CONNECTIONIST MODELLING OF AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS

[Guy Brown <G.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

                         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@dcs.shef.ac.uk           Email:
dwang@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@dcs.shef.ac.uk


Abstracts should be sent 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/

PS: For those of you who are not familiar with the NIPS (Neural
Information
Processing Systems) Conference, NIPS is an annual meeting of the
premier

interdisciplinary conference covering all aspects of neural
processing and

computation. NIPS brings together neuroscientists, computer
scientists,

cognitive scientists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and

statisticians, with interests in natural and artificial neural
systems.

This year's NIPS is the tenth meeting. NIPS postconference workshops
are
held at a world-class ski resort.