President’s Welcome Message

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to INTERSPEECH 2014 in Singapore. It is the 15^th Annual International Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) known as INTERSPEECH and has been held in great locations around the world, including Beijing (2000), Aalborg (2001), Denver (2002), Geneva (2003), Jeju (2004), Lisbon (2005), Pittsburgh (2006), Antwerp (2007), Brisbane (2008), Brighton (2009), Makuhari (2010), Florence (2011), Portland (2012), and Lyon (2013).

This year’s INTERSPEECH is being held in the wonderful and exciting location of Singapore. During this conference, the community will honor the ISCA Medalist for Scientific Achievement 2014, to be announced in the opening ceremony. We will also honor six ISCA members who were elected as ISCA Fellows, i.e. James Glass, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Michael Picheny, Isabel Trancoso, Jacqueline Vaissière, and Bayya Yegnanarayana.

INTERSPEECH 2014 continues ISCA’s pursuit for high quality publications and achieves an acceptance rate of 52% with a total of 614 accepted papers which will be presented in 42 oral sessions, 30 poster sessions and 6 special sessions. For the first time in our history, the INTERSPEECH proceedings will be published and available online by the 3^rd day of the conference. The organizers were extremely successful in receiving great sponsorship from a large number of 19 companies and in attracting many exhibitors who will use the available exhibition space up to the full capacity.

This great success is due to the excellent and relentless work of the Organizing Team led by Professors Haizhou Li, the General Conference Chair and Pak-Chung Ching, the General Conference Co-Chair. For the Technical program we are extremely lucky to have Professor Helen Meng and Dr. Bin Ma. The local arrangements are chaired by Dr. Swee Lan See. So, we are in great hands to experience a wonderful time in Singapore. On behalf of ISCA, my warm big thanks go to the whole Organization Team and all volunteers who are committed to help with the various aspects of organizing the conference and technical program.

We are all looking forward to a spectacular conferences with excellent keynotes, interesting tutorials and sessions, and an exciting social program. I wish you all a very fruitful INTERSPEECH 2014.

Tanja Schultz

ISCA President