.. This document is written in reStructuredText, http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

.. title:: SLPAT 2013, Overview & Topics of interest

.. include:: menu.txt

Special topic
----------------------

To address the challenges imposed by a growing ageing population,
developed countries are massively supporting the development of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to provide Ambient
Assistance. These technologies are expected to improve the daily life
of the elderly so that they always keep control over their life and
continue to live independently, to learn and to stay involved in
social life. Especially, one of the greatest challenges in Ambient
Assisted Living (AAL) is to design Smart Homes and intelligent
companions that anticipate to the needs of its inhabitants while
maintaining their safety and comfort.

.. Smart Homes and intelligent companions are typically equipped with
.. many sensors perceiving different aspects of the user and the home
.. environment. 
.. However, an underexploited sensor is the microphone
.. whereas it can deliver highly informative data and can be the prior
.. way of interaction in the home.

This workshop aims at gathering researchers of speech and language
technologies interested in addressing the challenges related to
empowering frail population and ensuring social communication and
security. 

.. This workshop
.. would be open to discuss problems and peculiarities of speech
.. processing in Smart Homes environment, including but not limited to
.. automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialogue. A
.. particular attention would be paid to papers including an experimental
.. evaluation. The applications concerned are related (and not limited
.. to) to comfort, security, home automation, e-inclusion and Ambient
.. Assisted Living. 

Relevant research topics would include (but are not limited to):

- Automatic Speech recognition in multi-source environments
- Distant speech recognition
- Understanding, modelling or recognition of aged speech
- Speech analysis in the case of elderly with impairments, early recognition of speech capability loss
- Assistive speech technology
- Multimodal speech recognition (context-aware ASR)
- Multimodal emotion recognition
- Audio scene and smart home context analysis
- Applications of speech technology (ASR, dialogue, synthesis) for ambient assisted living