Apr. 7, 2021

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for April 2021. In this monthly message to all our members, I will highlight recent activities for ISCA, Interspeech events, upcoming opportunities to contribute/serve/participate in ISCA, and the announcement of ISCA Fellows for 2021, and ISCA Medal for Service.

The world still addresses COVID19 Pandemic, but multiple vaccines continue to make an impact and we continue to hope that the days ahead will be better. Please believe in the science and do all you can to get your vaccine shot as well as encourage others to get vaccinated.

INTERSPEECH-2021 (Hybrid Virtual/In-Person): [http://www.interspeech2021.org/]

Brno, Czech Republic (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2021)

INTERSPEECH-2021 (IS-21) Committee along with the ISCA Board have continued to monitor and assess the COVID19 situation. As announced in the Feb.’21 ISCApad, the consensus from the Interspeech-2021 Organizing Committee, in cooperation with the ISCA Board, INTERSPEECH-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). Authors will be 
requested to opt for in-person or virtual participation only when covering the author's registration fee on June 15. Those opting for virtual participation will have a reduced registration cost, and the IS-21 Committee will offer options for authors to switch if they later decide to participate virtually.

Paper Submissions: thanks to the many authors who have submitted their latest work to INTERSPEECH-2021. The paper submission deadline (initial upload: March 26, Final submission: April 2) for final submission has now passed and 2064 papers have been submitted for consideration for INTERSPEECH-2021. This level of submissions confirms the communities continued efforts in the field of speech communication.

The following shows upcoming deadlines:

• April 26, 2021 Show and Tell proposals Deadline

• May 1, 2021 Paper Review Deadline

• May 12, 2021 Survey Proposals Deadline

• June 2, 2021 Paper Accept/Reject Notifications

• June 15, 2021 Final Paper Upload Deadline

• June 25, 2021 Early-bird registration Deadline

• Aug. 24, 2021 Standard/Late registration Deadline

More details are included in this issue of the ISCApad.

2021 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:

Over the past few months, the ISCA Fellows Selection Committee has worked to seek out nominations and endorsements for this year’s ISCA Fellows selection. The ISCA Fellows Selection Committee maintains a rigorous process of collecting and evaluating all nominations (more details are found on the ISCA webpage at: https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/fellows). After extensive evaluations and reviews, the following eight distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA FELLOW for 2021. Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join me in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communications! All will be recognized at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2021 this fall.

• Prof. Mary BECKMAN (USA) “For contributions to phonology, including the phonology of intonation and language acquisition.” 

• Prof. Karen LIVESCU (USA) “For contributions to articulatory modeling, to speech representation learning, and to bridging the gaps between speech research, machine learning and natural language processing.”  

• Prof. Eric FOSLER-LUSSIER (USA) “For fundamental contributions to research and leadership in the fields of speech recognition and spoken language processing.”   

•  Prof. Maxine ESKENAZI (USA) “For contributions to phonetics, language learning, spoken    dialog systems, language resources, and for pioneering service to the community.”
  

• Prof. Jean-Francois BONASTRE (France)  “For leadership in the field of speaker recognition and sustained contributions to ISCA.” 

• Prof. Yang LIU (USA) “For contributions to speech recognition and understanding, prosody modelling, summarization, sentiment analysis, and social media research.”

• Prof. DeLiang WANG (USA)  “For seminal work in the area of speech separation and speech segregation.”
  

• Dr Dong Yu (USA)  “For research and development in deep learning-based automatic speech recognition.”

2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement:

I again note here and congratulate the recipient of the 2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany):

“for pioneering and seminal contributions to data-driven methods for automatic speech recognition and machine translation.”! This is the highest ISCA award for science achievement, and certainly well deserved for the remarkable contributions Prof. Ney has made to the field of speech communications, and in particular to automatic speech recognition/machine translation.

ISCA Special Service Medal: This year, the ISCA Board has also spent time to review the impact of a individuals for our society. While ISCA was born out of the combined collaborative efforts of two previous societies, ESCA – European Speech Communication Association, and PC-ICSLP: The Permanent Council of the Inter. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, ISCA is now a worldwide organization dedicated to the advancement of research, education, training, and understanding of all forms of speech communications for all people. Since our inception in 2000, the ISCA Special Service Medal has been awarded a total of eight times, with four recipients last year, in recognizing many in the field for their commitment to service for our society. The ISCA Board has reviewed the service, leadership and educational contributions made by a our ISCA members, and this year we recognize Prof. Martin Cooke as the 2021 ISCA Service Medal award recipient. Please join me in congratulating Prof. Cooke, who will be recognized at the INTERSPEECH-2021 conference.

Prof. Martin Cooke: “For sustained service to ISCA and the Speech Communication community for Publications and Community Support.”

ISCA STUDENT SAC (Student Activity Committee):

Get connected with the student membership of ISCA!

Finally, I would like to highlight a new point of engagement for our ISCA Student members! The ISCA Student SAC (Student Activity Committee) has created a PodCast to help offer opportunities to hear fellow students, get insights on career planning, or hear some new innovative ideas from our community membership.

The first episode of Speech Pitch, ISCA-SAC’s new podcast is located at this link: [click here]. The ISCA Community is always committed to supporting student career development and engagement. Please share and let us know your feedback! (A special thanks to the ISCA SAC for this wonderful edition – even if I am not sure if I want fingers as long as legs, or legs as long as fingers?!?)

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.

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)