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ISCApad #272 |
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 by Chris Wellekens |
2-1 | Message from our president Professor John Hansen
Feb. 8, 2021
Dear ISCA members:
Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for Feb. 2021. In this monthly message to all our members, I will highlight some recent activities for ISCA, Interspeech events, upcoming opportunities to contribute/serve/participate in ISCA, and the announcement of ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, our highest honor. INTERSPEECH-2021 (Going Hybrid!): [http://www.interspeech2021.org/] Brno, Czech Republic (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2021) The world is still addressing the COVID19 Pandemic, and the INTERSPEECH-2021 (IS-21) Committee along with the ISCA Board have continued to monitor and assess the situation. The situation here in 2021 continues to be challenging worldwide with the number of new cases still high and restrictions on air travel and cross-border travel. After careful consideration, the consensus from the Interspeech-2021 Organizing Committee, in cooperation with the ISCA Board, IS-21 in Brno will be a Hybrid-Conference (with continued monitoring and a back-up option to move to a fully virtual conference if needed). The paper submission deadline is still March 26, and authors will be More details are included in this issue of the ISCApad.
ISCA International Virtual Seminars: Expand your Schools/Students educational experience! To make it easier for speech labs to provide strong seminar programs, and to expand and support the educational needs of our membership, ISCA has recruited an international pool of speakers who are prepared to give online talks. This virtual seminar scheme complements our ISCA Distinguished Lecturer series (4 DLs are available to give talks now!). For details on both Virtual Seminars and ISCA Distinguished Lecturer programs, visit the ISCA Virtual Seminar page at: https://bit.ly/3cOdziZ.
ISCA Distinguished Lecturer (DL) program: Call for Nominations! Nominations for the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers (DL) program close on Feb 14th 2021. While we are following COVID19 guidelines, we are especially encouraging DL speakers to come forward to help us continue to expand our support for regions under-represented in ISCA programs (e.g., Eastern Europe, Africa, West/South/South-East Asia, and South/Latin America). (more details in this ISCApad!). Nominations for Members of the ISCA Board: Call for Nominations! We would like to encourage our membership to consider nominating their colleagues or themselves to serve on the ISCA Board. The ISCA Board consists of 14 volunteers who work to support the ISCA Society addressing all aspects of operations, programs, finances, leadership, conferences/workshops, Special Interest Groups, and support for education and outreach. As a society, we cannot exist without individuals willing to commit their time, experience and expertise in supporting our society. We encourage all who have interest to consider submitting a nomination. Election for Members of the ISCA Board 2021-25 will take place in April/May. Nominations should be received by: Monday, March 1, 2021. (more details in this ISCApad!). ISCA INTERSPEECH-2024 (location announcement): “A new country on the ISCA INTERSPEECH World Map!” I would like to update all on the ISCA Board evaluation process which took place for potential sites for ISCA INTERSPEECH 2024. We received a number of highly competitive proposals which were reviewed extensively by the ISCA Conferences Sub-Committee and discussed in ISCA Board Virtual Meetings as well. The board completed voting in order to select the final entry, and I am pleased to announce that ISCA INTERSPEECH 2024 will take place in Jerusalem, ISRAEL! This represents the first time ISCA INTERSPEECH will be in this part of the world, and we are excited to have this opportunity to experience the scientific, technical, and cultural sites in Jerusalem, Israel for 2024. We all understand the challenges it takes to organize such a major conference, and in these times where uncertainty is present, we are encouraged to have outstanding teams bid to host future Interspeech conferences. We would very much encourage previous bidding sites, as well as all interested in organizing future Interspeech events to consider submitting proposals, especially for regions which have not hosted INTERSPEECH!
2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement: As is customary at ISCA INTERSPEECH, we make several awards to recognize leadership in our community. I am pleased to announce that ISCA has selected Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney as the recipient of the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2021 “for pioneering and seminal contributions to data-driven methods for automatic speech recognition and machine translation.”Prof. Ney has made sustained and pioneering contributions in automatic speech recognition, statistical classification and machine learning, and statistical machine translation. Prof. Neywill deliver a plenary speech in INTERSPEECH 2021. Congratulations to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney!
We hope all of you are staying safe, and continue to work/collaborate and contribute to both the science and technology advancements in Speech Communication. We look forward to seeing you all virtually or in person at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2021 this year in Brno, Czech Republic (papers are due March 26th!).
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!
