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! đź“… 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 - UniversitĂ degli Studi di Napoli Federico II - UniversitĂ Luigi Vanvitelli A particular thanks to the Fondazione DÂł4Health 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 [email protected]
