The Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA2005) will be held on March 17-18, 2005, at Rutgers University in Piscataway NJ, USA (immediately before the 2005 ICASSP in Philadelphia PA). This workshop is devoted to reviewing the current state-of-the-art as well as recent advances in signal processing related to the problem of hands-free speech communications. It will bring together researchers and practitioners from universities and companies working in the fields of robust speech recognition, speech enhancement, microphone arrays, and MIMO (multiple-input multiple- output) acoustic signal processing. In order to facilitate interaction between different research communities, this workshop combines two earlier established workshops: Microphone Arrays and Hands- Free Speech Communications. The Microphone Array Workshop held typically every other year for the past 10 years has been growing in participation and diversity in subject matter coverage, but focused mainly on the problem of hands-free communications. The Hands-Free Speech Communication Workshop organized in Japan three years ago, focused mainly on back-end processing for automatic speech recognition of hands-free speech. This workshop will act to synergistically combine front-end MIMO acoustic signal processing with back-end automatic speech recognition processing. The workshop organizers believe that by bringing these two disparate research groups together will lead to synergistic advances in the field of hands-free speech communication. The workshop will feature keynote addresses by leading researchers, panel discussion of future research directions, and contributed technical papers.
This proposal requests facility and travel support for students. We would like to keep the registration cost of the workshop low to allow many folks to easily participate. In order to accomplish this, we have decided to host the conference at the CAIP center at the Rutgers University. We request support for the cost of the organizational staff and university facilities required for the workshop. We also request support for students from US institutions who are authors or coauthors of a paper to be presented, who without travel subsidies would not be able to attend.
The workshop website will provide further details URL: www.hscma2005.org
