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ISCApad #293 |
| Tuesday, November 08, 2022 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message from ISCA president Prof. Sebastian Möller
Dear friends of ISCA,
in this ISCApad, you will find the latest news from our association and community. Some points I would like to particularly highlight this month:
I wish you a pleasant read of the ISCApad, as usual kindly compiled by Chris Wellekens.
Sebastian Möller ISCA President
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| 2-2 | Professor Dr Hermann Künzel obituary
Prof. Dr. Hermann Jozef Künzel 10 April 1950 – 18 October 2022 Dear members of IAFPA, dear phoneticians, dear colleagues, It is with great sadness, that we have to inform you that Professor Hermann Künzel passed away last week on the 18th of October 2022. He was one of IAFPA`s founding members and the association‘s second President. Many of us in IAFPA remember him as a forensic colleague at the BKA, an academic colleague at the University, as a participant at IAFPA conferences, as a mentor, a lecturer or as a good friend. His enthusiasm for the field has inspired many of us. His time and energy contributed to forensic analysis seemed endless. Künzel`s many research projects played a key role in the improvement of analysis methods and a deeper understanding of the complexity of forensic investigations, and his work was essential in the development of the acoustic-phonetic method of forensic speaker recognition. His book called “Sprechererkennung”, published in 1987, offered the first detailed description of this method; it was used as a reference work in many developing forensic laboratories at the time and its content was studied and cited by academics and students worldwide. In 1977 he obtained his PhD from the University of Kiel. In May of 1980 Hermann Künzel became the very first linguist appointed by the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden. Under his guidance and over a period of 10 years the “Fachbereich Sprecher-Identifizierung; Tonband auswertung und linguistische Textanalyse” was established with several linguists and phoneticians carrying out between 200-350 cases per year. In addition, research projects were conducted in order to provide the theoretical background data necessary for the improvement of identification methods and for the interpretation of case findings. Few forensic laboratories at the time were able to conduct research; the international community profited greatly from the efforts of the Wiesbadener BKA scientists. Between 1994 and 1999 he was an Honorary Professor of Phonetics at University of Trier. Between 2000 and 2015 he was a professor and head of the Institute of Phonetics at the University of Marburg. Many forensic phoneticians who are currently working at the BKA or LKA, or who were employed there, were trained by him and developed their enthusiasm for forensic phonetics at that time. From 2000 onwards he was involved in the further development and testing of the BATVOX ID-system from the Agnitio Voice ID company and his work formed the basis for the integration of automatic speaker recognition into existing auditory-acoustic speaker identification methods. For many colleagues and students, Hermann Künzel was an inspirational pioneer, valuable advisor and mentor. In grateful remembrance, we take leave of our highly esteemed colleague and companion. Our deepest sympathy goes to his wife, Ute, and his family.
Gea de Jong-Lendle on behalf of the IAFPA
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| 2-3 | Call for DL nominations for 2023-2024 Call for DL nominations for 2023-2024
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.
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| 2-4 | Professor Ann Cutler in the Sidney Morning Herald A extensive obituary to our past colleage Ann Cutler hac been published in the Sidney Morning Herald:
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| 2-5 | ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL) Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer: Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan) Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy) Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)
SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH. The 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) will be held as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022, Marseille (FR), 24-25 June 2022. The SIGUL venue will provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers, and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages. Topics include but are not limited to:
We also invite position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues. Important Dates:
More details can be found on the workshop web page: https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/
SIGUL Board Sakriani Sakti Claudia Soria Maite Melero
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| 2-6 | ISCA Language SIGS ISCA supports speech communication research activities in various languages. The individual languages have equal interest, but they may involve have different technical or scientific problems. For example, some languages are tonal, while others are not; Some languages have only one writing system, while others have several. In the ISCA community, we have 6 language Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for Chinese, French, Italian, Iberian, Indian, and Russian. Each SIG is organised by researchers who speak the language of interest as L1 and others who have a technical or scientific interest in the language. Each SIG sponsors domestic and international research activities, and representative members of the SIGs attend a Lang SIG meeting every year during the INTERSPEECH conference. In this meeting, recent activities of each SIG are reported, and new ideas are exchanged. We also review what ISCA can do for the SIGs and what the SIGs can do for ISCA. Each SIG has its own web page, and you can visit the pages here. Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU The University of Tokyo Japan
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| 2-7 | ISCA Special Interest Group (SIG) 'Spoken Language Translation'
ISCA SIG “Spoken Language Translation” Aims. The SIG SLT covers all aspects of spoken language translation — simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas SIG SLT will (a) provide members of ISCA with a special interest in spoken language translation and its related areas with a means of exchanging news of recent research developments and other matters of interest in spoken language translation; (b) organize challenges and evaluation campaigns; (c) sponsor and organize the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), meetings, satellites, and tutorial workshops in spoken language translation, operating within the framework of ISCA's by-laws for SIGs; and (d) make available open-source code and data resources, best practices and tools, and evaluation metrics relevant to spoken language translation.
