Dear friends of ISCA,

the preparations for Interspeech 2022 are progressing full-speed, and in particular the reviewers and area chairs are busy reviewing a record number of submissions in order to guarantee the level of scientific quality you expect from ISCA. The Technical Programme Committee meeting will take place in Incheon, Korea, on May 30-31, and I am confident that the TPC will compile an excellent program for the event which – as with IS21– will be run in a hybrid manner. However, this year we expect that the majority of participants will show up in person, so I hope to welcome many of you in Korea.

The most rewarding duties as ISCA president are the announcements of awards. This time, I am particularly happy to announce that the 2022 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement will be awarded to

Prof. Lin-shan Lee

for his sustained innovation in all aspects of Chinese and English spoken language technologies.

Prof. Lin-shan Lee has pioneered a variety of spoken language technologies. Based in Taiwan from 1979, he had the very early vision of a voice-driven Chinese typewriter, to which he incorporated characteristics of the Chinese language, and successfully developed a comprehensive set of technologies for Mandarin. He formulated prosodic rules for Mandarin and made use of them in early TTS systems. Further, he pioneered the retrieval, understanding and organization of speech information, with the vision of a “spoken version of Google”. His work on speech information retrieval aimed at directly indexing and retrieving audio data for multimedia content, for precisely locating the exact timing of information. Again, this research led to a number of new technologies. These are just some examples of his numerous contributions to the field of spoken language technologies, as we will notice in the keynote talk he will present to us during the opening of Interspeech 2022.

As you know, ISCA has long recognized the importance of language diversity in speech research, and has been making efforts to connect linguistics, science and technologies. Prof. Lin-shan Lee has made significant, original contributions in all of these dimensions. ISCA is thus proud to award the 2022 Medal for Scientific achievements to him.

For the rest of this ISCApad, as always nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens, I wish you enjoyful reading.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA president