Dear friends of ISCA,

Many of you will be on holidays, but the ISCApad is still active in providing you with the latest news from our community, as usual nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens. Most important is of course the news related to the upcoming Interspeech in Dublin, including its satellite events.

With respect to the Interspeech program, I would like to highlight in particular the following events:

• The opening ceremony on Monday August 21, where we will welcome the eight new ISCA fellows, and award a number of Scientific and Service Medals;

• The keynote talk by the recipient of the ISCA 2023 Medal for Scientific Achievement: Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan, who received it for his sustained and diverse contributions to speech communication science and technology and its application to human-centered engineering systems;

• The keynote by Virginia Dignum on Tuesday August 22, on “the AI hype” – and how a need for responsible AI requires all to emphasize trust, cooperation, and common good;

• The debate session on Wednesday August 23 on how end-to-end approaches to speech technology impact our field, moderated by Roger Moore;

• The keynote by Martine Grice on Thursday August 24, exploring why and how intonational rises orient attention;

• A further panel session on assessing and mitigating AI bias in speech processing systems, nine special sessions and three challenges, demo and show-and-tell sessions, as well as overview talks on selected areas of our community;

• Events organized by the ISCA-SAC and ISCA-PECRAC addressing the needs of students and young researchers, and by our Diversity Committee making INTERSPEECH an even more inclusive event.

This will be my last message as your ISCA President. As you know, elections for the ISCA Board were held in April this year, and six members of the new Board were elected, whom we will welcome at the General Assembly taking place on Monday, August 21. The General Assembly will be the time when we will hand over the responsibilities to the new Board. Please join us and support your scientific association so that we can best serve all of you!

It was a pleasure to serve all of you in my ISCA Board roles, first as a conference coordinator, and last as the president. I wish the new Board all the best in supporting this vibrant community even better, with fresh ideas and initiatives.

I wish you a nice summer, and hope to see you all in Dublin, Ireland, for Interspeech 2023.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President

Back

Top

2023 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:

Is it is common practice since several years, the ISCA Fellows Selection Committee has worked over the last months 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 2023.  Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join us in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communication and technology!  All will be recognized at INTERSPEECH 2023 in Dublin, Ireland, in August.

• Prof. Gerard Bailly (GIPSA-Lab, CNRS & Grenoble Alps Univ., France) “For contributions to multimodal speech generation and bridging the gaps between speech research and social robotics”

• Prof. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (University of Illinois, USA) “For contributions to knowledge-constrained signal generation”  

• Prof. Kate Knill (University of Cambridge, UK) “For technical contributions in multi-language/accent, low-resource speech processing and long-standing service to the speech community”                         

• Prof. Hanseok Ko (Korea University, Korea) “For sustained innovation in Korean and English spoken language technologies”

• Prof. Kikuo Maekawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan) “For contributions to the development of language resources for the study of Japanese as a spoken language”

• Prof. Elmar Nöth (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany) “For innovative and extensive contributions to the analysis of pathological speech signals”

• Prof. Alexandros Potamianos (Amazon Alexa and University of Southern California, USA) “For contributions to human-centered speech and multimodal signal analysis and conversational technologies”

• Prof. Shinji Watenabe (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) “For wide ranging, fundamental contributions to research and leadership in speech recognition technologies”

Phil Green (ISCA Fellows Board Member)

Sebastian Möller (ISCA President)

Back

Top

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:

• general research on under-resourced languages.

• transfer-learning techniques for under-resourced languages (zero-shot, few-shot training);

• unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to build applications for under-resourced languages;

• use of multilingual pre-trained language models to under-resourced languages;

• speech technologies for under-resourced languages.

We also invite position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues.

Important Dates:

• Paper submission deadline: 11 April 2022

• Notification of acceptance: 3 May 2022

• Camera-ready paper: 23 May 2022

• Workshop date: 24-25 June 2022

More details can be found on the workshop web page: https://sigul-2022.ilc.cnr.it/

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero

Back

Top

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.
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/sigs

Do you want to start a new language SIG? If so, please visit the page above and check what you have to prepare for your SIG. Although it is not yet announced, we’re going to launch a new language SIG in the near future, perhaps for your native language. If so, please support it!.

Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU

The University of Tokyo

Japan

Back

Top

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:

• to establish link and collaboration between postdocs in different institutions and early career researchers from all over the world,

• to keep postdoc & early career researchers posted with current postdoc & tenure-track job offers,

• to provide mentoring,

• to give feedback to their major issues (in research),

• to create an environment where postdoc & early career researchers can socialize with their peers.

Contacts:

Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr)

Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)

Back

Top

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

Back

Top

 ISCA is committed to supporting diversity in speech communication, and celebrating speech
communication as an exciting and diverse field of research and discovery. Moreover, ISCA
is committed to gender equality.

We are therefore delighted to announce that the database with names, affiliations,
positions, and research topics of women in speech science and speech technology,
originally started by Maxine Eskenazi, is now a wonderful, searchable website, created by
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson.

The website can be found at http://isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/diversity?id=264

The website can be used for, amongst others:
- Workshop and conference organisers to search for keynote and invited speakers,
panelists, and co-organisers
- Nominations for distinguished lecturers
- Norminations for awards, medals, fellowships, and prizes
- Prospective new faculty by faculty search committees

If you identify yourself as female and want to be added to this list, please follow the
instructions on the WomenNspeech website.

We hope this website will be useful to many!

Julia Hirschberg
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Odette Scharenborg

Back

Top

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/ 

Back

Top

We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024:

Dr. Visar Berisha, School of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, USA

Congratulations.

Nobuaki Minematsu @ The University of Tokyo

Back

Top

ISCA Board Election 2023-2027

The ISCA Board Election has completed and the following have been elected to the ISCA Board for 2023-2027 (in alphabetical order):

Beena Ahmed,  Australia

Tom Bäckström, Finland

Esther Klabbers, USA 

Nobuaki Minematsu, Japan 

Jianhua Tao, China 

Meg Zellers, Germany 

Thanks to all the candidates for standing and the 544 members who voted. The new Board will take over after this year's General Assembly which will be held during INTERSPEECH 2023.

Torbjørn Svendsen

ISCA Secretary on behalf of the ISCA Board

Back

Top