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ISCApad #297 |
| Monday, March 06, 2023 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | Message from ISCA president Prof. Sebastian Möller
Dear friends of ISCA,
I guess that many of you have been busy in writing papers for our flagship conference. The submission deadline for the abstract which was March 1st has now passed, and the organizers have received an overwhelming number of initial submissions, confirming the enthusiasm researchers have in sharing their research findings and participating in this year’s INTERSPEECH. If you have submitted a paper, you will have noted that the submission system changed to CMT, and also the system for matching reviewers to papers has been changed. In addition, all submissions are now double-blind; we hope that these changes help us to maintain a high quality of accepted papers.
This March is a very special month for me and ISCA, as I have two important announcements to make: First, the selection process for Interspeech 2026 was successful. We are happy that we had very strong candidates, with very strong bids, and in the end the ISCA Board voted for Sydney, Australia, for hosting INTERSPEECH 2026. Congratulations to Felicity Cox, her entire team, as well as to the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA), for this success! ISCA is very happy to return to Australia after Interspeech 2009 in Brisbane, and after ICSLP 1998 also to Sydney, for running its flagship event.
The second announcement is also a very pleasant one: The ISCA Board is happy to announce that the 2023 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement – our most prestigious award – will be awarded to
Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
for his sustained and diverse contributions to speech communication science and technology and its application to human-centered engineering systems.
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan, ISCA fellow since 2016, is known to most of you for his excellent work in areas as diverse as speech production, articulatory acoustics, speech prosody, speech and language processing, prosody modeling, speech translation, speech synthesis, spoken dialog and conversational systems, behavioral signal processing, affective computing, multimodal signal processing, as well as biomedical signal and image processing. A hallmark of Shri’s research is its inclusive nature in creating technologies that are robust and equitable in the presence of the rich diversity e.g., developmental differences in children, differences in traits or other demographic variables including psychological state, and health status.
His career, in industry (AT&T Bell Labs/AT&T Research, 1995-2000) and subsequently in academia (University of Southern California, 2000-present), has created interdisciplinary approaches to human-centered sensing/imaging, signal and information processing, and computational modeling inspired by applications centered on human communication, interaction and behavior. His interdisciplinary scientific and engineering contributions are exemplified in over 900 peer-reviewed publications, numerous original curated datasets and tools widely-used worldwide, sustained leadership in technical projects, 18 granted patents (leading to 3 startups), over 100 invited keynote and plenary presentations worldwide, and mentoring over 80 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars.
Shri’s research has led to inventions and their commercialization with broad impact. To name just a few, the patents on voice interfaces laid the early foundation for now ubiquitous speech-based services and information retrieval on the cloud, and for mobile devices. The series of patents on automatic speech recognition for mobile devices paved the way for adaptive on-device (e.g., smartphone) speech processing and user personalization. Shri is also collaborating with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. ISCA is very proud to award the 2023 Medal for Scientific achievements to him.
For the rest of this ISCApad, I wish you a good read; as usual, it was nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens.
Sebastian Möller ISCA president
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| 2-2 | Call for ISCA conferences Reviewers
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| 2-3 | 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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| 2-4 | 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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| 2-5 | 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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| 2-6 | ISCA-PEDRAC: a new service of ISCA. ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) 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:
Contacts: Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)
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| 2-7 | 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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| 2-8 | Women in Speech Research ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
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| 2-9 | 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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| 2-10 | Election of members for the Board of ISCA (4-year term: 2023-2027) Election of members for the Board of ISCA (4-year term: 2023-2027)
The ISCA Board currently has 15 members from 11 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: Sebastian MÖLLER, John HANSEN and Torbjørn SVENDSEN. Nobuaki MINEMATSU,Jianhua TAO and Margaret ZELLERS will be ending their first term. Thus we have openings for 6 members for the 2023-2027 term. In accordance with the ISCA by-laws, elections to the Board will take place in April-May 2023. 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 10, 2023 (Monday) with the following information:
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require further information about the nomination process or about duties of ISCA Board members.
Areas: See the ISCA website for more information about the areas.
Current Board: Sebastian MÖLLER (ISCA President) (retiring from Board) Odette SCHARENBORG (ISCA Vice-President) Nancy CHEN Mariapaola D’IMPERIO Joakim Gustafsson Nobuaki MINEMATSU(end of 1st term) SR Mahadeva PRASANNA Ioana VASILESCU
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