Dec. 10, 2020

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for December 2020, and my monthly message to all ISCA members. I think basically all of us will be happy to see the year 2020 close. With COVID-19 pandemic continuing to impact the world, it is at least encouraging that several vaccines are now starting to be available for healthcare workers and at-risk individuals, so we hope that 2021 will see at least a modest return to some form of human interaction, even if CDC/WHO guidelines for masks and social distancing are still in place.

In this issue, you will find updates for meetings, job postings, and announcements.

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

Again, we finished Interspeech-2020 in October, our first online/virtual conference. By all measures, the conference was an extremely well attended event with 1021 papers presented, and ~2000 registered attendees, plus more than 6000 visitors to the general public streamed material.

Again, I extend a sincere 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 (I am so amazed how well the conference logistics could be moved towards online with an experience for technical presentations and content being as effective as it was).

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Proceedings (link) are now available in the ISCA Online Archive (link). 

ISCA INTERSPEECH-2020 Survey: The ISCA Diversity Committee drafted a survey to collect feedback on ISCA members experiences from INTERSPEECH-2020 conference. In addition to this core IS-20 conference survey, a second follow-on survey, which stated up front that all responses were completely optional, concentrated on all forms of diversity for our membership. Such optional voluntary data is being used to help ISCA provide improved experiences and support for our membership.

DIVERSITY MEETING: The ISCA Diversity Committee held an online meeting originally scheduled during INTERSPEECH-2020 conf. on Nov. 23, 2020. ISCA is committed to supporting all forms of diversity including gender, ethnicity, religion, regional, science/technology, etc. Any feedback, suggestions, etc. are always welcomed by emailing: diversity@isca-speech.org. We thank all who have participated, provide input or are involved in supporting diversity for our Speech Communication community.

ISCA DEADLINES in 2021: Some upcoming deadlines for ISCA members are shown below (nomination links are included).

• Nominations for ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2021: Tuesday, January 5, 20201 (link)

•  

   

  Nominations for ISCA Service

   

  Medal 2021: 

   

  Tuesday, January 5, 2021 (link)

• Nominations for ISCA Fellows 2021: Wednesday, February 10, 2021 (link)

Please consider nominating your colleagues who have made scientific, technical, and/or service impact to our field of speech communications.

In closing, we hope you all enjoyed INTERSPEECH-2020. The deadline for INTERSPEECH-2021 paper submissions is March 26, 2021 (hope all are working on research and looking to submit!). Again, we hope in this upcoming conference, we have the ability to engage with colleagues and catch up with friends and collaborators. We expect there will be some form of remote/virtual interaction in ISCA conferences going forward, but we do hope there will be a chance to be together in Sept.’21 in Brno, Czech Republic.

Hope all enjoy the holidays and have a HAPPY NEW YEAR. Until next month, stay safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

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).

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

 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

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

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 

Back

Top

For ISCA Fellows,

ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS

A seminar programme is an important part of the life of a research lab, especially for its research students, but it's difficult for scientists to travel to give talks at the moment. However,  presentations may be given on line and, paradoxically, it may thus be possible for labs to engage international speakers who they wouldn't normally be able to afford.

ISCA is setting up a pool of speakers prepared to give on-line talks. In this way we can enhance the experience of students working in our field, often in difficult conditions. All we need is a title, a short abstract, a 1 paragraph biopic and contact details. Speakers may pre-record their talks if they wish, but they don't have to. It is up to the host lab to contact speakers and make the arrangements. Talks can be state-of-the-art, or tutorials.

We already have the distinguished lecturer programme as a starting point, and the DLs have been asked to consider lecturing remotely, with interaction.

If you are interested in joining this scheme as a speaker, please reply to this mail, with the brief details above.

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

Back

Top

We are now open for nominations for ISCA Distinguished Lecturers for the period
2021-2022.  Details of the scheme are available at ISCA Distinguished Lecturers
webpage
(should be linked to https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers)

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

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

Nominations (for 2021-22) should be sent to dl_nominations [at] isca-speech.org before 31 January 2021

Back

Top