Dear ISCA Members, Dear Colleagues,

As you know, I was recently elected as ISCA President. It is a great honour for me and you can be sure I will do my best during the two next years to serve our association.

Thanks to the work done by the scientific events organizers, the student volunteers, the international advisory committee and the board members, ISCA has grown significantly during the past years. It is true in terms of membership, in terms of Interspeech participants and in terms of incomes but also in terms of grants, workshops and other activities.

I can't thank enough the ISCA past Presidents and, as I worked closely to her during the four past years, particularly Isabel Trancoso. They have led  our association very well during its main transformations and they help all of us, the ISCA members, to build a very active and dynamic international scientific association.

Yes, without any doubt, ISCA is now the main or one of the main scientific associations in the field of Speech Communication. And Interspeech conferences are the major scientific events in our field.

Looking at that, it is clear that ISCA doesn't need a revolution for the next years. On the contrary, the goals I wish for our association in the near future are to consolidate our position and our activities. Of course, to maintain the dynamism of ISCA and to increase the services our association is providing to our community, in terms of diversity and quality, remain our major objectives. But it will be very important also to work all together in order to emphasize the 'ISCA spirit', i.e. the flavor of our association which defines its specificity.

Taking in charge the ISCA President responsibilities at this specific moment of the Association life is for me particularly exiting and challenging for three main reasons. First, ISCA has now about 2000 members and about 1300 participants joined the recent Interspeech in Florence. These numbers demonstrate that ISCA is not longer the association it was few years ago, when ISCA was counting only a few hundred members. This nice situation introduces some new questions about Interspeech or about the ISCA administrative load, which increased also a lot. Secondly, our general professional environment is also changing very quickly and this evolution could have an impact on the ISCA members needs and desires. Lastly, the stable financial situation of ISCA will allow us more innovation and flexibility than in the past.

With the help of all ISCA volunteers and your feedback, I know I will really enjoy representing our Association during the next years and helping it to reach our objectives,

Sincerely,

Jean-Francois Bonastre
ISCA President
isca-president@isca-speech.org

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ISCA call for bids to organize INTERSPEECH 2015

INTERSPEECH is the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This conference has a long history, as it brings together two previous series of biennial international conferences: EUROSPEECH, the European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, and ICSLP, the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing.

EUROSPEECH conferences were organized by ESCA (European Speech Communication Association). Previous EUROSPEECH conferences were held in 1989 in Paris (France); 1991 in Genoa (Italy); 1993 in Berlin (Germany); 1995 in Madrid (Spain); 1997 in Rhodes (Greece); and 1999 in Budapest (Hungary). ICSLP conferences were coordinated by the Permanent Council for the Organization of International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing (PC-ICSLP). They were held in 1990 in Kobe (Japan); in 1992 in Banff (Canada); 1994 in Yokohama (Japan); 1996 in Philadelphia (USA); and 1998 in Sydney (Australia).

In 1999, as a result of the joint effort between ESCA and PC-ICSLP, ISCA was created and the two series of conferences merged under the joint label INTERSPEECH. The first INTERSPEECH event was ICSLP 2000, which took place  in Beijing (China), already co-sponsored by ISCA. It was succeeded by EUROSPEECH 2001 in Aalborg (Denmark); ICSLP 2002 in Denver (USA); EUROSPEECH 2003 in Geneva (Switzerland);  ICSLP 2004 in Jeju (Korea), EUROSPEECH 2005 in Lisbon (Portugal) and ICSLP 2006 in Pittsburgh (USA). Since 2007 the former conference labels, preserved for historic reasons during these first years, are no longer in use.  The INTERSPEECH conference 2007 was held in Antwerp (Belgium), 2008 in Brisbane (Australia), 2009 in Brighton (UK), 2011 in Makuhari (Japan), and 2011 in Florence (Italy). The next INTERSPEECH conferences will be held in 2012 in Portland (USA), 2013 in Lyon (France) and 2014 in Singapore.

The selection of the conference venue will follow the original pattern of being held in Europe in odd years and outside Europe in even years. Although there is no formal requirement for this alternation, ISCA attempts to not  have the conference in the same continent in two consecutive years.

INTERSPEECH conferences include papers on all  scientific and technological aspects of speech and language. More than 1.000 participants from all over the world attend the conference and more than 700 papers are presented in oral and poster sessions. Several satellite workshops and a Scientific and Industrial Exhibition complement the conferences' content. The technical program typically includes special sessions, which are often targeted at interdisciplinary topics, or intend to present the results of joint evaluation campaigns over common corpora, and are frequently enriched with discussions and panels. Special sessions are often organized by SIGs, the ISCA Special Interest Groups.

ISCA calls for bids to organize an INTERSPEECH conference four years before the event. The bids presented by well established and world recognized teams are presented to the ISCA Board, which makes the selection based on the feedback from the ISCA Advisory Council, a body of approximately twenty-five senior speech communication researchers.

The call for bids to organize INTERSPEECH 2015 is now open. The deadline for the bid is November 1 2011. You will find guidelines and information on the ISCA website (http://www.isca-speech.org -> Conferences) 

If you are interested in organizing an INTERSPEECH conference, please contact the ISCA Future Conference Coordinator Tanja Schultz (conferences@isca-speech.org).

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*ISCA SIG on Speech and Language Indexing for Multimedia*

We would like to invite everyone involved in the field of automatic speech and language processing on multimedia data to participate in the creation of a Speech and Language Indexing for Multimedia (SLIM) ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG). To push forward this proposal and better define the expectations and missions for such a SIG, we invite you to a meeting at Interspeech, on Wed. 31 August 12:00-12:45 (during lunch break). The meeting place will be announced at Interspeech.

The SLIM SIG intends to put together all protagonists working on speech and language processing to analyze, index and access multimedia data. Spoken language clearly plays a major role in semantic access to multimedia data such as lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast, podcasts, social videos on the Web, etc. However, such data raise specific challenges to speech technologies: high transcription error rates can be observed due to the sometime poor quality of the data; semantics can be shared between several modalities; etc. Bringing together researchers from across our community will allow us to direct focused effort at addressing these challenges. The initiative is of interest to people working in areas related to (but not limited to): Spoken content retrieval and spoken term detection for multimedia collections, speech summarization, speech-aware multimedia search engines and automatic speech structuring for indexing purposes, speech-based content recommendation and archive mining. The SLIM SIG offers a unique opportunity to share experience in multimedia spoken data processing, to foster new research directions and to gain visibility both in the speech and multimedia community. To do so, several catalysts can be foreseen: animate a discussion forum and a web site, provide a directory of resources and data, promote evaluation campaigns on multimedia data (initiatives such as MediaEval, ESTER/ETAPE, as well as many others), organize special sessions in the main speech and multimedia conferences, organize dedicated workshops, build strong relations with SIGs in other communities (IEEE, ACM), etc.

Feel free to contact us by mail should not be able to attend the meeting in Florence.

Guillaume Gravier (guig@irisa.fr), CNRS-IRISA, France
Martha Larson (m.a.larson@tudelft.nl), TU Delft, The Netherlands
Gareth Jones (gareth.jones@computing.dcu.ie), DCU, Ireland

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 ISCA announces that it starts a new service, Video Archive, that provides video streaming (video and slides) for lectures and presentations in related seminars and conferences, which can be found at the Archive section of ISCA Web. The content is hosted in University of Crete, Greece, as a temporary solution. For posting of Video Archive, please contact

archives@isca-speech.org

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

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