Blizzard Challenge organisation
From SynSIG
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
Annual organisers
- 2005 Alan Black assisted by Christina L. Bennett
- 2006 Alan Black assisted by Christina L. Bennett
- 2007 Simon King assisted by Mark Fraser
- 2008 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2009 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2010 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2011 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2012 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2013 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2014 Kishore Prahallad assisted by Simon King and various other people
- 2015 Kishore Prahallad assisted by Simon King and various other people
- 2016 Simon King assisted by Vasilis Karaiskos
- 2017 Simon King assisted by Lovisa Wihlborg and Wei Guo
- 2018 Simon King assisted by Jane Crumlish, Amy Martin, and Lovisa Wihlborg
- 2019 ... TBC
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 ... ?
