Blizzard Challenge 2015 Workshop
The Blizzard Challenge 2015 workshop is a satellite event of INTERSPEECH 2015
Friday 11th September 2015
The workshop will be held at Telekom Innovation Laboratories with the generous support from Google Inc., Apple Inc., and DeitY, Gov. of India.
The Blizzard Challenge 2015 workshop is a satellite event of INTERSPEECH 2015.]
Call for participation
The Blizzard Challenge 2015 Workshop is the culmination of the Blizzard Challenge 2015 which is an open speech synthesis evaluation campaign using common data sets and a large listening test. The aims of the workshop are to present the results from the listening tests and for participants in the Challenge to describe their systems.
The Blizzard Challenge 2015 uses datasets from six Indian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Malayalam, recorded by professional speakers in high quality studio environments.
The workshop is a satellite event of Interspeech 2015
Who can attend the workshop ?
The workshop is open to all and we encourage participation from anyone interested in speech synthesis.
Who can submit a paper to the workshop ?
All participants in the Challenge are expected to submit a paper describing their entry (even if they cannot attend the workshop in person). Papers will be refereed by the Programme Committee and the Expert Committee.
Organisers
- Simon King, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Kishore Prahallad, IIIT Hyderabad, India
- Alan W. Black, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Keiichi Tokuda, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
Expert Committee (Indian Languages)
- TBC
Paper submission instructions
- Use the Interspeech 2015 authors' kit, but your paper should be up to SIX pages in length
- Remember that Blizzard is a scientific investigation - we are all trying to understand why some techniques work better than others.
- With this in mind, please write a detailed, technical paper aimed at a specialist audience. Focus on analysis and evaluation. Try to explain WHY your system performed the way it did, and what makes it different from other systems. Explain why your system is designed in a particular way. For example, report internal evaluations you have done to select certain methods.
- Submit your paper by email to blizzard@festvox.org by the deadline given in the official timeline and we will notify you of acceptance within a week. If you need an earlier notification (e.g., in order to obtain travel permission from your employer), then please contact us.
Location and date
Date: Friday 11th September 2015 (all day)
Venue: The Blizzard Challenge 2015 Workshop will take place at the following address:
Quality and Usability Lab
Telekom Innovation Laboratories
TU Berlin
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7
D-10587 Berlin, Germany
Web: http://www.qu.tu-berlin.de
Programme
The workshop format is single-track with oral presentations from the participants in the Challenge, and the organizers.
Each system presentation slot is 30 minutes and presenters should speak for 20-25 minutes to allow time for questions and changeover. Presenters should bear in mind that the audience will mainly comprise speech synthesis experts; therefore presentations do not need to include extensive background material, but should focus on technical detail and go deep in to the specifics of each system. Presentations must include plenty of working audio examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the system! Please bring your own laptop to present.
The venue this year has a strictly limited capacity, so all attendees must obtain tickets in advance from Eventbrite.
The schedule below is now final
- 09.00 Registration
- 09.30 - 10.15 Welcome, introduction, summary of results
- Welcome from Simon King, on behalf of the organisers
- Message from sponsor, MCIT-TDIL Gov. of India - Prof. Hema Murthy
- Message from sponsor, Google - Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis
- Message from sponsor, Apple - David Winarsky
- Summary of Blizzard Challenge 2015 from Kishore Prahallad
- 10.15 - 11.00 Coffee break
- 11.00 - 13.00 System presentations
- CMU - Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- DONLAB - Indian Institute of Technology - Madras,India
- NITECH - Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
- IRISA - Institute de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires
- 13.00 - 14.30 Lunch break
- 13.00 Lunch
- 14.00 Lab tour (optional)
- 14.30 - 16.30 System presentations
- NELSLIP - National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology,China
- CSTR - CSTR Edinburgh & University of Helsinki
- NAIST - Nara Institute of Science and Technology , Japan
- IIIT H - International institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad,India
- 16.30 - 17.00 Coffee break
- 17.00 - 18.00
- Announcements
- Introduction to the 2016 Challenge from Simon King
- Show and Tell - preliminary samples using the pilot data
- NITECH
- NELSLIP
- Innoetics
- MARYTTS
- CSTR/Helsinki
- IRISA
- more welcome...
- Wrap-up, final discussion about future Blizzard Challenges
- 19.00 evening social event at Paulaner im Spreebogen where Apple will buy you a drink, and Google will buy you another. Food also available, at your own expense.
Practical information
Registration procedure
Please register via Eventbrite by the end of August 2015.
Places are limited, so we reserve the right to amend registrations later, if that is necessary to guarantee places for participating teams and sponsors.
Cost
There is no cost to attend the Blizzard Workshop this year, thanks to support from MCIT-TDIL (Government of India), Google Inc. and Apple Inc., and the free use of Telekom Innovation Laboratories conference facility.
Accommodation and travel
Train travel from Dresden to Berlin is straightforward. No accommodation is arranged by the workshop: please make your own arrangements.
