1. • JST-ANR Binaural Active Audition for Humanoid Robots (BINAAHR)
   • JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) “Deployment of Robot Audition Toward Understanding Real World”
   

2. • MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Excellent Graduate School to Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University

Binaural audition, i.e., hearing capability with a pair of ears in humans and animals as well as with a pair of microphones for machines, is a rudimental function for perception and communication. To make robots, either physical or virtual, be in symbiosis with people, they must be endowed with the ability to localize, separate and process sounds under noisy environments or from a mixture of sounds. This symposium focuses on theoretical and pragmatic aspects of binaural audition. It is organized in the framework of the French-Japanese BINAAHR (BINaural Active Audition for Humanoid Robots) project, jointly funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). One-day series of papers will be presented by members of the BINAAHR consortium, as well as from an invited external lecturer.

Machine listening, or binaural active audition are first considered in the following manner:

1. •Generic design of binaural sensors
   

2. •Active binaural sound source localization
   

• Voice detection
• Binaural speaker recognition
• Ego-noise cancellation

The symposium secondly focuses on theoretical approaches to human binaural perception and on their outcomes in robotics. Theoretical contributions from cognitive psychology which put forward the active and exploratory nature of perception are outlined, as well as some artificial perception strategies which hypothesize the interweave of perception and action.

The addressed topics are:

• Psychology of Perception in human hearing

• Geometric space perception based on the Sensorimotor Contingencies theory
• Audio-visual integration and Redundancy reduction based on Psychology of Perception based approaches

1. • Human Interface Society
   • Information Processing Society of Japan
   • Japanese Association for Artificial Intelligence
   • Japan Society for Software Science and Technology
   • The Society of Instrument and Control Engineers
   • The Acoustical Society of Japan
   • Robotic Society of Japan
   • The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan
   • The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
   

2. • The Association for Natural Language Processing

For organization issues, participants should register by mail before March 10th 2013 (BINAAHR-Reg@zeus.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp). In order to encourage scientific exchanges in the field of binaural audition and in connected areas, the registration is free of charge.

Sylvain Argentieri (Université Pierre and Marie Curie – ISIR)

Alain de Cheveigné (École Normale Supérieure – LPP)

Patrick Danès (Université de Toulouse – LAAS-CNRS)

Makoto Kumon (Kumamoto University)
Kazuhiro Nakadai (Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. / Tokyo Institute of Technology) Hiroshi G. Okuno (Kyoto University)

Katsutoshi Itoyama (Kyoto University)
Makoto Kumon (Kumamoto University)
Kazuhiro Nakadai (Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. / Tokyo Institute of Technology) Hiroshi G. Okuno (Kyoto University)