Nov. 10, 2020

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for November 2020, and my monthly message to all our members!  In this issue you will find updates for meetings, job postings, and announcements. COVID-19 pandemic continues to impacts the world, 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, and especially supporting our families, friends and colleagues is even more critical in the current times we are all facing for our society.

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 25-29, 2020)

The main event for our society this past month was the overwhelmingly successful INTERSPEECH-2020 conference, held virtually for the first time in Shanghai, China. The conf. program took place over a five day period, with a worldwide time synchronous program that spanned Asia/Australia, North/South America, Europe, and the Middle East/Africa. Here is a brief recap of the INTERSPEECH-2020 conference activities:

• 1021 peer reviewed conf. papers presented

• 110 Technical Sessions were held including 14 special sessions and challenges

• ~2000 Registered Attendees participated (able to participate in Q&A, see 90sec overview and 15min full video presentations of each paper), and many more sat in as observers in the livestream online view portal.

• 8 Tutorials presented by internationally recognized individuals/teams

• ISCA Student SAC Events: Students Meet Experts, Student Mentoring, Doctorial Consortium

• 4 Keynote speakers!

• 6 new ISCA Fellows Elected! (81 ISCA Fellows to date)

• 4 Internationally recognized ISCA members, awarded 2020 ISCA SERVICE MEDALS  for sustained service to ISCA and the Speech Communication community!
  

• Finally, one individual recognized for her sustained impact to the field, Janet Pierrehumbert, as the 2020 ISCA SCIENTIFIC MEDAL

While this Interspeech Conference was a unique due to the challenges presented with COVID19, the Interspeech-2020 Organizing Committee went to great lengths to ensure a highest quality technical program, and to infuse as much culture and local experiences within a virtual online experience. So, below are some screen pictures of events which took place during the conference!

Opening Ceremony

ISCA Fellows

ISCA SERVICE MEDALISTS                                          ISCA SCIENTIFIC MEDALIST

CLOSING CEREMONY

CLOSING CEREMONY

CLOSING CEREMONY

Closing Ceremony

Shanghai, China (Fireworks for closing Ceremony!!)

• ISCA DIVERSITY MEETING: Nov. 23. 2020: due to meeting time conflicts, the ISCA Diversity Meeting originally scheduled during INTERSPEECH-2020 conf. week has been move to Nov. 23, 2020. This will be an online ZOOM meeting. Meeting time is: 15-16h Dutch time; 14-15h UK time; 9-10 am NY time; 8-9 am IL/Dallas time; if you have interest, PLEASE email diversity@isca-speech.org for the Zoom link.

As we closed this chapter of INTERSPEECH-2020, a sincere thanks goes to a number of individuals and organizations. First, to the many corporate sponsors of INTERSPEECH, many thanks for your sustained commitment to supporting our society, and helping to ensure registration fees, especially for students are kept low. MANY thanks!

Many thanks to the General Chairs, Helen Meng, Bo Xu, Thomas Zheng, and the Technical Program Chairs Jianhua Tao and Kai, Yu, as well as the entire Interspeech-2020 Organizing Committee for their work and extensive commitment to a truly memorable conference experience!!!

As is the tradition, the world map showing countries that have hosted INTERSPEECH conferences (as well as ICSLP Conf.’s and Eurospeech Conf’s) are shown below. In the next 3 years, several new countries will be included! We encourage those interested in organizing an Interspeech to respond to the next call for proposals for Interspeech-2024. Even if you are not ready to propose, please reach out to express your interest (see ISCA Home page or send email to conferences@isca-speech.org).

We hope you all enjoyed INTERSPEECH-2020, and were able to engage with speakers, and catch up with colleagues and friends, at least remotely/virtually this time. We look forward to see you all and hopefully physically being together at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2021 next year in Brno, Czech Republic.

Until next month, stay safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)

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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-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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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.  Authors are also encouraged to
open their code and dataset.

