AUG 9, 2020

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of ISCApad for August 2020!   Hope your summer is progressing well. In this issue you will find updates for meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements. COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the world in terms of work, social engagement, and most importantly health of all – so please do all you can to ensure the safety of yourselves, colleagues, family and friends. Research and advancements in the field of speech communication is even more critical in the times we are all facing, since human support via communication for all is critical for the well being of society.

COVID-19 continues to impact the world – and many of our ISCA colleagues, researchers and friends. Many countries are and have recognized and adopted best practices including practicing safe social distancing and the use of face coverings. Please do all you can to ensure the safety of yourselves, colleagues, students, and friends and family.

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 26-29, 2020)

Papers: the organizing process has progressed well in the last month. The IS-2020 Technical Committee has moved forward with the review process of 2140 paper submissions, resulting in a total of 1020 conference paper acceptances which include all technical areas including a number of approved special sessions. All submissions underwent a rigorous review process with two Area Chairs for each sub-area who oversaw 3-4 reviewer assignments and final assessment and decision process of papers. There were many very good submissions, but unfortunately not all manuscripts could be accepted for the technical program. I extend a sincere thanks to all those reviewers who submitted reviews, as well as Area Chairs and all members of the Interspeech-2020 Technical Program Committee, who were involved in establishing an excellent program for IS-2020. So, after much discussion within the Interspeech-2020 Organizing Committee, as well as ISCA Board, it has been decided that ISCA INTERSPEECH-2020 will be a distant/virtual conference this October, so there will not be physical presentations made in Shanghai, China this Oct. This decision was a difficult one to reach, since there was hope of having a hybrid conference with a mix of in-person and remote access participation. In the end, the logistics of running two events like this simultaneously would far exceed the organizational resources in place to run Interspeech, and the IS-2020 Organizing Committee in collaboration with the ISCA Board came to a unanimous decision to have IS-2020 this year be completely remote, primarily to ensure the safety, health and wellbeing of all ISCA Members involved with our flagship conference.

All Oral Presentations: Since Interspeech-2020 will be completely remote, all accepted papers will be oral (i.e., no distinction between oral and poster presentations). More details will follow for all authors (since both this ISCApad as well as Interspeech-2020 website latest information), but authors would be expected to prepare an extended video presentation of their paper to be uploaded and allowed for viewing offline. In addition, each author would prepare a short 2 slide (title slide + 1 overview slide) presentation of 1-2min, which will be played prior to a period of Q&A for each paper. The goal here is to allow as many presentations to be viewed and experienced by ISCA IS-2020 participants in approximately 102-110 sessions. The logistics of these are currently being finalized by the IS-20 Tech Committee.

Keynote Speakers: This year, there will be four keynote presentations from world recognized experts in the fields of speech communication. These presentations will consist of the follow speakers:

• Janet B. Pierrehumbert, University of Oxford (recipient of the ISCA Scientific Medal)

• Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Carnegie Mellon University

• Lin-shan Lee, National Taiwan University

• Shehzad Mevawalla , Amazon Alexa

We thank these distinguished researchers for their contributions to the technical program for Interspeech-2020 and look forward to their presentations and follow-on Q&A sessions.

ISCA Student and Young Scientist Travel Awards: since IS-2020 will be remote, it has been decided that a larger number of ISCA Travel Awards will be made this year since expenses will be reduced to only IS-2020 registration fee and one-year ISCA Membership dues. ISCA Board in collaboration with the Interspeech-2020 Organizing Committee will increase the number of awards made this year by approximately 2x, to encourage students and young scientists from all regions who have papers, or are from regions which have limited travel resources, to expand ISCA membership participation. PLEASE encourage your students, or young researchers to submit travel award applications.

• Aug 28, 2020 Notification about ISCA Travel Grants

• Sept 01, 2020 Early-bird registration deadline

• Sep 23, 2020 Standard registration deadline

Remote attendance would also be associated with a reduced registration fee. ALL accepted papers will be published in the standard format in the Proceedings of INTERSPEECH-2020 as usual (i.e., including release on ISCA Archive).

