Dear ISCA members:

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

New ISCA Members: For all of those who joined as ISCA Members and participated in ISCA Interspeech-2019, WELCOME! ISCA strives to embrace the diverse field of speech communication, including science, technology, and all aspects relating to human speech production, human-to-machine, and human interaction/communications. We especially encourage you to get involved and participate in some of the ISCA SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS (SIGS), the many supported ISCA Workshops, Summer/Seasonal Schools, as well as considering having an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer visit your institution/organization.

ISCA Board 2019-2020: For 2019, we completed the election process, and during ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019, we officially ushered in the new 2019/20 ISCA Board.

I would again like to recognize and thank those ISCA Board Members who completed their service:

   Lori Lamel: responsible for overseeing: Student Activities Committee, and ISCA

Technical Committee

  Satoshi Nakamura: responsible for overseeing: Special Interest Groups (SIGs) - Languages,

Distinguished Lecturers Program

   Kay Berkling: responsible for – Communication, especially working with Phil Green on

SCOOT, and other outreach efforts for support of education.

I would like to welcome our newest ISCA Board Members who will be contributing to next year’s ISCA activities:

Margaret “Meg” Zellers

Nobuaki Minematsu

Jianhua Tao

We thank our newest Board Members for their willingness to serve and contribute to the goals of ISCA.

Interspeech-2019: [http://www.interspeech2019.org/] (September 15-19, 2019), in Graz, AUSTRIA: A sincere thank you to the INTERSPEECH-2019 Organizing Team, especially General Chairs:Gernot Kubin and Zdravko Kačič, and Technical Program Chairs: Thomas Hain and Björn Schuller, whose commitment to the countless organizational logistics ensured that this was one of the most well organized and memorable INTERSPEECH events to date. The theme of: Crossroads of Speech and Language, was echoed throughout the technical and social program. With the incorporation of creative music in the opening and closing sessions, including innovative artistic performances that highlighted the creative use of speech and music and synthesis – providing a great opportunity to experience speech and language processing in a country which produced one of the first major published speech works by Wolfgang von Kempelen’s on his speaking machine.

The conference broke all records, with 2056 attendees (the largest to date for any Interspeech), as well as diverse representation based on gender (75% male/25% female), work employment (58% Academic; 38% Industry; 3% Government/Other), as well as a good balance between speech science and speech technology (attendees who completed the survey noted: 48% “Speech Science” = 5 Most Important, and 65% “Speech Technology” = 5 Most Important).

We also recognized and honored seven leaders in our field, with the following seven pioneers being recognized as ISCA Fellows for 2019. This brings the total number of ISCA FELLOWS recognized to date to 75 (starting from 2008).

Martine Adda-Decker

Mark Gales

Yannis Stylianou

Douglas O'Shaugnessy

Jennifer Cole

Valerie Hazan

Christian Wellekens

In addition to the ISCA Fellows program, we also awarded the ISCA MEDAL for Scientific Achievement, the highest technical honor bestowed from our society to

Prof. Keiichi TOKUDA for his “pioneering statistical parametric approaches in speech synthesis, and for leadership in the provision of enabling software tools”. Congratulations to Prof. Tokuda for his remarkable accomplishments to the field!

For those of you who attended, the conference banquet was remarkable! Held in a magnificent venue which included, again with the same IS-19 theme, a range of live music performances, as well as professional dance exhibitions. I also noted that many hopefully checked off a once in a life-time “to-do” of dancing the Viennese Waltz in Austria! Very happy to see the many participants in this event – including many ISCA Board Members who showed their dance skills in this wonderful venue!

The technical progam was equally balanced, technically innovative, and efficiently executed. There were many attendees, yet the well organized space, options for coffee breaks spread out, and exhibits made it very enjoyable.

I  would be remiss of me not to mention the creative design for the poster sessions – which as most conference attendees would confirm, you can never have too much space between posters! One of the most innovations for IS-19 was the design of the poster spaces themselves. The organizers were able to get the school of design at the Technical Univ. of Graz, to develop sound absorbing space units which actually contributed to suppressing conversations between posters, in addition to configuring the poster setups to face the conversations away from each other. This resulted in both compact poster space with maximum sound suppression between posters. Really an innovative idea for this meeting!

The closing Ceremony was equally creative and enjoyable. Recognizing all those involved in the organization and logistics for INTERSPEECH-2019. I, the ISCA Board, as well as all ISCA members express our thanks to the industry sponsors (Amazon Alexa, Apple, DiDI, ASAPP, Facebook, Microsoft, Nuance, NaverLine, Google, Alibaba, DataBaker, IBM Research, Yahoo, Uber) for the support of the conference. The INTERSPEECH-2019 Organizing Committee should be congratulated for a REMARKABLE job in this Interspeech!

Future ISCA INTERSPEECH Conferences:Some updates here are needed for upcoming Interspeech conferences.

• IS-2020: In the closing ceremony, we welcomed all to attend the next Interspeech-2020 Conference, which will take place in Shanghai, China (http://www.interspeech2020.org/). The first deadline is for Special Sessions and Challenges, which is due Nov. 29^th, 2019.

• IS-2021 will take place in Brno, Czech Republic (https://www.interspeech2021.org/)

While it was reported in the closing ceremony that IS-2022 would take place in Dublin, Ireland, a number of logistics issues unfortunately developed which resulted in the ISCA Board having to re-assess the location for 2022. As a result, the bidding process is being reconsidered for Interspeech-2022. We do hope to see a bid in the future from the country of Ireland for Interspeech.

Currently, because of the decision to re-evaluate bids for Interspeech-2022, the deadline for submissions for INTERSPEECH-2023 has been changed to Feb. 28, 2020 (it was previously Nov. 1, 2019). We would like to encourage all countries/potential host sites to consider submitting a bid to host Interspeech. Our goal is to support the field of speech communication worldwide, so please reach out to the ISCA if you have interest or any questions [send email to  conferences@isca-speech.org]; (the ISCA website https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php includes Guidelines, Bidding & Budget Templates).

ISCA Medal For Scientific Achievement: the nomination process is now open for nominating the 2020 ISCA Scientific Medal. See https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors for a list of ISCA Honors and consider nominating your colleagues and those you feel are deserving of recognition.

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-2020 next year! Until the next ISCApad, be safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President