Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for April 2019!  This edition has a number of updates from the community including upcoming meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements.

Interspeech-2019: [http://www.interspeech2019.org/] will take place September 15-19, 2019, in Graz, AUSTRIA, with the theme being: Crossroads of Speech and Language.This past month, the Interspeech-2019 organizers received a record number of more than 2000 initial submissions (March 29^rd was the deadline for paper submissions, with final update deadline of April 5^th). The conference promises to be very engaging and wide participation across all topic areas of speech communication. A few announcements pertaining to Interspeech-2019 follow here.

New Elevated ISCA Fellows for 2019:We are pleased to announce the following seven ISCA members will be elevated to ISCA Fellow in 2019. They will recognized at INTERSPEECH-2019 and receive their ISCA Fellow Plaque, Certificate, and Pin at the opening ceremony. Please join me in congratulating our colleagues for their significant contributions to the field!

     Martine Adda-Decker (France): “For contributions to multilingual speech

   processing and large-scale, corpus-based linguistics, and for bridging

   communities”

       Jennifer Cole (USA): “For theoretical and experimental descriptions of the sources

       of phonological and prosodic variability in spontaneous speech”

     Mark Gales (UK): “For wide ranging, fundamental contributions to research and leadership

      in the fields of speech recognition, synthesis and statistical modelling algorithms”

    Valerie Hazan (UK): “For contributions to speech perception and production”

 Douglas O'Shaugnessy (Canada): “For contributions to automatic speech recognition and

  leadership in the speech community”

    Yannis Stylianou (Greece): “For contributions to speech analysis, speech modification

     and speech communication”

    Christian Wellekens (Belgium): “For pioneering contributions in the use of neural networks

     in   automatic speech recognition and education activity in speech science”

ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement:

While we announced this in the last ISCApad, I am including the ISCA Medal for Scientific

 Achievement announcement again. I am pleased to announce that ISCA has selected

 Dr. Keiichi Tokuda as the recipient of ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2019  in

 recognition of “Pioneering the statistical parametric approach to speech synthesis, and 

  for leadership in the provision of enabling software tools.” Prof. Tokuda is the originator 

     of many of the early methods for statistical parametric speech synthesis using  HMMs, which now

     include DNN and LSTM-based statistical parametric speech synthesis methods.

     Dr. Keiichi Tokuda will deliver a plenary speech in INTERSPEECH 2019.

                                   Congratulations to Dr. Keiichi Tokuda!

INTERSPEECH-2019 Events/Highlights:

I would also like to point out some additional items taking place at Interspeech-2019…

• Tutorials (link): the organizing committee has put together a Tutorial Program with 8 highly respected individuals/teams covering a range of topics.

• Show & Tell (link): the deadline for contributions for show & tell approaching! - deadline is April 26. This is an excellent chance to highlight new technologies, demos, and systems!

• Survey Presentations (link): at this ISCA Interspeech-2019, the Organizing Committee has established an new option to have survey papers presenting overviews of an area with talks lasting 40min. If you have interest, the deadline is May 3.

• Satellite Events (link): finally, there are eight satellite events/workshops which are taking place in conjunction with INTERSPEECH-2019.

Again, this is the first time Interspeech will be held in Austria, and it promises to be a great opportunity to experience

speech and language processing in a country where one of the first major published works on

speech by Wolfgang von Kempelen originated (original speaking machine

 {read his original publication here (link)})!

There are still opportunities for industry sponsorship, and I encourage companies to

consider providing even modest support, since this allows for the organizers to provide

expanded opportunities for attendees, particularly for students and young researchers

exploring job prospects!

Supporting Diversity in Speech Communication:

ISCA has launched a new area on the ISCA website to support diversity in speech communication. This is intended to offer opportunities for organizers of workshops and conferences to help expand diversity representation in terms of geographic, gender, and topic/specialization. Please visit the ISCA website to learn more! https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/

ISCA INTERSPEECH-2022 (location announcement):

Finally, I would like to update all on the ISCA Board evaluation process which took place for potential sites for ISCA INTERSPEEH-2022. We received four highly competitive proposals which were reviewed extensively by the ISCA Conferences Sub-Committee and discussed in ISCA Board Virtual Meeting as well. The board completed two rounds of voting in order to select the final entry, and I am pleased to announce that ISCA INTERSPEECH-2022 will take place in Dublin, Ireland! I encourage all interested in organizing future Interspeech events to consider submitting proposals, especially for regions which have not hosted Interspeech in recent years!

As always, we welcome feedback and input from the ISCA community – if you have suggestions for our society or want to be involved, please let us know!

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and Interspeech-2019!

John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President

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Dear Members,

Thank you to those members who have voted in the 2019 ISCA Board Election.