(2) the work does NOT include plagiarism or significant
self-plagiarism.  The work is NOT ALLOWED to be submitted to any other
conference, workshop or journal during the review process.  ISCA (and
conference organizers or journal editors) may use tools to detect
(self-)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 convene their
Ethics 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).

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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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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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 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 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 Speech Prosody SIG Members,

We welcome announcements of prosody-related events, *including virtual ones*.

(In the past, we've been more restrictive, mostly publicizing only events designed to welcome international travelers.  But lately even many national or regional events are virtual, and so can probably, without much extra work, be made open to the world.  So, if you're hosting or organizing such a workshop, special session, etc., on any aspect of prosody, please consider informing either of us, so we can announce it at sprosig.org and/or via the mailing list.) 

Plinio and Nigel   pabarbosa.unicampbr@gmail.com   nigelward@acm.org

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The ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement recognizes and honors an individual each year who has made extraordinary contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Any ISCA member can make a nomination. All nominations for ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement should be submitted to the ISCA Secretary at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 5 January 2021 using the nomination form.  The ISCA Board will select the winner by 1 February and announce the winner in the March 2020 ISCApad. Unsuccessful candidates of the previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy.  

The ISCA Service Medal recognizes an ISCA member who has provided extraordinary service to ISCA and/or the Speech Communication community. Any ISCA Board or Advisory Council member can make a nomination. All nominations for ISCA Service Medal should be submitted to the ISCA Secretary at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 5 January 2021 using the nomination form. Unsuccessful candidates of the previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy.  

The ISCA Fellows Program recognizes and honors outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the science and technology of speech communication. To qualify for this distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field. Nominations may be made by any ISCA member. Fellows may be recognized by their outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. The supporting case for the candidate's nomination should include up to 3 major contributions which have had impact on the speech community and/or society in general. A nomination should be supported by 3 references from senior scientists/technologists in the Speech Communication community, for instance ISCA Fellows and ISCA Board members. Current ISCA Board members are not eligible for nomination. All nominations for ISCA Fellow should be sent to fellows_nomination@isca-speech.org by 10 February using the nomination form. Those who plan to nominate are strongly advised to send brief information on candidates (candidate's name and affiliation) to the above email address before January 10 with your name and contact email address. 

More information can be found on the ISCA Honors webpage.

Kate Knill and Phil Green

ISCA Secretary and ISCA Board Member for Fellows

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Now open, deadline Feb 10th:

The ISCA Fellows Program recognises and honours outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the science and technology of speech communication. To qualify for this distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field. Nominations may be made by any ISCA member. Fellows may be recognized by their outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. The supporting case for the candidate's nomination should include up to 3 major contributions which have had impact on the speech community and/or society in general. A nomination should be supported by 3 references from senior scientists/technologists in the Speech Communication community, for instance ISCA Fellows and ISCA Board members. Current ISCA Board members are not eligible for nomination. All nominations for ISCA Fellow should be sent to fellows_nomination AT isca-speech.org by 10 February using the nomination form. Those who plan to nominate are strongly advised to send brief information on candidates (candidate's name and affiliation) to me with your name and contact email address.

-- ************************ Professor Phil Green SpandH Computer Science University of Sheffield 

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Join our ISCA Diversity Meeting !!!

ISCA is committed to ensuring inclusive membership and equality and
diversity in supported events.
We are therefore excited to invite you to the 2nd ISCA Diversity meeting,
after the first successful meeting during Interspeech in Graz, on : Nov 23,
2020 (14:00 London)

https://zoom.us/j/97280308773?pwd=Nm9qWGZkOVpXU1JFamw2M0M2Wndzdz09
Meeting ID: 972 8030 8773
Passcode: 236473

During this meeting we will inform you about our activities, we will present
the latest numbers on gender diversity in our community, and hopefully
initial results of a survey we plan to send out soon. But most importantly
we would like to hear from you what you think we can do better.

We hope to see you at the meeting!

Best wishes

Odette Scharenborg (chair of the Diversity Committee), Mark
Hasegawa-Johnson, Julia Hirschberg, Heidi Christensen, Dale Joachim,
Sebastian Möller

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