Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for February 2018!  This edition has a number of updates from the community including upcoming meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements.

Interspeech-2018: [http://www.interspeech2018.org/] will take place September 2-6, 2018, at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC), Hyderabad, India, with the theme being: Speech Research for Emerging Markets in Multilingual Societies. March 23^rd is the deadline for full paper submissions (this is really the deadline! - note that initial titles/abstracts are due by March 16^th as placeholders). This is the first time Interspeech will be held in India, and it promises to be a great opportunity to experience the diversity of speech and language processing in a country that manages daily life with 122 major languages. There are still opportunities for industry sponsorship, and I encourage companies to consider providing even modest support, since this allows for the organizers to provide expanded opportunities for attendees, particularly for students and young researchers exploring job prospects!

ISCA Website: [ http://www.isca-speech.org/] Next, stay connected with the speech and language community by visiting the ISCA website. As of Jan. 2015, the ISCA Archive has gone Open Access, so past INTERSPEECH and ISCA Sponsored Workshops are available to all exploring challenging research problems in speech and language processing.

ISCA Publication Rules: Finally, I will like to bring to the ISCA community’s attention our need to ensure fair and balanced publishing guidelines. The ISCA Board has recently had to visit this issue regarding “self plagiarism”.  We realize there is constant pressures to publish ones work, but as an organization we are committed to ensuring that all ISCA published papers, including conference, workshop, or those submitted to journals, are stand alone/unique efforts that meet the guidelines of our community. As authors, if you are submitting a paper for consideration in an ISCA sponsored meeting (Interspeech, etc.), such a submission must be unique and stand alone. The specific requirement which has been posted on our website is stated below:

All papers submitted to INTERSPEECH 20xx must be original contributions that are not currently submitted to any other conference, workshop, or journal, nor will be submitted to any other conference, workshop, or journal during the review process of INTERSPEECH 20xx. In all such paper submissions, any use of prior material should be cited by a reference to the source of that prior material, including one's own work, i.e., if an author uses earlier existing material, whether from one's own work or that of others, that work should be cited in the paper's list of references. Any violation of this policy may result in sanctions by ISCA, such as a ban on further submissions to ISCA publications by these authors. [ http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/conferences ]

If you as an author have some doubt, please contact either ISCA or Interspeech organizers with any questions. We have recently needed to address this issue and would like to encourage our membership to follow these requirements to ensure the highest quality publications appear in our meetings and journals.

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 Interspeech-2018!

John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President

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Dear ISCA Member,

We are now open for nominations for ISCA’s Distinguished Lecturers for the period 2018-19.  Details of the scheme are available at http: //www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers

Each nomination should include the following information:
  - a short biography of the candidate
  - selected publications
  - a website, or a resume that provides this information
  - topics/titles of up to three possible lectures that the nominee co uld give

Please note that the nominator must ensure the candidate is willing to s erve if elected.  Also, nominations from previous years will be only c onsidered if updated.  Finally, self-nominations are permitted, but mu st include a letter of support from an ISCA Fellow or Board Member.

Nominations should be sent to dl_nominations@isca-speech.org before 31 J anuary 2018.

Thank You

Roger K. Moore
Chair: ISCA Distinguished Lecturers  Selection Committee

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At the start of this new year 2018, we invite you to update your contact and
 professional information on the ISCA Membership Portal:
   http://www.isca-speech.org/iscamember/member.php

 This is of particular importance for reviewers since the new Reviewer Portal
 retrieves informatil from the Membership Portal. If you are one of the people
 who have multiple START IDs with different emails, please let us know your
 preferred username and we will see about cleaning this up.

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SCOOT - Speech Communication On-line Training

The ISCA board is planning to set up an on-line portal, SCOOT,  on the ISCA web site to help and encourage students to enter the Speech Communication area. The goal is to provide students with an easy route to high-quality, up-to date learning resources which can be tailored to their individual needs.

The multidisciplinary nature of speech research raises problems for how students are introduced to our field. Students of various backgrounds may become interested in speech: while there are very few, if any, degree programmes centred on speech, speech modules are taught in a wide variety of curricula: in phonetics and linguistics, speech therapy, perceptual psychology, electrical engineering, computer science, communications and mathematics. Students come to these modules from different backgrounds and with different skills, requiring different training resources.

Many institutions do not have established speech research groups but nevertheless offer speech modules, and few speech groups are active across the entire axis from phonetics to speech technology. Consequently, many speech modules are not delivered as well as they might be, and teachers as well as students may need refreshing on new techniques (DNNs for example).

SCOOT will point students to material of all kinds: tutorials, lectures, videos, toolkits, interactive software, databases and so on. The only condition is that the material is freely available on the internet. SCOOT will be organised within a software platform which is designed to help students to learn,

At the moment we are collecting suggestions for items which should be available within SCOOT. You can make a suggestion using the google form on

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-o6GOiADoJ4Xtik3AvFckonHBdTpcFnSHhpoDz0OhmdroMQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

and you can see the responses so far on

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13uLM63MqITXOsAlUIa-rC6d6O50zGzEnRxTJbz0X8lE/edit#responses

We hope to launch SCOOT at Interspeech 2018.

Phil Green (p.green@sheffield.ac.uk) for the ISCA Board.

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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

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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.

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

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