Dear ISCA Members,

This represents my first ISCApad welcome message as the next elected ISCA President. I first wish to thank the ISCA membership, ISAC Advisory Council, and ISCA Board for allowing me to serve in this role. Given the previous ISCA Presidents who served since 2000 (Roger Moore, Sadaoki Furui, Julia Hirschberg, Isabel Trancoso, Jean-Francois Bonastre, Tanja Schultz, and most recently Haizhou Li), it truly is an honour, as well as an enormous responsibility, to serve the members of ISCA, and I hope I can do justice in this role given the significant accomplishments of those who have gone before me.  

So, I expect many of you have safely returned from Stockholm, Sweden after attending the very successful ISCA INTERSPEECH-2017 [http://www.interspeech2017.org/] “Situated Interaction @ Stockholm” – which broke all records for attendance for any Interspeech to date! I would like to recognize Francisco Lacerda (General Chair), David House (General Co-Chair), and the Technical Program Co-Chairs: Mattias Heldner, Joakim Gustafsson, and Sofia Strömbergsson, and the entire INTERSPEECH-2018 Organizing Committee for a wonderful job in organizing and running a truly memorable Interspeech! Many Special Events & Satellite Workshops took place, as well as several Student Events to support attending ISCA students (hopefully many of you made connections for your first jobs!).

INTERSPEECH-2017 took place on the picturesque academic grounds of the campus of Stockholm University. This was one of the first times Interspeech was held on a campus vs. a convention center or hotel, so many found this a very academically stimulating atmosphere! The picture to the right here was the entrance to the large lecture auditorium where the Opening Ceremony, ISCA General Assembly, and Closing Ceremony took place, along with a number of oral sessions as well.  It was clear that Stockholm was the right city to host the largest conference on speech and language communications/processing, Interspeech-2017, and especially the campus of Stockholm University, given that we were all welcomed by an enormous statue of a human tongue as we stepped off the bus on to campus! I will also note that a range of excellent Keynote speakers, Special Sessions, and Tutorials also took place as well as the Show and Tell (many thanks to the organizers, speakers, and attendees!). In particular, I want to thank all companies and organizations who provided financial sponsorship of Interspeech. ISCA being a non-profit, receiving sponsorship allows the Interspeech organizers to offer expanded experiences as well as work to reduce the registration costs, especially for students and young scholars. ISCA as well as the Interspeech-2017 team provided a number of travel scholarships which provided valuable support for many deserving young researchers and students. A sincere thanks to all the Sponsors for Interspeech-2017, and ask that you consider sponsoring Interspeech-2018!
 

At INTERSPEECH-2017, we recognized a number of ISCA Board members who completed their service this year. In particular, I would like to recognize the outgoing ISCA President, Haizhou Li, who has served on the ISCA Board from 2009-17 (9 years), overseeing the ISCA Web (2009-13), then ISCA Vice-President (2013-15), and finally ISCA President (2015-17). Haizhou served in this role as the senior statesman, leading by example and supporting the many tasks and duties needed to ensure that the ISCA society continued to look forward and serve the community. He was always first to recognize those around him and give credit to the many Board members, IAC members, and countless volunteers that make ISCA successful. The ISCA Community recognized his leadership by presenting him with a plaque in the closing ceremony for Interspeech-2017. Also, during the Opening Ceremony, a number of ISCA Board Members completing their positions were recognized for their service and contributions as well, and also received ISCA Plaques. Those recognized included Douglas O‘Shaughnessy (Secretary and past Vice-President), Martin Cooke (Publications & Archive), Hynek Hermansky (Education, Training, Season Schools), Keikichi Hirose (Conferences),  Wolfgang Hess (long standing service for ISCA Archive). Doug oversaw extensive logistics as ISCA Secretary – establishing ISCA Board meeting agenda, meeting minutes, and ensuring procedures governed by ISCA By-Laws were followed (plus countless other tasks which helped ensure all went smoothly). Hynek re-energized the education program by working with numerous institutions/individuals for summer schools (or “seasonal” schools) as well as other educational and outreach activities. Martin for publications took it upon himself to transition ISCA publications so they each had a “digital object identifier” (DOI) – a critical and time consuming effort which increases the recognition of our conference and workshop publications. Martin will continue to work with the ISCA Board to help support this effort going forward. Keikichi was a leading person in conferences which has been critical in working with potential Interspeech proposing teams, as well as the review and voting process for selecting Interspeech conferences. Finally, Wolfgang was recognized for his many years of service for ISCA Archive and publications. His commitment to transitioning all ISCA workshop and conference proceedings to the ISCA web represents an enormous time commitment. Many thanks to all of these outgoing ISCA Board members for their service – as volunteers, they elevated the bar in each of their areas to promote ISCA for our membership.

