This workshop, with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research as its principal sponsor and attended by over 50 participants, continued the discussion started with the 2003 Montreal workshop. It was both a survey and an analysis of the most important questions and problems related to the "cocktail-party effect" performed by human listeners and by machines. The topics included presentations and discussions on sensing arrays, reverberation, integration of different machine approaches, human-machine collaborative systems, neural bases of auditory and visual scene analysis, and evaluation and corpora. Eleven predoctoral and postdoctoral participants (attending thanks to a National Science Foundation award) presented posters. A final general discussion tackled the question of how to design a device capable of performing separation and interpretation of speech presented in complex environments.

PERSPECTIVES ON SPEECH SEPARATION —
an NSF SPONSORED WORKSHOP
October 31 - November 2, 2003
Montreal, Quebec

An overlook on the various methods makes the observer conclude that at least some of the limitations of each of the schemes could be overcome by integrating them into a single approach. Such integration, however, has the prerequisite that proponents of different approaches get together, present their methods, theories, and data, discuss these openly, and attempt to find ways to combine schemes, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of separating speech signals by computational means. Given the sheer volume of current work on the diverse methods, such a meeting of researchers is not only necessary but also extremely timely... [more]