US Intelligence Unit Launches $50k Speech Recognition Competition

coondoggie writes The $50,000 challenge comes from researchers at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The competition, known as Automatic Speech recognition in Reverberant Environments (ASpIRE), hopes to get the industry, universities or other researchers to build automatic speech recognition technology that can handle a variety of acoustic environments and recording scenarios on natural conversational speech.

Comments

How about this one?

[korbulon]

"Go fuck yourself."

Eh arent they trying?

[Roodvlees]

Haven't Microsoft, Apple and Google already spend billions of dollars on this?
Seems they are appealing to any random developer who might have an idea.

Re:Eh arent they trying?

[bouldin]

Haven't Microsoft, Apple and Google already spend billions of dollars on this?

All the speech recognition software I've used has relied on a controlled environment (e.g. yelling directly into your phone with almost no reverberation, no competing conversations, very little background noise).

Reverberation *should* be the easiest kind of noise to remove, because it has a simple mathematical model:

S(t) = signal(t) + f(signal(t - delay))

Where f() is a pretty simple function that may attenuate some frequencies more than others.

Modelling all the other kinds of background noise is much, much harder.

Re:Eh arent they trying?

[ranton]

All the speech recognition software I've used has relied on a controlled environment (e.g. yelling directly into your phone with almost no reverberation, no competing conversations, very little background noise).

...

Modelling all the other kinds of background noise is much, much harder.

I agree, but the issue is this problem is harder than those that industry leaders are putting billions of dollars of R&D money into. What is $50k really going to accomplish? There are Kaggle competitions that pay out more than that for far more trivial problems (like a marginal increase in CTR prediction).

Out of touch with reality

[MtHuurne]

So they want a complex problem solved in 2 months (first test on Feb 4 and there are holidays inbetween), for which they will pay a relatively low amount and only to the winners. Even if the result wouldn't be used for spying, I don't think there would be many takers.

Re:Out of touch with reality

[SourceFrog]

I am sick of these "challenges" that effectively try get programmers to work for effectively well below market rates. As if we're like children, a "challenge" is supposed to make us set aside months or years of income to work on a really difficult problem that if we had to actually go out and do for a company in the job market, we'd be paid $100K/year or more. I think they probably attract young people who don't understand the value of their own time or skills, or who are more easily lured by childish notions like that it's a "challenge", or some of these types of "challenges" attract good programmers from poor countries who are desperate to become more recognized in the longer term - in that case they may at least get something useful out of it, but still I'd rather see these "challenges" pay at *least* closer to market rates for programming labor. As they say in prostitution and marriage, don't 'give away the goods for free'.

Re:Out of touch with reality

[CaptainLard]

Well they're not doing it on purpose. The DOD is just used to it's contractors massively under-bidding to win the contract and then exploding the budget with 1000 MBA's united in the goal of shareholder profit maximization. Just enter the contest and when it comes time to demonstrate the algorithm say the schedule has slipped to April...2022 and you'll need an extra $3billion. You'll see, they won't even blink!

Saw this coming

[Ol Olsoc]

First person arrested will be Stephen Hawking.

Re:50k?

[Thanshin]

Thing is, every huge company has a core of an idea (perhaps built by the founders on a weekend), that they're just milking for all its worth... the $50k might motivate a lone wolf developer to build something that's qualitatively better than the multibillion dollar's core idea.

You may be right, let's offer $50k to whoever sends another probe to a comet. Sure it cost $1,4 billions to the ESA but a lone wolf could find a qualitatively better way to do the mission. By February 4, 2015.

Slashdot is the last place where I expected to see an extremely difficult problem underestimated just because it's a computing problem.

intelligence?

[l3v1]

So, who wants to be the one who improves the automatic speech2text capabilities of automatic wiretapping systems in the US for a few bucks? :))