Exchange program with ICSI

Framework
IM2 (Interactive Multimodal Information Management, www.im2.ch) is a Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR), managed by Idiap (www.idiap.ch, Martigny, CH), aiming at the advancement of research, and the development of prototypes, in the field of man-machine interaction. IM2 is particularly concerned with technologies coordinating natural input modes (such as speech, image, pen, touch, hand gestures, head and/or body movements, and even physiological sensors) with multimedia system outputs, such as speech, sounds, and images. Among other applications, IM2 is also concerned with multimodal technologies to support human interaction, in the context of smart meeting rooms, such as the one available at ICSI/Berkeley (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/Speech/mr/mtgrcdr.html) and Idiap (www.idiap.ch/~moore/meeting). In that context, IM2 aims to develop new audio, visual and multimodal tools for understanding, searching and browsing meetings data captured from a wide range of devices, as part of an integrated multimodal group communication. IM2 thus addresses a range of multidisciplinary research including natural speech recognition, speaker tracking and segmentation, visual shape tracking, gesture recognition, multimodal dialogue modeling, meeting dynamics, summarization, browsing and retrieval.

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, www.icsi.berkeley.edu) is an independent nonprofit research institute, located in downtown Berkeley. It is closely affiliated with the Computer Science Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) of the University of California at Berkeley.

Research Areas
In the framework of the ongoing IM2-ICSI exchange program managed by Idiap, ICSI has opened a number of visitor fellowship positions. These positions are open to postdocs and PhD students working within IM2, as well as to outstanding undergraduate students who are strongly motivated to work in the above research areas. More specifically, research interests should fit one of IM2 and ICSI's key areas of research, such as:

• New developments, applications or technology research concerning speech processing, and in particular robust speech recognition (e.g., for distributed speech recognition from cell phones and PDAs)
• Spoken language interaction in meetings (both analysis of interaction and of the spoken language properties)
• Computational linguistics, including algorithm and corpus development (such as semantic role annotation)
• Ubiquitous Computing, with particular emphasis on interfaces (e.g., speech).

How to apply
Interested candidates should send their documents to François Foglia. They can also contact  Prof. Hervé Bourlard for additional information.

Decisions will be taken on the basis of

• Quality of the proposed research and match with current IM2 and ICSI research activities
• CV, especially as it reflects the scientific excellence and the ability to contribute substantially to the proposed project
• Available resources

Financial terms
For PhD students and postdocs, financial terms will be based on standard Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) recommendations. For undergraduate students, internship funding will typically cover living expenses, but not salary. Living expenses will typically be around 2,000 US$/month.

The selected candidates will also receive, upon the acceptance at ICSI of a travel expense report (including the airline receipt), a travel expenses reimbursement (a round trip air fare ticket in economy class, from their home locations to San Francisco, USA) up to 1,000 US$