Welcome Message

Welcome to Odyssey 2014: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop! Odyssey 2014 is an ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) tutorial and research workshop held in co-operation with the ISCA Speaker and Language Characterization special interest group (SpLC SIG). Throughout its 20-year history, Odyssey has established its role as the key conference of the speaker and language recognition community. The 2014 edition is hosted by the School of Computing at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), taking place in Joensuu, Finland, June 16-19, 2014.

Odyssey 2014 received a total number of 52 paper submissions, from which 46 were accepted and organized into a 4-day technical program consisting of 9 sessions. Every paper was reviewed by at least 4 (but more often by 5) scientific committee members. The presentations will cover a wide variety of topics ranging from applications to evaluation and from robust speaker and language modeling to feature extraction and neural nets. One of the highlights is a Special Session organized in co-operation with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It presents the first results and lessons learnt from a new “NIST i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge”, specifically designed for a quick access to new researchers. With 140 active participants (at least one valid submission), representing 105 unique sites and producing more than 8000 submissions, this goal seems well met.

Odyssey series has always enjoyed being a multi-disciplinary forum including talks that cover both applications and methodology advancements. To this end, Odyssey 2014 features three complementary invited talks represented by world-renowned experts in their areas. Dr. Joseph P. Campbell (MIT Lincoln Lab, USA) will talk about forensic speaker recognition, Prof. Martin Cooke (University of the Basque Country, Spain) about intelligibility-enhancing speech modifications and Dr. Samy Bengio (Google Research, USA) about learning of a joint embedding space in large scale.

This is the first time when Odyssey takes place in Nordic countries and, for many attendees, the first time to visit Finland. Finland represents a unique mix of both modern and traditional values. Its education system is considered one of the best in the world. Finland is also one of the most technically advanced countries: the number of cellular phone and Internet subscribers per capita are among the highest ones. When running your i-vector scripts next time, remember that the Linux operating system originates from Finland. As per the traditional values, Finns appreciate silence and get inspired from their nature: the forests and the nearly 200,000 lakes - and of course, the sauna. Odyssey 2014 takes place in the beautiful "lake Finland" part. Our social program will introduce you to some of the above-mentioned Finnish core values. I do hope that the high-quality technical presentations, combined with sauna and some refreshing lake water, will keep us all inspired in search for solutions to the remaining problems in our field!

Organizing a scientific conference, especially for a first-timer, requires an enormous amount of work that no person could handle alone. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to the organizing committee members for their valuable advice and the scientific review committee for their highly thoughtful reviews: collectively, you returned 260 individual review reports and provided 175 pages of written feedback. My greatest thanks will go to my hard-working colleagues at UEF with their endless support: Pasi Fränti (advisory/co-chairing, social program & media, WWW), Oili Kohonen (budget, social program, coffee breaks, registration), Rahim Saeidi (registration, technical program), Ville Hautamäki (proceedings, registration package), Rosa Gonzalez Hautamäki (EasyChair), Radu Mariescu-Istodor (graphics, WWW), Sami Sieranoja (registration) and Md Sahidullah (booklet). Thanks also to Padmanabhan Rajan (EasyChair), Karol Waga (WWW) and Cemal Hanilçi (Facebook) for their early contributions. My personal thanks will go to my dear Kaisa for her love and understanding for significant absence from home throughout this busy year.

In Joensuu, Finland, June 2014

Tomi H. Kinnunen, Chair of Odyssey 2014