The “SAND – Speech Analysis for Neurodegenerative Diseases” challenge has officially kicked off. This international competition aims to harness the potential of artificial intelligence to analyze speech signals and support the diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

The challenge, organized as part of the IEEE ICASSP 2026 conference, stems from the need to develop objective, noninvasive, and scalable biomarkers that overcome the limitations of current clinical scales, which are often subjective and slow to detect the early signs of disease.

Using a dataset of voice recordings collected from both healthy and sick individuals, participants will be asked to develop algorithms to:

1. Classify subjects based on their vocal cues.

2. Predict the progression of the disease over time.

The top five teams will present their results at ICASSP 2026, scheduled to take place in Barcelona from May 4 to 8, 2026, with the proceedings published on leading academic platforms such as IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science.

Join this challenge that combines technological innovation with a significant social impact!

For more information and to register: www.sand.icar.cnr.it