Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for Aug. 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 next month on Sept. 15-19, 2019, in Graz, AUSTRIA, with the theme being: Crossroads of Speech and Language.The Technical Program has been finalized with all paper decisions made. Please note that to ensure your paper is included in the program, you must complete your registration for the conference to cover your paper. I would again like to express our sincere thanks to the +1300 reviewers who participated in ensuring the highest quality technical program for this Interspeech-2019.

WELCOME new MEMBERS! I take this opportunity to welcome all the new ISCA members who have joined in response to Interspeech registration! ISCA is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing the field of speech communications world-wide, and we welcome all our new members who have recently joined and will be participating in INTERSPEECH-2019!

INTERSPEECH-2019 Events/Highlights:

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

• INTERSPEECH-2019 Registration: the standard registration period/rate for Interspeech-2019 deadline is Aug. 15, so please be aware of this (late registration is after Aug. 16).

• SPONSORSHIP & Exhibition Opportunities: there is still time and opportunities for sponsorship of Interspeech-2019. Since ISCA is a non-profit organization, we strive to provide support for our community in a cost-effective way. Many of the sponsorship opportunities directly help students and young researchers who may not have an opportunity to attend, receive a travel fellowship – and see the latest breakthroughs in science and technology for speech communications. Please if your organization has the resources, I encourage you to consider even a modest sponsorship!

• Tutorial Program with 8 highly respected individuals/teams covering a range of topics – consider one or more of these when you register.

• Survey Talks: this Interspeech, mini survey talks will be given that are integrated into the technical program. These are expected to encourage our ISCA members to expand their “comfort” space and go to areas outside of your main specialization!

• Satellite Events (link): there are eight satellite events/workshops which are taking place in conjunction with INTERSPEECH-2019 – so explore these in addition to our main event.

• SAC – Student Advisory Committee: a number of events are being organized by ISCA SAC to support student development including a mentoring program and Doctorial consortium (an excellent chance to get feedback on your research progress activities!).

• Young-Women-in-Speech event: this event is being organized to further advance diversity in both ISCA membership and activities for our society.

We encourage all students and young researchers attending to participate in these events!

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 on the speaking machine.

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 Commitment to our Membership:

ISCA is committed to promoting a safe, supportive, and professional experience for all peoples to work and contribute to advancing the field of speech communications. To this end, the ISCA Board has recently developed several documents to articulate our support:

(1) Code-of-Ethics for Authors (e.g., addressing data issues, (self-)plagiarism, copyright, human right issues), as well as .

(2) Code-of-Conduct for Conference Attendees (e.g., addressing harassment and discrimination based on on gender, race, religion, etc.)

If you have any suggestions, please contact us.

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

Top

Code-of-Ethics for Authors

ISCA is committed to publishing high-quality journals and conference
proceedings.  To this end, all authors are requested to ensure they
adhere to ethical standards, specifically (but not limited to):

(1) the work does NOT include fabrication, falsification or any kind
of data breach.  Authors should keep their code and log data that
produced the results in the paper.

(2) the work does NOT include plagiarism or significant
self-plagiarism.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors)
may use tools to detect plagiarism and reject papers without review.

(3) the work does NOT use figures, photographs or any other kind of
content whose copyright is not owned by or granted to the authors,
except for proper quotations allowed by the copyright law.  ISCA (and
conference organizers or journal editors) may request authors to
provide evidence of permission to use the content for their work.

(4) the work does NOT include inappropriate content in terms of human
rights.  ISCA (and conference organizers or journal editors) may
request authors to provide evidence of approval from the host Ethics
Committee (Institutional Review Board or equivalent) that the work
meets their Institution's ethical requirements, and/or explicit
consent from the human subjects used in the work.

(5) all (co-)authors must be responsible and accountable for the work,
and consent to its submission.

If any concerns relating to this code are raised or reported, ISCA
(and conference organizers or journal editors) will set up a committee
to investigate the matter and decide on appropriate action including
withdrawal of the paper and suspension of future submissions by the
authors.

ISCA also enforces the NO-show policy for conference papers.  Any
paper accepted into the technical program, but not presented on-site,
may be withdrawn from the official proceedings.  Please refer to
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/conferences point 2) and 8).


* Short version: (to be posted in a limited space)

ISCA is committed to publishing high-quality journals and conference
proceedings. Our code-of-ethics for authors can be found at:
    http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/about-isca?id=279

Top

Code-of-Conduct for Conference and Workshop Attendees

ISCA is committed to providing a pleasant conference experience
without harassment and discrimination for anyone, regardless of
gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability and physical
appearance.  We do not tolerate any verbal or non-verbal expressions
of harassment or discrimination.  Please note that it matters if a
person feels harassed or discriminated regardless of the original
intent of the expressions. In particular, sexual language and imagery
are not appropriate in any conference venue.  Conference participants
who engage in inappropriate behavior may be expelled from the
conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference
organizer. These persons may be included in a watchlist for future
ISCA-sponsored events.

If you are troubled by the behavior of another attendee at the
conference, or notice someone is in trouble, please speak immediately
to a member of conference staff or send a message to <ethics@isca-speech.org>.

Your concern will be heard in confidence and taken seriously to solve
the problem.

* Short version: (to be posted in a limited space)

ISCA is committed to a pleasant conference experience without
harassment and discrimination. Our code-of-conduct can be found at:
    http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/about-isca?id=278

Top

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.

Top

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

Top

All ICASSP-2019 papers are now downloadable from IEEExplore for everyone (not just Explore members), but only for a 30-day period, ending mid-May.

Top

video of Interspeech 2018 keynotes is  uploaded on ISCA website

Top

 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

Top

The Christian Benoit Award has been granted  to Sankar Mukherjee for his research project  on Neuro-behavioral Aware Conversational Agent.

Congratulations!

Top