The “SAND – Speech Analysis for Neurodegenerative Diseases” challenge has officially launched, an international competition that aims to harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence to analyze speech signals in neurodegenerative diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

The challenge, which will take place during the IEEE ICASSP 2026 international conference, stems from the need to find objective, non-invasive, and scalable biomarkers for the diagnosis and monitoring of complex neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS.

Currently, diagnostic tools are often based on subjective clinical scales, which sometimes fail to identify early changes, delaying intervention and treatment.

The “SAND challenge” aims to promote the development of algorithms that can fill this gap, positioning speech analysis as a central tool for the identification and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases.

Starting from a dataset of voice signals collected by the organizers and acquired from both diseased and healthy subjects, the challenge proposes two different tasks: (i) classifying subjects and (ii) predicting how the disease worsens over time.

The five teams with the highest scores will be invited to present their work at IEEE ICASSP 2026 in Barcelona, ​​Spain, from May 4 to 8, 2026.
The contributions will be published in the official conference proceedings, indexed in the most important academic databases, such as IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Scopus, and Web of Science.

SAND organizers hope that researchers from academia, industry, and industry professionals will embrace the opportunity to participate in this challenge, which combines technological innovation with significant societal impact.

Important Dates:
September 01, 2025: Challenge Registration opens and Release of the datasets (training)
October 01, 2025: Release of the datasets (testing) – first day for submitting results and code
November 20, 2025: Challenge submission closes – last day for registration, submitting results and code
December 02, 2025: Results announcement
January 18, 2026: Camera-ready 2-page Papers Due

Website:
www.sand.icar.cnr.it

Organizers:
Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR)
University of Naples “Federico II”
University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”