It is also fitting that we welcome the new ISCA Board Members from the 2017 election (5 new and 3 returning): Hema Murthy, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Odette Scharenborg, Tatsuya Kawahara, Phil Green,
Gérard Bailly (2nd Term), Mark Hasegawa-Johnson(2nd Term),  Kate Knill (2nd Term). All are leaders in the field and we look forward to their contributions on the Board.

ISCA also recognized five new ISCA Fellows for their scientific contributions to the field:
• Alan BLACK: For  leadership in the area of automatic speech synthesis.
• Jean-Luc GAUVAIN: For wide-ranging contributions to the field of automatic speech recognition.
• Giuseppe RICCARDI: For contributions to language modelling, spoken language understanding and dialogue systems.
• Michael RILEY: For work in developing weighted finite-state transducers and applications to automatic speech recognition.
• Bhuvana RAMABHADRAN: For contributions to the fields of speech recognition research and applications.

Finally, the highest award from ISCA is the ISCA Medal, which was presented to Prof. Fumitada Itakura, For contributions in developing fundamental statistical algorithms in speech coding and recognition with broad and unparalleled impacts. It was particularly special to see Prof. Itakura participate in this INTERSPEECH, since some recent health concerns limited his ability to travel. Prof. Itakura, in the true scholar, educator, and mentor, thanked his past collaborators, students and colleagues for all of their interactions which helped shape and contribute to his extensive legacy of contributions. Prof. Sadaoki Furui, working with Prof. Itakura’s colleagues and past students, presented an overview of his past work in the field in speech modelling and coding (especially from my perspective his work on Line Spectral Pair (LSP) features – which are employed in most cellphone technologies worldwide!). 
I hope you’all enjoyed this INTERSPEECH-2017 conference, and came away with new ideas, engagements, opportunities, and/or friendships!

In the next ISCApad, I will highlight some of the initiatives I plan to focus on in addition to seeing that all regular ISCA activities continue!  Remember, INTERSPEECH-2018 will be in Hyderabad Sept. 6-10, 2018, so don’t miss the submission deadline!

As always, we welcome feedback and input from the ISCA community – if you have suggestions on our society or want to be involved, please let us know!

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and the future Interspeech-2018!
John H.L. Hansen,
ISCA President

Back

Top

ISCA Distinguished Lecturers for 2017-2018 are as follows.

For invitations, please take a look at http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers and contact s-nakamura@is.naist.jp)

(1)   Professor Jennifer S. Cole, Linguistics, Northwestern University, USA

1. Individual differences and attentional effects on cue weighting for prosody perception
2. Prosodic entrainment and its relation to dialogue conditions
3. Memory for Prosody

(2)    Professor Laurence Devillers, Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Paris-Sorbonne IV, LIMSI-CNRS, France

1. Towards social and affective relations with a robot : Joke and Empathy of a Robot/ECA
2. Affective and social robotics: engagement and evaluation
3. Affective and social Robotics aligned with Human Values : ethics by design

Back

Top

Video archives are available in 

http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/video-archive 

where keynote speeches from IS 2010 can be seen. You will also find video archives 

of many other conferences.

Back

Top

The videos for the plenary talks at IS2016 are now accessible via https://www.superlectures.com/interspeech2016/ where all the videos of previous conferences are also available.

In case of problems, they can also be watched on our the website of the conference http://www.interspeech2016.org/

Back

Top

ISCA Online Archive is now accessible directly from ISCA Web main page.

Back

Top