Call for Challenge Proposals

Challenges play an important role in advancing scientific progress by fostering the development, benchmarking, and evaluation of methods on shared tasks and datasets. IEEE ASLI 2027 welcomes challenge proposals that stimulate research and innovation across all areas of audio, speech, and language intelligence.

Challenge proposals should be limited to two pages and include the following information:

• Overview: challenge title, acronym and website (if already known), keywords.
• Organizers: names, affiliations, contact information, and brief biographies.
• Short description of the challenge, including its motivation, objectives, task definition, datasets, baseline systems, evaluation protocol, and expected outcomes.
• List of the scientific committee members who will serve as reviewers for challenge paper submissions.
• Expected target audience and anticipated level of participation.

Organizers of accepted challenges are expected to:

• Manage communication with participants;
• Release datasets, baselines, and evaluation tools in a timely manner;
• Encourage and support reproducible research practices;
• Ensure a fair and transparent evaluation process for challenge entries;
• Submit a challenge paper introducing the challenge, including its motivation, task definition, datasets, baseline systems, and evaluation protocol.

Challenge proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Relevance to IEEE ASLI 2027;
• Scientific significance and potential to generate novel insights;
• Accessibility and attractiveness to potential participants;
• Feasibility and likelihood of successful completion within the proposed timeline;
• Commitment to reproducible research;
• Diversity of the organizing team (e.g., academia and industry representation, geographical diversity, gender balance, etc.).

Challenge papers will be limited to three pages of technical content, with one additional page permitted for references. All challenge papers will undergo a dedicated single-blind review process with a timeline distinct from that of the regular conference papers. Accepted challenge papers will be presented in a dedicated session and included in the main conference technical program. They will also be published in IEEE Xplore as part of the Challenge & Demo Proceedings associated with IEEE ASLI 2027.

Challenge proposals should be submitted by email in PDF format to the Challenge and Demonstration Chairs: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].

Important Dates

For questions regarding challenge proposals, please contact the Challenge and Demonstration Chairs.

Sincerely,

Simon Leglaive, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Leda Sari