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and INTERSPEECH-2020! Until the next ISCApad, be safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)

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The safety and well-being of our participants is of paramount importance to ISCA. The Organizing Committee of INTERSPEECH 2020 has been monitoring closely the dynamic developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. After careful consideration and in light of the global health emergency and pervasive travel restrictions, ISCA has made the difficult decision to convert INTERSPEECH 2020 to a fully virtual conference. We were looking forward to seeing everyone at INTERSPEECH in Shanghai, but we are excited about the opportunity to innovate by creating an engaging virtual conference that will be rewarding for both presenters and attendees. We thank those who have submitted papers to INTERSPEECH 2020. More information for authors and questions about registration and participation are provided on the INTERSPEECH 2020 website : http://www.interspeech2020.org/ Please check also this ISCApad issue (message from our President John Hansen : https://www.isca-speech.org/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=21791&back =p,270 We send our best wishes to all our members and the Speech Communication community at this difficult time.

The ISCA Board

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We encourage all members tokeep contact with ISCA via our social nets. Also you will bde kept informed about all events on our website. 

This is particularly important in this time where due to the coronavirus, many modifications may be brought to the conference.

ISCA Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/iscaspeech/

ISCA Twitter : https://twitter.com/ISCAFOX

ISCA SAC Student Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/98794207409/

 website : www.isca-speech.org

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Code-of-Ethics for Authors

ISCA is committed to publishing high-quality journals and conference
proceedings.  To this end, all authors are requested to ensure they
adhere to ethical standards, specifically (but not limited to):

(1) the work does NOT include fabrication, falsification or any kind
of data breach.  Authors should keep their code and log data that
produced the results in the paper.

(2) the work does NOT include plagiarism or significant
self-plagiarism.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors)
may use tools to detect plagiarism and reject papers without review.

(3) the work does NOT use figures, photographs or any other kind of
content whose copyright is not owned by or granted to the authors,
except for proper quotations allowed by the copyright law.  ISCA (and
conference organizers or journal editors) may request authors to
provide evidence of permission to use the content for their work.

(4) the work does NOT include inappropriate content in terms of human
rights.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors) may
request authors to provide evidence of approval from the host Ethics
Committee (Institutional Review Board or equivalent) that the work
meets their Institution's ethical requirements, and/or explicit
consent from the human subjects used in the work.

(5) all (co-)authors must be responsible and accountable for the work,
and consent to its submission.

If any concerns relating to this code are raised or reported, ISCA
(and conference organizers or journal editors) will set up a committee
to investigate the matter and decide on appropriate action including
withdrawal of the paper and suspension of future submissions by the
authors.

ISCA also enforces the NO-show policy for conference papers.  Any
paper accepted into the technical program, but not presented on-site,
may be withdrawn from the official proceedings.  Please refer to
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/conferences point 2) and 8).


* Short version: (to be posted in a limited space)

ISCA is committed to publishing high-quality journals and conference
proceedings. Our code-of-ethics for authors can be found at:
    http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/about-isca?id=279

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Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees

ISCA is committed to providing a pleasant conference experience
without harassment and discrimination for anyone, regardless of
gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability and physical
appearance.  We do not tolerate any verbal or non-verbal expressions
of harassment or discrimination.  Please note that it matters if a
person feels harassed or discriminated regardless of the original
intent of the expressions. In particular, sexual language and imagery
are not appropriate in any conference venue.  Conference participants
who engage in inappropriate behavior may be expelled from the
conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference
organizer. These persons may be included in a watchlist for future
ISCA-sponsored events.

If you are troubled by the behavior of another attendee at the
conference, or notice someone is in trouble, please speak immediately
to a member of conference staff or send a message to <ethics@isca-speech.org>.

Your concern will be heard in confidence and taken seriously to solve
the problem.

