Dear ISCA Members Worldwide,

As 2020 comes to a close, on behalf of the ISCA board, I wish to extend a sincere thanks for your membership and participation in ISCA this year.  The world continues to address the COVID19 pandemic, and at least now there are number of vaccines which are beginning to be made available, so I hope we all can turn this corner and be able to come back to a sense of human communication/engagement which helps all. There are a few announcements below which I would like to share (and will also appear in the ISCApad for Jan.’21).  I extend best wishes to all of you for a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2021! Stay safe and healthy – and look forward to your involvement with ISCA in 2021!

John Hansen, ISCA President

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

ISCA Fellows 2021 Nomination DEADLINE : 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 (nomination link is included).

ISCA Educational Community & Outreach Support:
ISCA DL Program: ISCA currently has four ISCA Distinguished Lecturers for 2020-22 and 2019-21, both terms extended due to COVID19).   Please visit ISCA Distinguished Lecture page here. Consider inviting our current ISCA DLs for a talk! (2020-22: Prof. Suzanne Boyce, Univ. of Cincinnati, USA; Prof. Hemant Patil, DA-IICT, INDIA; 2019-21: Prof. Laurent Besacier, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France; Prof. Mark Gales, Cambridge Univ., UK). Specific topics are listed on our ISCA DL page.

ISCA International Virtual Seminars: In addition to our ISCA Distinguished Lecturers, ISCA Board has also taken steps to increase educational support for academic programs in the speech and language communication domains.  It is expected that such seminars will help provide support for research labs, especially students.  ISCA has set up a pool of speakers prepared to give on-line talks. Further details on speakers and topics will be available on: www.isca-speech.org.

Hope all enjoy the holidays and I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR for 2021!

Stay safe and healthy!
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 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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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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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
************************

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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

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www.afcp-parole.org

Appel à candidatures

Prix de thèse AFCP 2020

Depuis 2004, l'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP) décerne un prix

scientifique récompensant la grande qualité d'un travail de thèse francophone du domaine

(ou anglophone issue d’un laboratoire francophone), afin de promouvoir les recherches en

communication parlée, fondamentales ou appliquées, dans le domaine des technologies de la

communication, des sciences humaines et de la vie. Ce prix permet de soutenir et diffuser les travaux

de jeunes chercheurs du domaine.

Le prix est décerné par un jury composé des chercheurs élus du conseil d'administration de l’AFCP. Il

sera officiellement remis lors des prochaines Journées d’Etudes sur la Parole, en 2022.

Le ou la lauréat(e) se verra remettre la somme de 500 euros et sera invité(e) à présenter ses travaux à

la communauté de la communication parlée lors des prochaines JEP (inscription offerte à la

conférence). Il/elle se verra également offrir l’opportunité de publier sa thèse sous la forme d’un livre

dans la collection « Recherches en PArole » (éditions CIPA).

CALENDRIER

Date limite de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2021

Décision du jury AFCP : avril-mai 2021

Remise officielle du prix : JEP 2022

CONDITIONS DE CANDIDATURE À CET APPEL

Peut candidater au présent appel : tout docteur dont la thèse, préparée dans un laboratoire francophone, et

rédigée en français ou en anglais, a été soutenue entre le 1er janvier et le 31 décembre 2020. Toute candidature

est limitée à une seule édition du prix. Seuls les dossiers complets de candidature seront examinés.

CANDIDATURE

Pour candidater, il suffit de :

(1) Envoyer un e-mail déclarant votre intention de candidater, avec vos nom, prénom, titre de la thèse, directeur

de thèse, et date de la soutenance à : camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. Vous recevrez un accusé de réception.

(2) Déposer votre manuscrit de thèse en PDF sur le serveur du site web de l’AFCP : http://www.afcpparole.

org/soumettre-une-these/

(3) Envoyer votre dossier complet via un courrier électronique à l’adresse camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. La pièce

jointe sera constituée d’un fichier unique (nommé VOTRENOM.pdf), contenant dans l’ordre : (i) le résumé de la

thèse (2 pages) ; (ii) la liste des publications ; (iii) les rapports scannés du jury et des rapporteurs de soutenance

de thèse ; (iv) une lettre de recommandation scannée du directeur de thèse ; (v) un CV (avec coordonnées

complètes dont e-mail).

___________Date de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2021____________

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