland (ramani@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx); and Alexander I. Rudnicky (co- 
chair), Carnegie Mellon University (air@xxxxxxxxxx).