Dear ISCA Members:

The Archive now contains a new series of ISCA-supported workshops:
MAVEBA - Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications.
These workshops have been initiated and organized by Prof. Claudia Manfredi,
Florence, Italy. The series started in 1999.
All these workshops took place in Florence, the most recent one
(2011) as a satellite workshop of INTERSPEECH-2011. Upon proposal
by the ISCA Archive coordinator, the ISCA Board approved, and Claudia Manfredi
gave permission to include the proceedings of these workshops in the ISCA Archive.
The archive now contains five of the seven workshops, i.e., 2003 through 2011,
with more than 250 papers. We intend to include 2001 and 1999 as well.

ISCA is very grateful to Claudia Manfredi for giving permission to
include these workshops in its Archive

With respect to copyright, MAVEBA workshops are a special case since
these proceedings are commercially available as e-books and
hardcopies from Firenze University Press (FUP), and the
copyright for these volumes is (and remains) with FUP. Links
to FUP are provided in all abstracts and index files; abstracts and full papers
in the ISCA Archive, however, are freely accessible.

For those of you who are not familiar with this workshop series, let me
quote a part of Claudia Manfredi's call for papers from the 2011 workshop.

'Speech is the primary means of communication among humans,
and results from complex interaction among vocal folds vibration at the
larynx and voluntary articulators movements (i.e. mouth tongue, jaw, etc.).
However, only recently has research focussed on biomedical
applications. Since 1999, the MAVEBA Workshop is organised every
two years, aiming to stimulate contacts between specialists active in
clinical, research and industrial developments in the area of voice signal
and images analysis for biomedical applications. This seventh
Workshop will offer the participants an interdisciplinary platform for
presenting and discussing new knowledge in the field of models,
analysis and classification of voice signals and images, as far as both
adults, singing and children voices are concerned. Modelling the
normal and pathological voice source, analysis of healthy and pathological
voices are among the main fields of research. The aim is that of
extracting the main voice characteristics, together with their deviation
from “healthy conditions”, ranging from fundamental
research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related
established and advanced technologies.

Some of the relevant topics are:
- modelling of the normal and pathological voice source;
- diagnosis and classification of pathological voice;
- voice quality during rehabilitation;
- development of vocal prostheses and aids for disabled;
- protocols and reliable objective parameters;
- objective parameters extraction from vocal folds images through
videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI and other emerging techniques;
- multi-modal analysis;
- relationship between speech and neurological dysfunction; interaction with hearing impairment.

We are moving rapidly towards a time where many common speech
disorders and dysfunctions will be remediable by computer-based or
physical prosthetics, and, since speech communication is so fundamental
to human interaction, the beneficial effects to users of these devices
are likely to be immeasurable.'

The topic of MAVEBA is particularly relevant to ISCA given the focus
of the forthcoming 2012 INTERSPEECH conference, which
'... will have an area of special emphasis ('Spoken Language Processing and Biomedicine'),
inviting contributions in assistive communication, language markers for
neurological disorders, and computational cross-fertilization between
spoken language processing and computational biology.' (I'12 website).

Enjoy the Archive!
Sincerely, Wolfgang Hess, ISCA Archive Coordinator

Addendum by Claudia Manfredi:

First of all, I thank my colleagues Wolfgang Hess, ISCA archive coordinator, Isabel Trancoso and Nick Campbell, conference and workshop coordinators in the ISCA Board,  for posting the series of International
Workshops MAVEBA on the prestigious ISCA archive.
I also thank Dr. Fulvio Gautelli, Firenze University Press, for  giving permission to freely publish all the Workshop Proceedings.

I would like to dedicate the series of MAVEBA Workshops to the memory of Rob, who with great professionalism has helped me to find  a logo aesthetically appealing and original, but respectful of the  Florentine culture. In all these years he has been my main  supporter, encouraging and supporting me in many difficult times,  with great respect and unwavering love.

January 2012, Claudia Manfredi