The 9th Management Committee Meeting was held in Rhodes (Greece) on the 26th and 27th of September 1997. The chairman opened the meeting by welcoming all participants and thanking Nikos Fakotakis from the University of Patras for the local organisation of the COST Workshop.
Enclosed you will find the following annexes:
Annex I: Approved agenda of the MCM
Annex II: List of participants
Annex III: Updated mailing list of all members
Annex IV: List of participants of the COST Workshop
Annex V: Action points Annex VI: Mail Exploder
Mr. Steffen Malmros has been appointed scientific officer for the COST projects concerning speech recognition. He attended the Workshop and the COST249 MCM. He can be reached at : smal@postman.dg13.cec.be
The grant for 1997 has arrived. The reimbursement of travel expenses will no longer be handled by Brussels, but by the University of Gent.
The Zurich meeting was held in October 1996. The reimbursement of that meeting should be in progress now.
This is the first meeting that will be reimbursed from the grant for 1997. This reimbursement will come together with the reimbursement of the Rhodes meeting.
The finance plan and work plan for 1998 was distributed to all participants and presented by the chairman. The COST249 meeting in Rolduc will be held in co-operation with the workshop “Modeling Pronunciation Variation for Automatic Speech Recognition”. There is also a request for a budget for the publications. This will be used for the technical annexes. The technical annex for the WG meetings will be copied by the local organiser, but reimbursement of these costs will be possible if the submitted budget is approved.
The end date for the COST249 Action is May 1998. As decided on the previous MCM we would request for an extension of the action for a period of two years. The chairman has applied for this extension at the TCT Meeting. The TCT has already agreed and now we have to wait for the decision of the CSO.
The Management Committee approved the minutes of the 8th MCM.
Most of the contributors have sent their paper or a link to the paper to the secretary. Participants who did not do this yet, are urged to send the paper or its WWW address as soon as possible. (See COST Web page for missing links).
This has been done. A copy of the document was distributed to all participants.
For the Ministerial Conference in Prague we gathered a lot of demonstrators and created a Web page. Jan Uhlir has tested these demo’s and everything worked well. Unfortunately there were some technical problems with the telephones during the conference. The MCM decided to keep the demo’s on the Web. Institutes or companies who have a (new) demo are requested to create a Web page about it and to send the address to the secretary.
Ok
The mail exploder will be updated. Participants, whose email address has changed, have to send this new email address to the secretary
There were positive reactions on both of these points.
A detailed work plan for the two years of the extension has to be made up. The WG chairmen make it ready before the meeting in Portugal.
From now on the reimbursement of these travel expenses has to come from the grant. For this reason the chairman added this item explicitely to the finance plan for 1998.
During the two days in Rhodes the workshop ‘Speech Technology in the Public Telephone Network: Where are we today?’ was held. This workshop was a satellite event of Eurospeech ‘97 and it was organized by the three COST Actions on Speech Technology (COST249, COST250 and COST258). A lot of speakers gave an interesting presentation and the discussions were very to the point. The papers were gathered in the proceedings of the workshop. There are still some extra proceedings available. Requests for an extra copy have to be sent to the secretary (jo@elis.rug.ac.be). In annex IV you will find a list of all participants of the workshop.
The workshop ‘Modeling Pronunciation Variation for Automatic Speech Recognition’ will be held in Rolduc (the Netherlands) on 3-7 May 1998. The COST249 meeting will be held immediately after the workshop (on 7&8 May 1998). For this workshop there will be a reduction of the registration fee for 1 person per COST249 participating institute.
10th MCM: Porto (Portugal) 12&13 Feb 1998
11th MCM: Rolduc (the Netherlands) 7&8 May 1998
12th MCM: UK Sept/Oct 1998 (if the extension is approved)
Last updated: December , 1997 - page maintained by Jo Cremelie (jo@elis.rug.ac.be)