* Short version: (to be posted in a limited space)

ISCA is committed to a pleasant conference experience without
harassment and discrimination. Our code-of-conduct can be found at:
    http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/about-isca?id=278

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The article 'Rediscovering 25 Years of Discoveries in Spoken Language Processing: A Preliminary ISCA Archive Analysis', published at Interspeech 2013 on the occasion of the ESCA/ISCA Silver Jubilee, has been extended to the production and analysis of the NLP4NLP corpus containing close to 65,000 articles published in major conferences and journals in speech and language processing over 50 years (1965-2015) on various aspects (publication, collaboration, citation, innovation, plagiarism,...). The results of those analyses have recently been assembled in a series of two papers published in a special issue on 'Mining Scientific Papers: NLP-enhanced Bibliometrics' of the 'Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics' journal :

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00036/full

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00037/full

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 ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
communication as an exciting and diverse field of research and discovery. Moreover, ISCA
is committed to gender equality.

We are therefore delighted to announce that the database with names, affiliations,
positions, and research topics of women in speech science and speech technology,
originally started by Maxine Eskenazi, is now a wonderful, searchable website, created by
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson.

The website can be found at http://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/diversity?id=264

The website can be used for, amongst others:
- Workshop and conference organisers to search for keynote and invited speakers,
panelists, and co-organisers
- Nominations for distinguished lecturers
- Norminations for awards, medals, fellowships, and prizes
- Prospective new faculty by faculty search committees

If you identify yourself as female and want to be added to this list, please follow the
instructions on the WomenNspeech website.

We hope this website will be useful to many!

Julia Hirschberg
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Odette Scharenborg

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Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,

Since we have no nominations other than current officers as of June 1, the Permanent Advisory Council (PAC) decided to ask current officers (Plinio Barbosa, Aoju Chen, Hongwei Ding, Martine Grice, and  Nigel Ward
(Chair)) to serve the 2020 - 2022 term.  Thank you for your kind cooperation.

Sincerely,
Keikichi Hirose
Past President of SProSIG

 ?

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The papers are already publicly available, at https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/SpeechProsody_2020/ .  To also see the videos, you can register for the conference, for only 4000 Yen, at https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sp2020_registration/vp/ .

I encourage you to contact the authors with questions, or just to let them know that you liked their work.  Since we won't be meeting physically this year, let's make the extra effort to stay connected as a community.

Many thanks to Professor Minematsu and the Organizing Committee for putting together an excellent set of papers and talks, in a time of adversity.

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair

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Dear SProSIG Members,

I am pleased to announce that Speech Prosody 2022 will be held in Lisbon,  May 23-26, 2022.

Thanks to all who voted: 315 members from 46 countries.  Although the vote for Lisbon was decisive (41%), it was good to see strong support also for the bids for Aix (33%) and Nijmegen (26%).
 
Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair
Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

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Dear ISCA community,

The Student Advisory Committee of ISCA (ISCA-SAC) is pleased to announce three student VIRTUAL events in the context of Interspeech 2020. 6th Doctoral Consortium The event provides an opportunity for PhD students, especially those early in the process of identifying a thesis topic, to present their research and discuss it with a panel of experts. The discussion includes feedback on the evolution and progress of their research. It helps them to identify a road-map toward refining their thesis. Application required. Submit extended two-page abstract until August 22, 2020 (extended deadline). For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events 2nd Mentoring The event gives PhD students the opportunity to engage in a discussion with early-career and senior researchers from academia and industry. ISCA-SAC aims at providing a warm environment for discussing questions concerning a variety of topics, such as research in academia and industry, equal opportunities, publishing, and professional development. Application required. Participants will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events 7th Students Meet Experts The event consists of a panel discussion with experts from industry and academia, in which the questions of the student audience are discussed. All Bachelor, Master, and PhD students are invited to join! Registration requested. We collect questions for the experts during the registration process. For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events For more information about ISCA-SAC, please visit: www.isca-students.org We are looking forward to your participation!

Iona Gessinger

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