[visionlist] TEST SET now AVAILABLE: SAND CHALLENGE @ICASSP 2026

[Nadia Brancati]

Dear Colleague,

I deeply apologize if you received multiple copies of this call.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the "SAND - Speech Analysis
for
Neurodegenerative Diseases" challenge, an international competition
aiming to revolutionize the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases like
ALS.

Today, many diagnostic tools rely on subjective clinical scales. This often
delays the identification of early changes, postponing intervention and
treatment. The goal of the challenge is clear: to leverage the potential of
Artificial Intelligence and speech signal analysis to create objective and
non-invasive biomarkers.

The challenge includes two main tasks:
- Classifying subjects (diseased vs. healthy).
- Predicting how the disease worsens over time.

The top-scoring teams will have the opportunity to present their work at
the prestigious 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech,
and Signal Processing (ICASSP) conference in Barcelona and publish their
contributions in the official conference proceedings, indexed in major
academic databases.

This is an invitation to researchers, professionals, and innovators in
these fields.

Go to *www.sand.icar.cnr.it <http://www.sand.icar.cnr.it>* and register
your team for the challenge through the *Sign Up* section.
Once logged in, you can access the *Dashboard* from the menu, where the
dataset will be available for download.

The TEST SET is already AVAILABLE, and the submissions are open!


📅 Important Dates:
- Registration and dataset release: September 1, 2025
- Submission closes: November 20, 2025
- Results announcement: December 2, 2025

The SAND challenge is organized by ICAR-CNR - Università degli Studi di
Napoli Federico II - Università Luigi Vanvitelli

A particular thanks to the Fondazione D³4Health for its technical support.



-- 
Nadia Brancati
Researcher @ AI-ISA Lab
<https://www.icar.cnr.it/en/gruppi-di-ricerca/artificial-intelligence-in-image-and-signal-analysis/>
Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking - National Research
Council of Italy (CNR - ICAR)
Via P. Castellino, 111 - 80131 Napoli
Tel. 081.6139228
nadia.brancati at icar.cnr.it
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://visionscience.com/pipermail/visionlist_visionscience.com/attachments/20251015/252b5968/attachment.html>