Blizzard Challenge organisation

Who organises the Blizzard Challenge?

The challenge was conceived by Alan Black and Keiichi Tokuda, as described in their Interspeech 2005 paper. In 2007, they were joined by Simon King. Together these three people form the steering committee with overall control of the challenge.

Each annual challenge has an organiser who is responsible for the main tasks of data preparation and release, planning and executing the evaluation, and arranging the workshop. In the first years of the challenge, this organiser was one of the steering committee.

Steering Committee

• Alan Black
• Keiichi Tokuda
• Simon King

Annual organisers

• 2005 Alan Black
• 2006 Alan Black
• 2007 Simon King
• 2008 Simon King
• 2009 Simon King
• 2010 Simon King
• 2011 Simon King
• 2012 Simon King
• 2013 ... ?

Who provides the data?

The data are donated by external organisations. Where possible, we ask for the data to be made available for longer term research use either only to the participating teams, or more generally.

Data providers for each challenge

• 2005 CMU (the ARCTIC databases)
• 2006 ATR
• 2007 ATR
• 2008 National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences; The Centre for Speech Technology Research
• 2009 ANHUI USTC iFLYTEK Co., Ltd.; The Centre for Speech Technology Research
• 2010 Rhetorical Systems; The Centre for Speech Technology Research; National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences
• 2011 Lessac Technologies
• 2012 Librivox audiobooks processed and labelled by Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Cambridge Research Laboratory
• 2013 ... ?