Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for April 2019!  This edition has a number of updates from the community including upcoming meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements.

Interspeech-2019: [http://www.interspeech2019.org/] will take place September 15-19, 2019, in Graz, AUSTRIA, with the theme being: Crossroads of Speech and Language.This past month, the Interspeech-2019 organizers received a record number of more than 2000 initial submissions (March 29^rd was the deadline for paper submissions, with final update deadline of April 5^th). The conference promises to be very engaging and wide participation across all topic areas of speech communication. A few announcements pertaining to Interspeech-2019 follow here.

New Elevated ISCA Fellows for 2019:We are pleased to announce the following seven ISCA members will be elevated to ISCA Fellow in 2019. They will recognized at INTERSPEECH-2019 and receive their ISCA Fellow Plaque, Certificate, and Pin at the opening ceremony. Please join me in congratulating our colleagues for their significant contributions to the field!

     Martine Adda-Decker (France): “For contributions to multilingual speech

   processing and large-scale, corpus-based linguistics, and for bridging

   communities”

       Jennifer Cole (USA): “For theoretical and experimental descriptions of the sources

       of phonological and prosodic variability in spontaneous speech”

     Mark Gales (UK): “For wide ranging, fundamental contributions to research and leadership

      in the fields of speech recognition, synthesis and statistical modelling algorithms”

    Valerie Hazan (UK): “For contributions to speech perception and production”

 Douglas O'Shaugnessy (Canada): “For contributions to automatic speech recognition and

  leadership in the speech community”

    Yannis Stylianou (Greece): “For contributions to speech analysis, speech modification

     and speech communication”

    Christian Wellekens (Belgium): “For pioneering contributions in the use of neural networks

     in   automatic speech recognition and education activity in speech science”

ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement:

While we announced this in the last ISCApad, I am including the ISCA Medal for Scientific

 Achievement announcement again. I am pleased to announce that ISCA has selected

 Dr. Keiichi Tokuda as the recipient of ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2019  in

 recognition of “Pioneering the statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis, and 

  for leadership in the provision of enabling software tools.” Prof. Tokuda is the originator 

     of many of the early methods for statistical parametric speech synthesis using  HMMs, which now

     include DNN and LSTM-based statistical parametric speech synthesis methods.

     Dr. Keiichi Tokuda will deliver a plenary speech in INTERSPEECH 2019.

                                   Congratulations to Dr. Keiichi Tokuda!

INTERSPEECH-2019 Events/Highlights:

I would also like to point out some additional items taking place at Interspeech-2019…

• Tutorials (link): the organizing committee has put together a Tutorial Program with 8 highly respected individuals/teams covering a range of topics.

• Show & Tell (link): the deadline for contributions for show & tell approaching! - deadline is April 26. This is an excellent chance to highlight new technologies, demos, and systems!

• Survey Presentations (link): at this ISCA Interspeech-2019, the Organizing Committee has established an new option to have survey papers presenting overviews of an area with talks lasting 40min. If you have interest, the deadline is May 3.

• Satellite Events (link): finally, there are eight satellite events/workshops which are taking place in conjunction with INTERSPEECH-2019.

Again, this is the first time Interspeech will be held in Austria, and it promises to be a great opportunity to experience

speech and language processing in a country where one of the first major published works on

speech by Wolfgang von Kempelen originated (original speaking machine

 {read his original publication here (link)})!

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!

Supporting Diversity in Speech Communication:

ISCA has launched a new area on the ISCA website to support diversity in speech communication. This is intended to offer opportunities for organizers of workshops and conferences to help expand diversity representation in terms of geographic, gender, and topic/specialization. Please visit the ISCA website to learn more! https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/

ISCA INTERSPEECH-2022 (location announcement):

Finally, I would like to update all on the ISCA Board evaluation process which took place for potential sites for ISCA INTERSPEEH-2022. We received four highly competitive proposals which were reviewed extensively by the ISCA Conferences Sub-Committee and discussed in ISCA Board Virtual Meeting as well. The board completed two rounds of voting in order to select the final entry, and I am pleased to announce that ISCA INTERSPEECH-2022 will take place in Dublin, Ireland! I encourage all interested in organizing future Interspeech events to consider submitting proposals, especially for regions which have not hosted Interspeech in recent years!

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

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and Interspeech-2019!

John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President