ISCA Special Interest Group: Child Computer Interaction (CHILD)

Aim. CHILD aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from universities and industry working in all aspects of multimodal child-machine interaction with particular emphasis on, but not limited to, speech interactive interfaces.

Motivation. Children are special both at the acoustic/linguistic level but also at the interaction level. CHILD provides a unique opportunity for bringing together different research communities to demonstrate various state-of-the-art components that can make up the next generation of child centred computer interaction. These technological advances are increasingly necessary in a world where education and health pose growing challenges to the core wellbeing of our societies. Noticeable examples are remedial treatments for children with or without disabilities, and first and second language learning. CHILD should serve for discussing recent advancements in all core technologies for multimodal child-machine interaction as well as experimental systems and prototypes.

Board. Current SIG officers are:

• Chairperson: Heysem Kaya (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
• Secretaries: : Maryam Najafian (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Saeid Safavi (University of Surrey, UK)

ISCA-supported events

CHILD supports special sessions at Interspeech

• Interspeech 2021 Shared Task on Automatic Speech Recognition for Non-Native Children's Speech
• Interspeech 2020 Shared Task on Automatic Speech Recognition for Non-Native Children's Speech, 26/10, virtual
• Interspeech 2019  Special Session on Spoken Language Processing for Children's Speech, 16/9, Graz, Austria

CHILD supports the Workshops on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behavior

• ICMI 2021 2^nd Workshop on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behavior, 18/10, (probably virtual)
• ICMI 2020 Workshop on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behavior, 29/10, virtual

CHILD supports the series of workshops on Child, Computer and Interaction (WOCCI)

• WOCCI 2017, 13/9, Glasgow, Scotland (in conjunction with ICMI)
• WOCCI 2016, 6-7/9, San Francisco, CA, USA (in conjunction with Interspeech)
• WOCCI 2014, 19/9, Singapore (in conjunction with Interspeech)
• WOCCI 2012, 14/9, Portland, OR, USA ( in conjunction with Interspeech)
• WOCCI 2009, 5/11, Cambridge, MA, USA (in conjunction with ICMI)
• WOCCI 2008, 23/10, Chania, Crete, Greece (in conjunction with ICMI)

CHILD supports the new series of workshops on Language Teaching, Learning and Technology (LTLT)

• LTLT 2017, forthcoming, Helsinki, Finland, (co-located with Interspeech and SLaTE)
• LTLT 2016,  6-7/9, San Francisco, CA, USA (in conjunction with Interspeech)
• L1LT 2015, 3/9, Leipzig, Germany (special session of SLaTE 2015)

Join the SIG (in case of issues email the SIG secretaries)