HCSNet Update Newsletter Volume 3 Number 19

Tuesday, 15th May 2007
HCSNet Update
Tuesday 15 May 2007

Participant Spotlight

Christine Kitamura, University of Western Sydney

Research area: Psychology - Auditory Perception

In broad view, my research explores the acquisition of speech and communication skills in infants by examining their perception of speech, and the properties of their language environment, including those in speech input to infants, hearing aid frequency responses, and non-native English dialects. Complementing this are studies involving the analysis of speech input to young children in terms of its acoustic, phonetic, pragmatic and affective features. Current projects include research on (1) infants’ discrimination of, and attention to the spectral tilts commonly found in hearing aids, and the spectral tilt that bests facilitates infant perception of speech information (funded by an ARC Discovery held with the National Acoustic Laboratories); (2) an examination of the quality of interactions between mothers and infants with impaired hearing being conducted in conjunction with the Royal Institute of Blind and Deaf Children; (3) the perception of native language dialectal accents in an ARC Discovery Project with Professor Catherine Best; (4) the investigation of the phonological development of infants with and without a familial history of dyslexia; (4) the investigation of the emotional component of infant directed speech both by testing infants’ perception of the acoustic and affective concomitants of infant directed emotions developmentally (UWS Research Grant).

Contact:
Christine Kitamura
University of Western Sydney
MARCS Auditory Laboratories
email: c.kitamura@uws.edu.au     www: marcs.uws.edu.au/people/kitamura/index.htm

News

SummerFest '07

This year's SummerFest is shaping up to be our best yet! To be held at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, from 3-7 December 2007, HCSNet's premier event will include a Summer School and Student Poster Evening, our popular Speed Papers Session, Priority Area Workshops, Performances and Installations and of course opportunities for informal networking at our social events. This year we're also delighted to host the inaugural International Conference on Music Communication Science (ICOMCS) which will be held from 5-7 December to bring together people interested in an interdisciplinary understanding or application of music cognition, perception and performance. The conference will attract musicologists, psychologists, educators, linguists, composers, engineers, computer scientists, speech scientists, physicists, philosophers and performance artists. The aim of the conference is to bring a wide range of presenters together, ranging from students to established researchers with an interest in finding or presenting synergies from several disciplines to help solve problems in music, or to use elements of music and music research to address problems in other disciplines. For more information, please visit http://marcs.uws.edu.au/links/ICoMusic.

HCSNet Workshop - NGS07

After a very successful first workshop at the University of Melbourne last year, the second HCSNet Workshop of the Next Generation Search Priority Area will be held on 19-20 July 2007 at Macquarie University, Sydney. Hosted by Diego Molla Aliod and Robert Dale, the workshop will explore how we can improve search engine technology by integrating more knowledge about the processing and understanding of language. There will be a number of presentation formats aimed at further developing interdisciplinary collaboration, time for discussion, and a keynote presentation by Brett Poole, Head of Search of Yahoo!7. A call for participation will be announced very shortly. Further details will soon be available at http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/workshops/next-gen-search07.

HCSNet Awards

We'd like to remind you that HCSNet is now inviting applications for the HCSNet Graduate Student Placement Award and the HCSNet Early Career Researcher Placement Award in 2007. The Awards provide financial support for a Higher Degree Research Student and Early Career Researcher to spend a block of time (two weeks or longer) at another participating Research Laboratory, Centre, Group, Department or Industry Facility in Australia. The proposed visit should be designed to enhance knowledge or a skills base, build professional networks, and provide an opportunity to collaborate with experts in the field. Financial support from HCSNet is up to $2,500 to each award winner plus $500 to each host institution to assist with local expenses. Applications will be assessed on merit by the HCSNet Executive and a nominated assessor relevant to the proposal. Closing date for applications: 25 May 2007; for further information, including eligibility, assessment criteria and application forms, please see Early Career Researcher (ECR) Placement Award and Graduate Student Placement Award.

Positions Vacant at Lexxe Pty Ltd

Lexxe Pty Ltd has the following 3 positions open for application: Software Engineer, Computational Linguist and Intern Programmer. Closing date for applications: 8 June 2007; for more information, please see http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/jobs/2007/lexxe.

Upcoming Submission Deadlines

We list here upcoming submission deadlines that fall in the next month. A more complete list of submission deadlines can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

WISI Web Information-Seeking and Interaction

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Due date: 16 May 2007
URL: http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi

Music, Language and Movement

England, United Kingdom
Due date: 18 May 2007
URL: http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/Research/imhsd/SummerWorkshop2007/

1st International Conference on Corpus-Based Approaches

Castelló, Spain
Due date: 18 May 2007
URL: http://www.fue.uji.es/jornadas/verevento.shtm?id=2676&tipoexpte=jornada

PsychoCompLA-2007 Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition

Tennessee, United States
Due date: 22 May 2007
URL: http://www.colag.cs.hunter.cuny.edu/psychocomp/

SIGIR 2007 Workshop Improving Web retrieval for non-English queries

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Due date: 25 May 2007
URL: http://rea.teimes.gr/~lazarinf/ir7w/

CHAA-07 Communication Between Human and Artificial Agents

Silicon Valley, United States
Due date: 25 May 2007
URL: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~ckemke/CHAA-07/

TLS 11 The New Empiricism in Linguistics

Austin, TX, United States
Due date: 27 May 2007
URL: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~tls/2007tls/

Workshop on Contextualization in Human Tasks: Enriching of Actors

Denmark, Denmark
Due date: 28 May 2007
URL: http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~jbrezillon/CHUT-07

Second Workshop on The Future of Web Search

Bertinoro, Italy
Due date: 28 May 2007
URL: www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~tfws07

