About

Table of Contents

  1. Theme
  2. Organizers
  3. Co-Organizers & Academic Partners
  4. Sponsors
  5. Contact Information

Theme

The LRAC 2.0 Challenge (the 2026 Low-Resource Audio Codec Challenge) brings together researchers and practitioners to advance neural speech coding for resource-constrained devices. The central theme is developing low-resource, efficient neural speech codecs that are lightweight, suitable for real-world deployment, and effective under everyday noise and reverberation conditions, while meeting strict constraints on computational complexity, memory, latency, and bitrate, and scaling toward perceptual transparency across languages.


Meet the organizers of the LRAC 2.0 Challenge

Organizers

  • Kamil Wojcicki, Cisco Systems, Australia
  • Yusuf Isik, Cisco Systems, Türkiye
  • Mansur Yesilbursa, Cisco Systems, Poland
  • Ivana Balic, Cisco Systems, Switzerland
  • Erfan Loweimi, Cisco Systems, UK
  • Anna Bartlett, Cisco Systems, UK
  • Rafał Łaganowski, Cisco Systems, Poland
  • Nezih Topaloglu, Cisco Systems, Türkiye

Co-Organizers & Academic Partners

  • Shinji Watanabe, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  • Minje Kim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Yossi Adi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Sponsors

  • Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (IEEE Signal Processing Society)
  • Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (IEEE Signal Processing Society)

Contact Information

Challenge related enquiries can be sent to lrac-challenge@cisco.com.

We are also on Slack - please send us an email to request an invitation link.