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