JSALT 2016 - Jelinek Summer Workshop on Speech and Language Technology (JSALT)

One-page proposals are invited for the annual Frederick Jelinek Memorial Workshop in Speech and Language Technology (JSALT), to be held in Baltimore, MD, USA (tentative dates June 27 to August 5, 2016).
An interactive peer-review meeting will refine and select proposals to be funded for a 6-week residential team exploration. Proposals should aim to advance the state of the art in any of the various fields of Human Language Technology (HLT) or of related areas of Machine Intelligence. Proposals may address emerging topics or long-standing problems. Areas of interest in 2016 include but are not limited to:
* SPEECH TECHNOLOGY: Any aspect of information extraction from speech signals (e.g. speech-to-text, speaker, language or dialect recognition, emotion and sentiment detection, keyword spotting); techniques that are robust to input signal variations and/or which generalize in spite of very limited amounts of training data.
* NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Knowledge discovery from text; new approaches to traditional problems such as syntactic/semantic/pragmatic analysis, machine translation, sentiment analysis, summarization, etc.; multi-lingual learning; domain adaptation; integrated language and social analysis; etc.
* COMPUTER VISION AND LANGUAGE: Understanding object attributes and their relationships using language, generating descriptions of images or video, multimodal sentiment analysis, referring expressions, etc.
* LANGUAGE AND HEALTHCARE: Suicide previention, information extraction from health records, mental health modeling, public health, individualized health, etc.
These workshops are a continuation of the Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop series, and will be hosted by various partner universities on a rotating basis. The research topics selected for investigation by teams in past workshops should serve as good examples for prospective proposers: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/workshops/.
An independent panel of experts will screen all received proposals for suitability. Results of this screening will be communicated by October 16, 2015. Authors passing this initial screening will be invited to an interactive peer-review meeting in Baltimore on November 13-15, 2015. Proposals will be revised at this meeting to address any outstanding concerns or new ideas. Two or three research topics and the teams to tackle them will be selected at this meeting for the 2016 workshop.
We attempt to bring the best researchers to the workshop to collaboratively pursue the selected topics for six weeks. Authors of successful proposals typically become the team leaders. Each topic brings together a diverse team of researchers and students. The senior participants come from academia, industry and government. Graduate student participants familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Undergraduate participants, selected through a national search, are rising star seniors: new to the field and showing outstanding academic promise.
If you are interested in participating in the 2016 Summer Workshop we ask that you submit a one-page research proposal for consideration, detailing the problem to be addressed. If a topic in your area of interest is chosen as one of the topics to be pursued next summer, we expect you to be available for participation in the six-week workshop. We are not asking for an ironclad commitment at this juncture, just a good faith understanding that if a project in your area of interest is chosen, you will actively pursue it. We in turn will make a good faith effort to accommodate any personal/logistical needs to make your six-week participation possible. Proposals must be submitted to jsalt2016-AT-clsp.jhu.edu by 5pm EDT on 12 Oct 2015.