NIPS'96 Workshop on Auditory Scene Analysis

[DeLiang Wang]

                           CALL FOR SPEAKERS

                     NIPS'96 Postconference Workshop 

             CONNECTIONIST MODELLING OF AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS

                     Snowmass (Aspen), Colorado USA
                          Friday Dec 6th, 1996


          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 at dcs.shef.ac.uk	    Email: dwang at cis.ohio-state.edu
     http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~guy	  http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~dwang


OBJECTIVES

Auditory scene analysis describes the ability of listeners to  
separate the acoustic events arriving from different environmental  
sources into separate perceptual representations (streams). It is  
related to, but is more general than, the well-known "cocktail party  
effect", which refers to the ability of listeners to segregate one  
voice from a mixture of many other voices. Computational models of  
auditory scene analysis are likely to play an important role in  
building speech recognition systems that work in realistic acoustic  
environments. However, many aspects of this important modelling  
problem are as yet largely unsolved.

Recently, there has been significant growth in neural modelling of 
auditory scene analysis since Albert Bregman published his book "Auditory 
Scene Analysis" in 1990.  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: 

* Whether attention is involved 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 oscillatory 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 FORMAT

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.


SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS

A group of invited experts, including Albert Bregman, will speak in the
workshop. We are seeking a few more speakers to contribute. If you have
done work on this or related topics and would like to contribute, please 
send an abstract as soon as possible to: 

	GUY J. BROWN
        Department of Computer Science
        University of Sheffield
        Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street
        Sheffield S1 4DP, UK
        Phone: +44 (0)114 2825568; Fax: +44 (0)114 2780972
        Email: guy at dcs.shef.ac.uk


Abstracts should be sent in by email or by fax.

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of abstracts:        27 September, 1996 
Notification of acceptance:         	     7 October,  1996 

A set of workshop notes will be produced. 

Please contact the workshop organizers for further information, or consult 
the NIPS WWW home page:

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