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HCSNet-backed LIEF Grant Application on Corpus Collection

At last Friday's HCSNet Steering Committee and Priority Areas Meeting, it was proposed that HCSNet participants (with the backing of HCSNet, the Thinking Head project, and ASSTA - the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association) submit a cross-university application for ARC LIEF (Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Fund) grant funds to support data collection for the development of corpora that would then be used as an infrastructure resource for a number of parties. A meeting will be held on Friday, 16 March 2007 from 11:00am - 2:00pm at the University of Western Sydney (Milperra) to discuss the grant application. As a first pass, the application would involve:

1. The establishment of a documentation and metadata system for the storage, cataloguing, and retrieval of data.

2. The use of this system to collect an AV speech database that would be useful for audiovisual automatic speech recognition systems, audiovisual speaker authentication and speaker characteristic detection systems, audiovisual speech synthesis systems and other similar applications.

3. The system put in place in the first application could be accompanied by, or provide a basis for future data collection in other areas, e.g. dialects of Australian and New Zealand English, sign language, music, endangered and indigenous music, facial emotions etc.

Time is of the essence - these applications are due in Canberra on 18 May 2007, and must be at the institutions' Research Offices well before that. If you are interested in attending this meeting, please email Rosemary Eliott at reliott@ics.mq.edu.au as soon as possible stating your name, institution and your specific interest in the project. Note that participating universities in LIEF grants are expected to contribute significant amounts of money to the project (in the order of 10s of 1000s of dollars), so you would need to be prepared to approach your research office for financial input to the project.