Events

2011 Most Cited Paper award

2011 Most Cited Paper award by the J. on Computer Vision and Image Understanding was awarded to the ETHZ paper on SURF, a feature investigated at the start of DIRAC (WP1). 

2010 Best paper award

Best paper award was awarded to: D. Hollosi, J. Schröder, S. Götze, J.-E. Appell, "Voice Activity Detection Driven Acoustic Event Classification for Monitoring in Smart Homes", 3rd International Symposium on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Communication Technologies, Rome, Italy, November 2010.

ECML/PKDD 2010 - European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases

• Dirac has organized a full-day-workshop at the ECML/PKDD in Barcelona which took place on Friday, 24th of September. See Summer Workshop 2010 for impressions from the workshop.
  
• for details about the DIRAC workshop click here 
• for information about the ECML/PKDD click here 

DIRAC featured in radio broadcast "Forschung Aktuell" ("Current Research") of German radio station Deutschlandfunk, March 16, 2010

The recording of the feature is available at the Deutschlandfunk site here, with DIRAC addressed at minutes ca. 5:45 to 10:00.

DAGA 2010 - German Acoustics Conference 2010, March 15 to 18, 2010, Berlin

Dirac researchers with oral presentation at DAGA 2010.

• J. Anemüller, J. -H. Bach, L. van Gool, H. Kayser, W. Moreau, and S. Wabnik, "Audio-visuelle Identifikation ungewöhnlicher Ereignisse - das DIRAC Projekt" ("Audio-visual Identification of Unexpected Events – The DIRAC Project"), Fortschritte der Akustik – DAGA, 2010, 2010.

ICASSP 2010 - International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, March 14 to 19, 2010, Dallas, Texas

Dirac researchers have several invited, oral and poster presentations at ICASSP 2010.

• Bach, J.-H., Kollmeier, B., Anemüller, J. Modulation-based detection of speech in real background noise: Generalization to novel background classes.
  
• Ganapathy, S., Thomas, S., Hermansky, H. Comparison of modulation features for phoneme recognition.
  
• Ganapathy, S., Thomas, S., Hermansky, H. Robust spectro-temporal features based on autoregressive models of Hilbert envelopes.
  
• Garimella, S., Nemala, S.K., Elhilali, M., Tran, T.D., Hermansky, H. Sparse coding for speech recognition.
• Hermansky, H. History of Modulation Spectrum in ASR.
  

ITG Innovation award for DIRAC researchers, December 18, 2009

• Innovation Prize ITG 2009 handed out by Electrosuisse for the submission `quo vadis? - from video to motion pattern', by M. Breitenstein, E. Koller- Meier, F. Reichlin, L. Van Gool, work on pedestrian tracking with a single camera (new focus in Dirac).
  

Invited talk at Alcatel Bell Labs, October 20 to 21, 2009

• Invited talk by Luc Van Gool at Alcatel Bell Labs Open Days October 20 - 21, 2009 Antwerp, with a large audience from industry, with Dirac results as one of the highlights of the presentation.

3rd International Conference on Auditory Cortex, August 29 to September 2, 2009, Magdeburg, Germany

Partner LIN has organized the 3rd International Auditory Cortex Conference (www.auditory-cortex.de). An entire session of this conference will be devoted to crossmodal sensory processing, and a further session will be devoted to learning and adaptivity.

DIRAC Summer Workshop, Leuven, Belgium, August 24-28, 2009

This year's DIRAC Summer Workshop was held in the Irish College in Leuven (Belgium) from 24-28 August 2009. For more information, visit this page.

DIRAC work on Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) word detection featured in IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter

• Cernocky, H. Brno University of Technology detecting OOVs in DIRAC project.

Computational Neuroscience, July 18–23 2009, Berlin, Germany

A joint abstract from Univ. Oldenburg and Leibniz Institute Magdeburg has been accepted for presentation at the Computational Neuroscience meeting CNS 2009.

• Meyer, A.F., Happel, M.F.K., Ohl, F.W., Anemüller, J. Estimation of spectro-temporal receptive fields based on linear support vector machine classification. BMC Neuroscience 2009, 10(Suppl 1):P147.