This is a reminder for other members to VOTE NOW! Voting closes 30 April 2019. There are 12 qualified nominations for 6 vacant seats on the ISCA board. According to the ISCA by-laws, you are invited to vote for any number of candidates from 0 to 12 in the 2019 ISCA Board Election. Each vote has equal weight.

Please visit http://www.isca-speech.org/iscavote to cast your vote using your ISCA userID and password. After voting, you can still revise your vote at any time before 30-Apr-2019.

Only current ISCA members are eligible to vote. If your ISCA membership has lapsed please consider rejoining now so you can vote. You will get the reduced registration fees for Interspeech and other ISCA sponsored workshops and training schools. Join now at https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/membership Thank you for your participation!

Best regards, ISCA Board  

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At the start of this new year 2019, we invite you to update your contact and
professional information on the ISCA Membership Portal:

   http://www.isca-speech.org/iscamember/member.php

 

If you are one of the people who have multiple START IDs with different emails, please let us know your preferred username and we will see about cleaning this up.

 We are also updating the reviewer base in anticipation of Interspeech 2019.
 Please think to nominate yourself or your colleagues to serve as reviewers.

 The recommended required experience is for the nominee to have obtained their
 PhD and be first author of at least one journal article or several conference
 papers. If the nominee stopped their studies with a Masters, they should have
 at least 5-7 years of experience and be the first author of at least one or
 two journal articles and several conference papers.

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 Tenth Christian Benoît Award conferred by the International Speech Communication Association  and the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée
  Deadline May 15, 2019
 
The Christian Benoît Award has been conferred periodically by the Association Christian Benoit until 2017. In 2018, the oversight of this Award was assumed  by ISCA and sponsored jointly by both ISCA and AFCP. It is awarded through a competitive nomination and review process to promising young scientists in the domain of SPEECH COMMUNICATION to further their career in the field. The focus of the award’s research topic may emphasize basic science or applied research projects.
 
The Award provides the elected scientist with financial support for the development of a personal short-term research project that:  (1) illustrates concretely the achievements of her/his research work; (2) could help in promoting his/her work in the scientific community, institutions and grant agencies in their geographical region/country; (3) gives an overall view of the state of the art in the particular research domain.  The proposed research project can take on the form of a demonstration, a technical product/system, or of a pedagogical multi-media product (movie, website, interactive software…).
 
The Award is valued at 7,500 Euros(*)
 
The commitments of the elected scientist who receives the award are: -- to attend the Interspeech-2019 Conference in Graz, Austria -- to deliver the final product of the project within 2 years -- to present her/his results at a future ISCA-endorsed event, specific to the research domain of the applicant.
 
In the application, the candidate should provide -- a statement of research interests (2 pages max), -- a detailed curriculum vitae including a list of the most relevant publications for the project. -- a description of the proposed short-term research project (5 to 15 pages max). The description should include a presentation of the scientific and/or pedagogical objectives and the methodological aspects, a link to the former research work of the applicant, and a detailed description of the provisional budget.
 
Applications will be evaluated by an international committee including experts in the field of Speech Communication and representatives of the institutions supporting the award.
 
Applications should be sent to gerard.bailly@gipsa-lab.fr before Monday May 15, 2019 Electronic submissions are mandatory
 
The successful candidate will be notified by June 15, 2019. The Award will be conferred at the Interspeech-2019 Conference in Graz, Austria (www.interspeech2019.org)
 
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* 3,500 Euros will be given immediately; with the remaining 4,000 Euros  available on reception of the multimedia project by the chair of the ISCA Award committee. Travel and registration costs necessary to attend the Interspeech 2019 Conference will have to be paid from this grant.
** For details about the Association Christian Benoît and the past awardees of the Christian Benoît Award see http://www.gipsa-lab.fr/acb/

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We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Lecturers for 2018-2019:

(1)   Dr. Daniel Hirst, Directeur de Recherche Emeritus, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, France

(2)  Prof. Takayuki  Arai, Professor, Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Science and Technology, Sophia University, Japan

Congratulations.

Satoshi Nakamura

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Video archives are available in 

http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/video-archive 

where keynote speeches from IS 2010 can be seen. You will also find video archives 

of many other conferences.

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 The photographs are representative and to go to the respective albums, please click on the photographs.

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INTERSPEECH 2018

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The article 'Rediscovering 25 Years of Discoveries in Spoken Language Processing: A Preliminary ISCA Archive Analysis', published at Interspeech 2013 on the occasion of the ESCA/ISCA Silver Jubilee, has been extended to the production and analysis of the NLP4NLP corpus containing close to 65,000 articles published in major conferences and journals in speech and language processing over 50 years (1965-2015) on various aspects (publication, collaboration, citation, innovation, plagiarism,...). The results of those analyses have recently been assembled in a series of two papers published in a special issue on 'Mining Scientific Papers: NLP-enhanced Bibliometrics' of the 'Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics' journal :

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00036/full

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2018.00037/full

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