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).