Until next month, stay safe and stay connected to our community!
John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)
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2-2 | Obituary Jack Godfrey
Jack Godfrey, 78, passed away at his home in Broussard, LA on Thursday August 27, 2020. Caring, generous, and honest, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge is an understated description of Jack Godfrey, as anyone who knew him will attest. He was born John Joseph Godfrey in Queens, NY on December 19, 1941. He attended Georgetown University where he earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics. He completed his post-doctorate work at Wright-Patterson Airforce Base in Dayton, OH where he met Nina, who would become his beloved wife of 44 years. Jack worked at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at The Johns Hopkins University, the US Dpt of Defense, U.of Pennsylvania, Texas Instruments, and U. of Texas.He did research in Psycholinguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. He made significant contributions from TI's 'Speak and Spell' to his leadership of the US Department of Defense's Human Language Technology Group at the National Security Agency. He is survived by his wife, Nina Suru Godfrey of Broussard, La, his sons, Brian Godfrey of Pottsboro, TX, Eliot Godfrey of Broussard, LA; and Paul Godfrey and his wife, Stephanie, with granddaughters Eliza, Suru, and June Godfrey of Charlotte, NC. Jack was a man filled with energy, drive, and commitment to accomplishment, a true 'Man for Others.' He showed this every day of his private life, how he was involved in the community, and how he treated every person he met. He had a passion for travel, which brought him many memorable adventures with Nina around the world. He was an avid and accomplished fisherman who spent countless days on the water with his sons and closest friends, where he was truly happy. Speech Community misses a highly appreciated researcher who inspired many scientists.
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2-3 | ISCA social networks 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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2-4 | Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees
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2-5 | Code-of-Ethics for Authors Code-of-Ethics for Authors
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2-6 | Publications and Videos of Speech Prosody 2020 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/ .
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2-7 | Women in Speech Research
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2-8 | Proposals for Speech Prosody events Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,
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2-9 | International virtual seminars: call for speakers For ISCA Fellows, Now's the time of year that seminar programmes get fixed up.. please direct the attention of whoever organises your seminars to the ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS scheme (introduction below). There is now a good choice of speakers: see https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers/online-seminars Phil Green ****************************************************************************************** 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. 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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2-10 | Election of members for the Board of ISCA (4-year term: 2021-2025): Call for Nomimations Election of members for the Board of ISCA (4-year term: 2021-2025)
The ISCA Board currently has 14 members from 9 countries (see full list below). Members are elected to the Board for a period of four years and no member may serve on the Board for more than two consecutive terms. The following Board members will have served for two terms of 4 years in August so will be retiring: Gérard BAILLY, Mark HASAGEWA-JOHNSON, Kate KNILL. Phil GREEN, Tatsuya KAWAHARA, Hema MURTHY, Bhuvana RAMABHADRAN, Odette SCHARENBORG will be ending their first term. Thus we have openings for 8 members for the 2021-2025 term. In accordance with the ISCA by-laws, elections to the Board will take place in April-May 2021. We invite nominations from the ISCA membership. Each nomination requires the support of three members of the Association and agreement from the candidate (e.g., by email). The ISCA statutes specify a maximum of three Board members from any one country. Each ISCA member will be asked to cast a anonymous ballot in the election, via a survey website. Members elected to the Board will be expected to have one of the areas of responsibility listed below, to commit time to furthering the work of ISCA in their area, to attend the two-day Board meetings that take place at each annual INTERSPEECH conference and to participate in additional virtual meetings during the year (teleconferences). All candidates should be aware of these obligations and commit themselves to fulfilling them before agreeing to be nominated. The Board will accept nominations either from proposers or self-nominations, as long as indication of support is provided. Please send your nomination(s) to the ISCA Secretariat secretariat@isca-speech.org BEFORE March 1st, 2021 (Monday) with the following information: Full Name and Title: Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require further information about the nomination process or about duties of ISCA Board members. Areas: Current Board: John HANSEN (ISCA President)
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2-11 | Applications are open for the Eleventh Christian BenoĆ®t AwardApplications are open for the Eleventh Christian Benoît AwardThe Christian Benoît Award is given biannually to a promising young scientist in the domain of SPEECH COMMUNICATION to further their career in the field. The focus of the award's research topic may emphasise basic science or applied research projects. The award is valued at 7,500 Euros and conferred by the International Speech Communication Association and the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée.Application Deadline is May 14, 2021 !!
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