Dear ISCA members,

Over the past few months the ISCA Board has sought out nominations for the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement.It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Board, I announce that the ISCA Medalist for Scientific Achievement 2024 is Prof. Dr. Isabel Trancoso:

'For pioneering contributions to speech coding and resources for the Portuguese language, and the speech community.'

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. The ISCA Medal has been established in 1989.

The ISCA Medal will be presented to Prof. dr. Isabel Trancoso by the ISCA President at the Interspeech opening ceremony in Kos, Greece, where Isabel will deliver a keynote speech.

Isabel is a well-known figure within our association but for the newer members I’m happy to provide a short bio: Isabel is a full professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and a former president of ISCA. She also served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing for several years. She was elected ISCA Fellow in 2014. Also, being one of the few senior women in the field, she has been a role model for, I am sure, many younger female researchers.

Interspeech 2024 & Reviewing

Behind the scenes many people are working hard to organize Interspeech 2024 in Kos. I hope many of you managed to submit a first draft to Interspeech before the deadline of March 2. Looking at the steep increase in paper submission IDs towards the deadline, I get the impression that many were dealing with a last minute deadline rush. Great to see to so many papers submitted to our flagship conference!

For now: good luck finalising your submissions if you haven’t done so, note the deadline of March 11 for the final updates.

All these submitted papers of course need to be reviewed. If you are not yet an Interspeech reviewer, please check whether you qualify and sign up if you do! All the information can be found here: https://www.isca-speech.org/Reviewing

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA President

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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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 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

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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

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Dear ISCA Members,

Bids for Interspeech 2027

ISCA now invites bids for hosting Interspeech 2027. Interspeech conferences include papers on all the scientific and technological aspects of Speech. More than 1,500 participants from all over the world attend the conference annually to present their work in oral and poster sessions. Several satellite workshops and a Scientific and Industrial Exhibition highly enrich the conference content.

Interspeech conferences may be held in any country, although they generally should not occur on the same continent in two consecutive years. After this year's Interspeech conference in Dublin, the next conferences will be held in Greece  (replacing Jerusalem ,Israel) in 2024, Rotterdam (The Netherlands) in 2025, and Sydney (Australia) in 2026.

In order to prepare the bid, please contact the ISCA conference coordinators at conferences@isca-speech.org well in advance of the deadline in order to prepare a high-quality bid. Each bid needs to include:

• the bidding and budget template
• a detailed description of the bid
• other material which might be necessary for evaluating the bid

Guidelines on how to prepare an Interspeech conference can be found here.

Deadline for bid submission: extended to january 1st, 2024

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ISCA Medals and Fellows Nominations 2024

Nominations 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 5 January 2024 using the nomination form.  The ISCA Board will select the winner by 1 February and announce the winner in the March 2024 ISCApad. Unsuccessful candidates from previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy.  

The ISCA Service Medal recognizes 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 5 January 2024 using the nomination form. Unsuccessful candidates from previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy.  

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 Felows Selection Committee.. Fellows may be recognised by their outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. The supporting case for the candidate's nomination should include up to 3 major contributions which have had impact on the speech community and/or society in general. A nomination should be supported by 3 references from senior scientists/technologists in the Speech Communication community, for instance ISCA Fellows and ISCA Board members. Current ISCA Board members are not eligible for nomination. Members of the Fellows Selection Committee may not nominate candidates or provide references. All nominations for ISCA Fellow should be sent to fellows_nomination AT isca-speech.org by 10 February 2024 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 email address before January 10 with your name and contact email address.

More information can be found on the ISCA Honors webpage.

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Nominations Open for ISCA Distinguished Lecturers 2024

We are now open for nominations for ISCA’s Distinguished Lecturers scheme for the period 2024-25.

This outreach scheme supports leading researchers in Speech Communication to deliver lecture tours in regions where our field is under-represented.

Distinguished Lecturers normally serve for 2 years, during which time they typically undertake 3 lecture tours.

Details of the DL scheme, including the nomination form, are available on the ISCA Web Site here.

Each nomination should include the following information:

•  a short biography of the candidate

•  a selected summary of publication,

•  a personal website, or a resume that provides equivalent information,

•  topics/titles of up to three possible lectures that the nominee could give.

Please note that the nominator must ensure the candidate is willing to serve if elected. Nominations from previous years will be only considered if they have been updated. Self-nominations are permitted, but must include a letter of support from an ISCA Fellow or Board Member.

Nominations should be sent to dl_nominations@isca-speech.org before 31 January 2024

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