Dear ISCA members,

It’s honours and award season! In this president’s message, I am thrilled to announce our eight new ISCA Fellows.

Eight new 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 2025. Congratulations to them!

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

Nancy Chen, I2R (Institute for Infocomm Research), A*STAR, Singapore.

 For significant contributions and technical leadership in multilingual speech processing, multimodal human-machine communication, and AI technology deployment.

Alex Cristia, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris, France.

 For outstanding contributions to cross-cultural studies of language acquisition and transformative practices to support inclusive and open science.

Emmanuel Dupoux, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris, France.

 For multidisciplinary contributions to the study of language acquisition by humans and machines.

Sanjeev Khundapur, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.

 For contributions to neural-language-models and acoustic modeling for speech recognition, and for leadership in fostering a vibrant speech research community.

Hung-yi Lee, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.

 For pioneering contributions to speech self-supervised learning (SSL) and establishing community benchmarks for evaluating speech SSL technologies.

Thomas Quatieri, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, USA.

 For contributions to speech signal processing, speech motor control and vocal biomarkers discovery and their applications in health

Jan van Santen, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, USA.

 For his outstanding contribution in the field of spoken language understanding, focusing on mathematical modeling of prosody, signal processing, and computational  linguistics. 

Kai Yu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.

For contributions to speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems and real-world deployment of spoken language technology.

 Revision of the scope of the journal Computer Speech and Language

Recently the scope of the journal Computer Speech and Language (CSL) was changed from “Computer Speech or Language” to 'Computer Speech and Language'.  This means that CSL is no longer accepting submissions devoted only to Natural Language Processing (NLP), i.e., all new manuscripts must address some aspect of spoken language processing.  As a consequence, CSL's remit is now fully aligned with ISCA and Interspeech.  You can see the revised aims and scope on the CSL Home Page.

Updates from the ISCA Technical Committee (TC)

The ISCA technical committee (TC) is responsible for the long-term development and oversight of the review process of Interspeech. Every year, the review process of Interspeech is evaluated and areas for potential improvements are identified and investigated with the aim to improve the overall review quality and reviewing process for Interspeech. Currently the topics that the TC are looking into are:

1. Improving the organization structure of the area committee, to better retain expertise over the years.

2. Improving review quality by introducing feedback to reviewers (“you can improve your review by…”). This would probably require switching platforms from CMT to OpenReview.

3. Increasing the impact and prestige of Interspeech by introducing long papers to Interspeech with a lower acceptance rate.

4. Updating the list of research areas to better reflect current trends.

I wish you a great Spring/Autumn season.

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA President