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ISCApad Archive  »  2024  »  ISCApad #310  »  ISCA News

ISCApad #310

Tuesday, April 09, 2024 by Chris Wellekens

2 ISCA News
2-1Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, ISCA president

 

Dear ISCA members,

 

This president’s message is full of exciting news! We have seven new ISCA Fellows, a new ISCA Distinguished Lecturer, and the location of Interspeech 2027 has been chosen.

 

ISCA Fellows

Over the past few months the ISCA Board has sought out nominations for ISCA Fellows. It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Board, I announce that the following colleagues have been elected ISCA fellows. Their titles will be conferred formally at Interspeech 2024. Congratulations to them!

 

The ISCA Fellow program is to recognise ISCA members who have shown outstanding scientific and/or technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA.


 

Takayuki Arai, Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

 For contributions to developing models of speech production and applying them for speech science, technology, pathology and education

 

 

 

 Kay Berkling, DHBW Mosbach,  Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany

 For her contributions to education, improving childhood learning and boosting diversity through interactive technology

 

 

 

 Carlos Busso, University of Texas at Dallas, US

 For contributions to speech and multimodal affective signal processing and their technology applications

 

 

 

Sebastian Moller,Technische Universität Berlin, and German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Germany

 For sustained contributions to the evaluation of speech transmission, processing, and speech technology

 

 

 Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, US

 For contributions to robust speech recognition and other areas in speech and audio processing.

 

 

 

 Torbjorn Svendsen, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

 For contributions to speech processing research and long-standing   contributions to the speech community

 

 

 

Petra Wagner, Universität Bielefeld, Germany

 For contributions to multimodal prosody, conversational interaction, and speech synthesis.

ISCA Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2025)

Over the past few months the ISCA Board has sought out nominations for ISCA Distinguished Lecturer (DL). After a nomination and selection procedure, the new DL was chosen. It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Board, I announce that Rita Singh, Carnegie Mellon University, US, has been elected as ISCA DL. We wish her all the best for her upcoming travels.

 

 Rita Singh, Carnegie Mellon University, US

The Distinguished Lecturer (DL) programme is an Outreach activity which funds ISCA scientists to undertake lecture tours to parts of the world where our research field is not well represented.

 

Interspeech 2027

The Interspeech conference is the flagship conference of ISCA. After having been hosted on four different continents in the world, Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia (unfortunately Interspeech 2024 moved to Europe), Interspeech 2027 will be hosted in South America. Congratulations to the Sao Paulo, Brazil team for their winning bid!

 

Interspeech 2024 reviewing deadline

The Interspeech 2024 reviewing period has started. A big thank you to all Interspeech reviewers! Please note that for the smooth organisation of Interspeech 2024, it is of the utmost importance to finalise your reviews on time, and please do so before April 13.

 

Odette Scharenborg

Isca President

 

 

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2-2ELRA/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:

  • 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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2-3ISCA 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.
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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2-4ISCA 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.

 

  1. Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Satoshi Nakamura, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan (website)

  2. Secretary: Marco Turchi, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento, Italy (website)

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2-5ISCA-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:

  • 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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2-6ISCA 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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2-7Women in Speech Research

 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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2-8ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2024

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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