Dear ISCA members, 

The election for five ISCA Board members is now complete. The results
are as follows: 

496 ballots were received during the voting period (30 April – 30
May) with the following five candidates elected as ISCA Board members
for a period of four years from 1 September (members are listed
alphabetically): 

ALAN W BLACK (USA) 

HELEN MENG (HONG KONG) 

BERND MÖBIUS (GERMANY) 

SATOSHI NAKAMURA (JAPAN) 

TANJA SCHULTZ (GERMANY) 

On behalf of the ISCA Board, I would like to thank all of you who
took part in the election. We are seeing an increased participation
in the Board election which is very encouraging. Participation has
increased from 169 ballots in 2007 to 338 in 2009 to 496 today. 

I would also like to encourage you to attend the ISCA General
Assembly which will take place in Florence in conjunction with
INTERSPEECH 2011 (http://www.interspeech2011.org). The General
Assembly is open to all members of ISCA and provides an excellent
opportunity for you to actively participate in the meeting and
propose suggestions to help make our association even better. 

Looking forward to seeing you in Florence. 

Best regards, 

David House 

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Julia Hirschberg, our past president, is being honored by IEEE with the 2011 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional association.

 The award, sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, recognizes Hirschberg for pioneering contributions to speech synthesis and prosody research. The award will be presented on 24 May 2011 at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Prague, Czech Republic.

Julia has been a pioneer and leading innovator in building viable computational models of human prosody for use in speech synthesis.In addition to her research for improving prosody in speech synthesis, she  recently worked on  the detection of  emotional aspects in speech with applications in automated call centers where a computer can recognize if callers are angry and pass them to a human operator. Julia is one of the architects of the Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) system for the labeling of human prosodic contours that is used in text-to-speech systems and is widely used in prosody research. Initially used for intonational description of standard American English, ToBI has been extended to model other languages.

After her graduation  in electrical engineering and a doctorate in computer science at the University of Philadelphia, Julia began working in James Flanagan’s laboratory at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J., and created the Human-Computer Interface Research Department at Bell Labs, which moved subsequently to AT&T Labs.  She is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, New York, N.Y.

Congratulations Julia!

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