Subject: CFP: AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium on auditory issues in robotics From: Derek Brock <brock@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:11:54 -0500CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ============================================= AAAI 2006 Fall Symposium Aurally Informed Performance: Integrating Machine Listening and Auditory Presentation in Robotic Systems ============================================= ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------- 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@xxxxxxxx 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@xxxxxxxx Organizing Committee Derek Brock (co-chair), Naval Research Laboratory (brock@xxxxxxxx); Ramani Duraiswami (co-chair), University of Maryland (ramani@xxxxxxxx); and Alexander I. Rudnicky (co- chair), Carnegie Mellon University (air@xxxxxxxx).