Motivation. Recent interest in speech translation and simultaneous translation by machine has been growing explosively, due to continued performance advances and a growing international need for simultaneous translation and interpretation, speech dubbing, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, cross-lingual communication including paralinguistic, emotional or multimodal information, and related areas. The under-covered elements in the current research are, for instance, incremental simultaneous speech-to-speech translation, paralinguistic translation, speaking style translation across languages. The proposed SIG will be organized by the members who are interested in spoken language translation/interpretation from various related areas such as ASR, TTS, and MT. SIG SLT emerged from over two decades of organizing the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) and its predecessor C-Star, scaling operations in response to significant growth in the field. The organizers of IWSLT and partners believe it is now time to join with ISCA by creating an ISCA SIG. IWSLT has a 15-year track record of profitability; it runs the premier benchmarking campaign on spoken language translation annually accompanied by an international scientific conference to present and discuss results.
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| 2-8 | ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA. ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) is pleased to invite postdoc & early career researchers to participate in the 1st Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering @ Interspeech 2021 (online this year).
The Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering aims to provide an opportunity for postdoc & early career researchers to meet and communicate at INTERSPEECH. In the framework of ISCA-PECRAC, we would like:
1st Early Career Researcher Annual Gathering @ Interspeech 2021 Time : August 30 at 18:00 - Brno time (preliminary slot) Location : Online Program :
Contacts: Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)
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| 2-9 | 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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| 2-10 | Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees
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| 2-11 | Code-of-Ethics for Authors (updated) Code of Ethics for Authors
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| 2-12 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-13 | SProSIG Officers Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,
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| 2-14 | Prosody slides and lecture videos @ ACL 2021 Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,
We are pleased to announce the open-source release of our tutorial on prosody, originally presented at ACL 2021. This includes about 400 powerpoint slides, with notes, downloadable from https://nigelward.com/prosody/ , and 29 video lectures based on this content, totaling about 4 hours, hosted at Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCFybA0SDVTjbQQRxJ1p2NnirCw_tk_z7 .
These we hope will be useful for - professors seeking slides to use for general-audiences talks - graduate students wanting to learn about aspects of prosody not taught at their institutions - engineers, clinicians and others seeking an overview of the field or some specific knowledge
Comments are welcome!
Gina-Anne Levow, Nigel G. Ward
Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso CCSB 3.0408, +1-915-747-6827 https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/
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| 2-15 | ISCA Medals and Fellows Nominations 2023ISCA Medals and Fellows Nominations 2023Nominations are open for the following ISCA Awards: 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 6 January 2023 using the nomination form. The ISCA Service Medal recognises 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 an ISCA Service Medal should be submitted to the ISCA Secretary at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 6 January 20223 using the nomination form. 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 except for those on the Fellows Selection Committee.. Fellows may be recognised by their outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. All nominations for ISCA Fellow should be sent to fellows_nomination@isca-speech.org by 10 February 2023 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 address before January 10. More information can be found on the ISCA Honors webpage.
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