10th Annual Meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum, New York, New York, June 29th-July 2nd, 2009

• Boenke LT, Deliano M, & Ohl FW. Stimulus duration influences perceived simultaneity in audiovisual temporal order judgment. Proceedings of the 10th Annual Meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum, New York (IMRF), New York, June 29th- July 2nd, 2009
• Fillbrandt A, Ohl FW (2009). Audiovisual category transfer in rodents. 10th International Multisensory Research Forum, New York, New York, June 29th- July 2nd, 2009
• Zeghbib A1, Fillbrandt A1, Ohl FW1,2 Phase coherence evolution in cortical networks: adaptation to audiovisual stimulation with fixed inter-modality asynchrony. 10th International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF), New York, June 29th- July 2nd, 2009

IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Miami, Florida, June 20-25, 2009

M. Havlena visited IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition and the collocated First WorkshoponEgocentricVisionwherehepresented two contributions.

• Michal Havlena, Akihiko Torii, Jan Knopp and Tomas Pajdla, ʺRandomized Structure from Motion Based on Atomic 3D Models from Camera Tripletsʺ, IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Miami Beach, 20‐25 June 2009.

• Michal Havlena, Andreas Ess, Wim Moreau, Akihiko Torii, Michal Jancosek, Tomas Pajdla and Luc Van Gool, ʺAWEAR 2.0 System: Omni‐directional Audio‐Visual Data Acquisition and Processingʺ, First Workshop on Egocentric Vision, Miami Beach, 20 June 2009.

Best Paper Award at 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May12 to 17, 2009

• Best vision paper award, Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, for the paper entitled `moving obstacle detection in highly dynamic scenes', by A. Ess, B. Leibe, K. Schindler, L. van Gool, an application of the Awear setup on a mobile platform.
  

 

Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic EngineeringWorkshop, Cap Caccia, Italy, April 26 to May 10, 2009

From April, 26th to May, 10th the 2009 Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop (http://capocaccia.ethz.ch/capo/) was held, organized by the Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich. The topic of the workgroup we focused on was ʺevent‐based auditory processingʺ. For DIRAC, participants from the partners Oldenburg and Brno attended the event and participated in the hands-on workgroup "Event-based auditory processing", led by Shih-Chi Liu. Their work aimed at developing methods for audio and auditory processing based on the spike‐output of a siliconcochlea sensor. As an example, a speaker recognition task using spike‐based features was implemented. A more detailed description is found on the workgroupʹs wikipage http://capocaccia.ethz.ch/capo/wiki/audsp09/, and in the workshop report available from the site.

8th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society, Göttingen, 25-29 March 2009

• Fillbrandt A, Zeghbib A & Ohl FW, "Trial-to-trial variability of interaction dynamics between auditory and visual cortex during asynchronous audiovisual stimulation"

NAG/DAGA International Conference on Acoustics, Rotterdam, 23-26 March 2009

• Hendrik Kayser , Birger Kollmeier and Jörn Anemüller, “Blind and Non-Blind Spatial Signal Processing Using Head-Related Impulse Responses”
•  Timm Schaer , Stephan D. Ewert, Jörn Anemüller and Birger Kollmeier, “Measurement, modelling and compensation of nonlinearities in hearing aid receivers”
• Peter van Hengel and Jörn Anemüller, “Audio Event Detection for In-Home Care”
• Jörg-Hendrik Bach and Jörn Anemüller, “Acoustic Object Detection in Adverse Conditions”

3rd Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology (PSIVT2009), Tokyo, Japan, January 13-16, 2009

A.Torii visited the 3rd Pacific‐Rim Symposiumon Image and Video Technology where he presented one contribution.

• Akihiko Torii, Michal Havlena and Tomas Pajdla, ʺOmnidirectional Image Stabilization by Computing Camera Trajectoryʺ, The 3rd Pacific‐Rim Symposium on Imageand Video Technology, Tokyo, 13‐16 January 2009.

Cognitive Science Summerschool 2008 (15-19 September)

In the last decade, research on cognitive systems has received increased attention. Inspired by biological systems and their ability to manage complex tasks in an ever-changing environment, researchers have set out to model biological processes. To advance the science of cognitive systems a multi-disciplinary investigation of requirements, design options and trade-offs for human-like, autonomous, integrated, physical (eg. Robot) systems, including requirements, for architectures, for forms of representation, for perceptual mechanisms, for learning, planning and reasoning for action and communication are investigated. Information is gathered from different modalities such as vision, audio and speech. A very important aspect is how biological systems can filter out vital information from this vast amount of data through fusion and transfer of knowledge between modalities. To model these processes, researchers have developed architectures, representations, algorithms and sensors to acquire and process data coming from the various sensory modalities.
For more information, visit this page.

Newsletter N^o. 9 - April, May and June 2008

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 9 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here 

Newsletter N^o. 8 - January, February and March 2008

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 8 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here

Temporal Dynamics in Speech and Hearing Workshop (26. August 2007)

This one-day workshop will focus on those aspects of auditory and higher-cortical function germane to analysis, decoding and interpretation of biologically relevant information encoded in the signal’s temporal structure. Of particular interest is the role of modulatory processes for encoding and decoding information germane to communication and environmental navigation (e.g., spoken language, auditory scene analysis, acoustic spatialization, musical dynamics) as well as computational approaches for exploiting such information for technology applications. The structure of this workshop departs from tradition in that it will favor structured discussion, reflecting the collective knowledge and wisdom of its participants, instead of long-winded presentations by a few. Presentations will be short and will focus on one of the following themes: (1) Auditory Temporal Dynamics and Informational Masking (2) Speech Dynamics and Its Relation to Information Coding in Spoken Language (3) Temporal Dynamics in Speech Engineering
Please see this website for more details.

Summer Workshop on Multi-Sensory Modalities in Cognitive Science (25-29 August 2007)

This year DIRAC will have its very first summer workshop. To organize this event Dirac has joined forces with IST-project CoSy (http://www.cognitivesystems.org) because of its similarity in goals: to investigate the cognitive processes of learning and understanding environments using data as retrieved by different sensor inputs. The summer workshop is sponsored by the PASCAL Network of Excellence (http://www.pascal-network.org/) and will carry the name "Summer Workshop on Multi-Sensory Modalities in Cognitive Science". It is scheduled to take place August 25-29 in Studienzentrum Gerzensee. The program of the summer workshop will be spread over five days during which the participants may follow tutorials on various topics such as: --- Neural mechanisms of recognition and categorization --- Visual Object Recognition Algorithms --- Image Matching and Camera Tracking --- Spatial Sound Processing --- Speech Communication by Humans and Machine --- Autonomous Robot Learning of Foundational Representations --- Developmental Algorithms --- Cognitive Architectures --- Markov Decision Processes These tutorials will be brought by well-known lecturers in the field: Ales Leonardis, Bastian Leibe, Benjamin Kuipers, Bernt Schiele, Craig Boutilier, Frederic Kaplan, Hynek Hermansky, Joern Anemueller, Matthias Scheutz, Rufin Vogels, Tinne Tuytelaars and Tomas Pajdla.
For more information, visit this page.

Newsletter N^o. 7 - July, August and September 2007

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 7 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here 

Newsletter N^o. 6 - April, May and June 2007

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 6 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here

Dealing with unexpected words

Please have a look at the Neuromorhic Engineer Vol 3., No. 2 issue posted at http://www.ine-web.org or only the article written by Prof. Hynek Hermansky about dealing with unexpected words

Updated DIRAC Undergraduate Internships Program

DIRAC updated its Undergraduate Internship Program with new proposals. Please have a look at our Undergraduate Internship Program Page.

Newsletter N^o. 5 - January, February and March 2007

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 5 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here

KULeuven and ETHZurich receive an Award

KULeuven and ETHZurich received the Best Video Award at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2006 in New York, USA, click here for more

Newsletter N^o. 3 - July, August and September 2006

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 3 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here

Newsletter N^o. 2 - April, May and June 2006

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 2 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here

Newsletter N^o. 1 - January, February and March 2006

The DIRAC's newsletter issue N^o 1 is online. To download the full newsletter, click here