Welcome Message

Welcome to Odyssey 2012: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, hosted by COLIPS (Chinese and Oriental Languages Information Processing Society) in Singapore, on 25-28 June 2012.
Odyssey 2012 received overwhelming response from the speaker and language recognition community. We accepted 51 papers out of 65 submissions, which we organized into a 4-day technical program consisting of 11 sessions. Researchers will present their latest endeavours and insights from multiple aspects, covering speaker and language characterization, modelling, evaluation, and applications. In addition, Odyssey 2012 also features 3 invited speakers: Dr. Li Deng (Microsoft Research) will share with us how new generation models such as deep belief networks and dynamic Bayesian networks can revamp the traditional framework of Gaussian mixture model and hidden Markov model in speech technology; Dr. Niko Brümmer (Agnitio Corporation) will discuss how proper scoring rules adopted from weather prediction can be applied to pattern recognition to make probabilistic decisions; and Dr. Alvin Martin (NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology) will talk about the past, present and future of the NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluations.
With a unique history and geographical location, Singapore is one of the few places on earth to experience the extreme blending of diverse languages. In the streets and neighbourhoods of Singapore, you can easily hear people talking in a rich mix of languages ranging from Chinese varieties (e.g., Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese) to other Asian languages (e.g., Tamil, Malay), and to English (e.g., British and Singaporean dialects). It is our hope to celebrate the diversity of languages by hosting the Odyssey 2012 Workshop in Singapore. I therefore wish you an enjoyable stay with a multi-cultural experience!   
Many volunteers have contributed significantly to organizing this workshop. I would like to take this opportunity to show my gratitude to the organizing committee for valuable advice, and the scientific committee for their thorough paper reviews. Great thanks also go to my colleagues at Institute for Infocomm Research, especially to: Bin Ma and Kong Aik Lee (technical program and website), Swee Lan See (finance), Cheung-Chi Leung (venue), Anthony Larcher and Hanwu Sun (social activities), Nancy Chen and Minghui Dong (publicity and sponsorship), Rong Tong (registration), Changhuai You (publication). I also appreciate the financial support from the Lee Foundation, Temasek Laboratories at Nanyang Technological University, and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).
Last but not least, I sincerely thank the reviewers, authors, invited speakers, presenters, exhibitors, local supporting staff, and all the workshop attendees for your support and enthusiasm. It is you that makes this conference possible. Thank you!

Haizhou Li
Odyssey 2012 Chair