| 2-1 | Standing on the shoulders of giants....(Isaac Newton)
In the opening session of the last Interspeech conference in Makuhari,
Japan, the ISCA community paid homage to three researchers who left us
during the last year:
- Manfred Schroeder
- Gosta Bruce
- Fred Jelinek
Manfred Robert Schroeder (12 July 1926 – 28 December 2009) was born in
Ahlen, studied at the University of Goettingen (1947-52), then joined
the technical staff at Bell Labs in New Jersey (1954-).
With Bishnu Atal he invented the linear predictive coding pf speech
(1967). Still affiliated with Bell, he rejoined University of Goettingen
as Universitätsprofessor Physik (1969), becoming professor emeritus in
1991. With Joseph Hall he developed code excited linear prediction
(1972). He led a famed study of 22 concert halls worldwide, leading to a
comparison method requiring no travel. He is also known widely for his
invention of what is called the Schroeder=Diffusor, based on the
application of number theory.
Manfred received a number of medals: the Gold medals of the Acoustical
Society of America and the Audio Engineering Society, and the Lord
Rayleigh and Helmholtz medals, and the ISCA Medal for Scientific
Achievement. He has also been elected to several learned societies:
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (founded in 1780), the
National Academy of Science, the New York Academy of Sciences, and
the Goettingen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Manfred died of a heart failure on December 28, 2009 at the age of 83.
---
Gösta Bruce (1947–2010) was a brilliant prosody scholar, particularly
known internationally for his description of the intonation of Swedish.
He received the Ph.D. degree in phonetics at Lund University in 1977. He
was appointed professor of phonetics at Lund University in 1986. He was a
member of the Council of the IPA, and the Editorial Board of Phonetica. He
published numerous works on prosody and was the project leader of several
research projects covering different aspects of phonetics and prosody. He
was the supervisor of several doctoral dissertations. He was a member of
the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities since 2001.
He was also the President of the International Phonetic Association since
2007.
He was a brilliant researcher and a very good friend to many of us. We
will miss him deeply.
Fred Jelinek (1932-2010) passed away mid september. Fred was a giant in the speech and language
area. He pioneered and tirelessly promoted the application of
statistical methods to speech and language processing. When he first
began in the early 1970s, the concept was extremely controversial;
today this approach is taken for granted. Fred received numerous
awards in his long, distinguished career, included being named an
ISCA Medalist in 1999 and an ISCA Fellow in 2008. Fred had been the
long-term director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for
Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and the Julian Sinclair Smith
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. A more detailed
description of his life and work, as well as information for those
interested in making contributions in his memory can be found on the
CLSP website (http://clsp.jhu.edu/).
He will be greatly missed but his legacy to us will continue.
Isabel Trancoso, ISCA president
and the ISCA board
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| 2-2 | New ISCA Fellows
The following researchers have been elected to the status of ISCA fellows.
Congratulations to all!
Alex Acero
For his contributions in research, development and education of spoken
language technologies
Janet Baker
For her contributions to speech recognition technologies, and for her
service to the speech community
John Hansen
For his contributions to research on speech signals under adverse conditions
Lin-shan Lee
For his contributions to Chinese spoken language processing and speech
information retrieval, and his service to the speech and language
community
Nelson Morgan
For his contributions to robust feature extraction and novel acoustic
models for automatic speech recognition
Philip Woodland
For his contributions to large vocabulary speech recognition including
techniques for speaker adaptation and discriminative training
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| 2-3 | ISCA Distinguished Lecturers Program
1)Introduction
ISCA started a new Distinguished Lecturers Program in 2006 to send Distinguished Lecturers to travel to different parts of the world to give lectures to help promote research activities on speech science and technologies. Up to now, the following Distinguished Lecturers were selected and completed their trips. Professor Chin-Hui Lee and Professor Marc Swerts (2007-2008), Professor Richard M. Stern, Professor Abeer Alwan and Professor James R. Glass (2008-2009), For the details of DL trips are found at the bottom of this page. For 2009-2010, Dr. Li Deng and Professor Thierry Dutoit are selected.
2)Nominations and Selection
A Distinguished Lecturers Committee has been organized. The chair of the Committee for 2010-2013 is Professor Julia Hirshberg. Nominations of candidates for 2010-2011 terms are called. Each nomination should include information (short biography, selected publications, website, etc. plus topics/titles of up to 3 possible lectures) of no more than 2 pages to be sent to the Committee Chair (julia@cs.columbia.edu and dl_nominations@isca-speech.org). Only those who receive the highest votes by the Committee, exceeding a minimum threshold of 2/3, are selected. Nominations for this year should be received before the deadline of Nov 15 2010.
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| 2-4 | ISCA student advisory committee (ISCA-SAC) seeks student volunteers.
'ISCA Student Advisory Committee (ISCA-SAC) is seeking student volunteers to
help with several interesting projects such as reporting on ISCA related events
and cutting edge research, plan/organize student events at ISCA-sponsored
conferences/workshops, increase awareness of speech and language research to
undergraduate and junior graduate students.
At the moment, we are particularly looking for someone to help keep our web
resources up to date, e.g. keeping track of upcoming conferences and other
events, or general help with web programming. However, there are many other
small tasks to be done, each of which would only take up a few hours. If you
are interested, please contact the ISCA-SAC Volunteer Coordinator at: vo lun te
er [at] isca-students [dot] org. You can also find more details on our
website: http://www.isca-students.org/blog/involved.'
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| 2-5 | Best paper awards
Congratulations to the winners!
Student papers at IS2010 (student is the first author)
Reliable tracking based on speech sample salience of vocal cycle lenght pertubations,
C. Mertens, F. Grenez, L Crevier-Buchman, J. Schoentgen
Did you say susi or sushi? Measuring the emergence of robust fricative contrasts in English- and Japanese- acquiring children
Jeffrey J Holliday, Mary Beckman and Chenelle Mays
Using Non-Native Error Patterns to Improve Pronunciation Verification
Joost van Doremalen, Catia Cucchiarini, and Helmer Strik
Best paper in Speech Communication 2005-2009
'Joint-sequence models for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion'
Maximilian Bisani and Herman Ney
Volume 50, Issue 5, May 2009 pp 434-451
Best Paper Published in Computer Speech and Language (2005-2009)
Partially observable Markov decision processes for spoken dialog systems
Jason D. Williams and Steve Young
Volume 21 Issue 2 2007 pp. 393-422
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