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ISCApad Archive » 2024 » ISCApad #315 » ISCA News » Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, President of ISCA |
ISCApad #315 |
| Friday, September 13, 2024 by Chris Wellekens |
2-1 Message of Dr Odette Scharenborg, President of ISCA
Dear ISCA members, Dear ISCA members,
It’s been a week since Interspeech finished. I look back at a wonderful, fruitful, and science- and fun-filled Interspeech in Kos, Greece. This Interspeech was the 25th Interspeech. We celebrated this with videos of the leaders in our field and lots of photos from previous Interspeech conferences. I hope you enjoyed those!
I first want to thank Itshak Lapidot and Sharon Gannot, the two great General Chairs, and Jean-François Bonastre, Reinhold Häb-Umbach, and Luciana Ferrer, the three amazing TPC chairs, for organizing this great event with their team and PCO Ortra. They worked very hard to not only make this conference the success it was, but also while moving the conference to another country. Interspeech was also made possible by the many sponsors and exhibitors, thank you for supporting and being part of our great community! And of course a big thank you to the many reviewers of the 2000+ papers that were submitted to Interspeech. If you are not yet a reviewer, check the criteria and sign up here: https://www.isca-speech.org/Reviewing !
The more than 1800 participants got to enjoy
and several great social events including live music and a lot of dancing.
At Interspeech we celebrated the new ISCA Medalist for Scientific Achievement, seven new ISCA fellows, three best student paper awards, two best journal paper awards, one best poster award at the Young Female Researchers in Speech Science and Technology Workshop, one best Interspeech paper, and two best paper awards of the 4th Symposium on Security & Privacy in Speech Communication. Congratulations to all!
This year’s Interspeech hosted several special sessions which specifically aimed to bring together people from speech science and speech technology on a common topic. This allowed all attendees to learn from each other. Finally, we continue to focus on furthering the integration of people from minorities and geographically distant areas into our association. ISCA stands for inclusivity and respectful treatment of everyone by everyone.
On Monday September 2nd, we held our yearly General Assembly, where we presented our budget and all the things the board has been working on the past year, these include a new website and new rules for Distinguished Lecturer. We also have been working on two new exciting plans: a new ISCA award, to complement our current Fellows program and ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, and a life-time membership for our senior members. We’re also working on improving our support for ISCA workshops. Watch this space for updates in the months to come! We’ll continue to work on further professionalising the software supporting ISCA and our administrative staff, community building, strengthening of the ties with external associations and related research areas, and strengthening the speech science part in ISCA and at Interspeech.
Finally, I would like to thank our members of the ISCA Advisory Council who provides the ISCA board with their opinions and advice on many different topics during the meeting in Kos and throughout the year. And a big thank you to Chris Wellekens, who for so many years now, has dedicated some of his time to put together this ISCAPad every month.
Logo competition In honor of Interspeech's 25th anniversary, we are excited to launch a competition to design a new ISCA logo! Participants should design a logo that embodies ISCA, the home for speech science and technology researchers and innovators. Please take inspiration from ISCA’s mission: to promote activities and exchanges in speech communication science and technology. The logo should not only align with the expectations of ISCA’s existing members but also serve to attract a wider audience, ultimately representing speech and language science and technology. Find all the information you need here: https://isca-speech.org/Logo-Design-Competition Deadline: October 25, 2025
Volunteers Are you interested in supporting our great association with your time or expertise? Are you interested in building your CV? Are you interested in learning more about how ISCA and the ISCA board work and would you like to help out? That is great! Now that ISCA has grown so large, we could use your support! Please sign up by filling in the form on the ISCA home page: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckba3R1XSxnHYoB8yKGNcM84siurQSOD3qY8oGgPN6naejDw/viewform
ISCA Archive Did you know that our ISCA Archive hosts almost 40.000 papers from more than 360 workshops and conferences dating back all the way to 1987? The ISCA Archive moved to a new location: https://www.isca-archive.org and has several new features including the possibility of adding an erratum. Please check out the new website! A big thank you to Martin Cooke and Sebastien Le Maguer who have put in so much of their time and effort into making this great archive available to everyone!
We want to hear from you! Therefore, during this year’s Interspeech, we asked Interspeech participants to fill out a survey, in return for which they received cool blue ISCA sunglasses. Thank you everyone who filled out the survey! But we also want to hear from those ISCA members who were not there at Interspeech. What is it that you would like ISCA to do, to improve, not to do, to provide? What would you like to get out of your ISCA membership? Do you have any cool ideas or suggestions? Anything you would like to share with us, please contact us through communication@isca-speech.org.
ISCA Board elections Next year April, we will have new ISCA board elections. If you are interested in learning more about joining the ISCA board, please let us know! We are happy to talk to you.
Important dates
Odette Scharenborg ISCA president
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