The Fourth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, 2007

Melbourne, Australia
Due date: 30 May 2007
URL: http://www.ie.rmit.edu.au

Linguistic Studies of Ontology: From Lexical Semantics to Formal Ontologies and Back

Seoul, Korea, Republic Of
Due date: 31 May 2007
URL: http://cil18.org

Written Communication: Intercultural Aspect

Kursk, Russian Federation
Due date: 31 May 2007
URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

FDIA 2007 The BCS-IRSG Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access

Scotland, United Kingdom
Due date: 1 Jun 2007
URL: http://irsg.bcs.org/fdia2007.php

Sixteenth Australian Language and Speech Conference

Cairns, Qld, Australia
Due date: 1 Jun 2007
URL: http://srvcns.it.jcu.edu.au/~david/

ASCS 2007 8th Australasian Society for Cognitive Science Conference

Adelaide, Australia
Due date: 1 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/ascs2007/

6th International Workshop on Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

Potsdam, Germany
Due date: 3 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/fsmnlp2007/

FSMNLP 2007 Finite-State Methods and Natural Language Processing

Potsdam, Germany
Due date: 3 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/fsmnlp2007

UCNLG+MT Using Corpora for NLG: Language Generation and MT

Copenhagen, Denmark
Due date: 8 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/ucnlg/

IJCNLP-08 3rd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Hyderabad, India
Due date: 8 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.ijcnlp2008.org/

ISCIT 2007 7th International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies

Sydney, Australia
Due date: 10 Jun 2007
URL: http://www.elec.uow.edu.au/ISCIT2007/

Upcoming Conferences

We list here upcoming conferences and workshops that fall in the next month. A more complete list of events can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

ML4NLP Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Date: 16 May 2007
URL: http://www.science.uva.nl/~katrenko/benelearn07/workshop.html

CLIC/LISO Conference On Language, Interaction, And Culture

Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Date: 17 May 2007
to 19 May 2007 URL: LISOconference@gmail.com

GASLA 9 Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition 9

Iowa City, IA, United States
Date: 18 May 2007
to 20 May 2007 URL: http://www.ss.ucalgary.ca/JArchibald/Program.html

CLDC-1 1st Conference on Language, Discourse and Cognition

Taipei, Taiwan
Date: 18 May 2007
to 19 May 2007 URL: http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~gilntu/

International Workshop on the Biology and Genetics of Music

Palazzo del Podestà - Bologna, Italy
Date: 20 May 2007
to 22 May 2007 URL: http://www.musicagenetica.it

MTT '07 3rd International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory

Klagenfurt, Austria
Date: 21 May 2007
to 24 May 2007 URL: http://www.mtt.upf.edu/

Knowledge Communication in Multimodal Contexts

Aarhus, Denmark
Date: 21 May 2007
to 22 May 2007 URL: http://www.asb.dk/about/departments/isek/forskning/konferencer/multimodalwor

TFSG'07 2nd International Workshop on Typed Feature Structure Grammars

Tartu, Estonia
Date: 24 May 2007
URL: http://cst.dk/anders/tfsg/tfsg07.html

SCAR Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation

Tartu, Estonia
Date: 24 May 2007
URL: http://www.sics.se/~mange/scar2007

CONSTRAINT GRAMMAR WORKSHOP

Tartu, Estonia
Date: 24 May 2007
URL: http://giellatekno.uit.no/cg/ee07/

Interactivist Summer Institute 2007

Paris, France
Date: 26 May 2007
to 29 May 2007 URL: http://www.lehigh.edu/~interact/isi2007/index.htm

CL-HCI2007 Computational Linguistics in HCI 2007

Beijing, China
Date: 27 May 2007
to 30 May 2007 URL: http://monet.skku.ac.kr/clhci2007/

RIAO'2007 Large-Scale Semantic Access to Content (Text, Image, Video and Sound)

Pittsburgh, PA, United States
Date: 30 May 2007
to 1 Jun 2007 URL: http://www.riao.org

DECALOG THE 2007 WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF DIALOGUE

Rovereto, Italy
Date: 30 May 2007
to 1 Jun 2007 URL: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/semdial/

DECALOG The 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue

Università di Trento, Italy
Date: 30 May 2007
to 1 Jun 2007 URL: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/Research/nle/decalog/

Biolinguistics: Language Evolution and Variation

Venice, Italy
Date: 4 Jun 2007
to 6 Jun 2007 URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html

Austronesian Endangered Language Documentation

Shala, Taiwan
Date: 5 Jun 2007
to 6 Jun 2007 URL: http://yamiproject.cs.pu.edu.tw/yami/conference/session.htm

AIIDE-07 Third Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment

California, United States
Date: 6 Jun 2007
to 8 Jun 2007 URL:

Segments and Tone

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Date: 7 Jun 2007
to 8 Jun 2007 URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html

The Sound Patterns of Syntax

Beer Sheva, Israel
Date: 11 Jun 2007
to 13 Jun 2007 URL: http://www.bgu.ac.il/~shir

The 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science

Funchal, Madeira, Portugal
Date: 12 Jun 2007
to 13 Jun 2007 URL: http://www.iceis.org/workshops/nlpcs/nlpcs2007-cfp.html

Globalization and Communication: Enrichment and Threat

Gdansk, Poland
Date: 14 Jun 2007
to 16 Jun 2007 URL:
HCSNet Update is a weekly electronic publication of HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science, and is emailed to all Network participants. If you have received this newsletter by some other means, or you'd like to find out more about HCSNet, visit our website at www.hcsnet.edu.au. For enquiries about this newsletter or to stop receiving it, please email newsletter@hcsnet.edu.au.