Dear ISCA members:

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

New ISCA Members: For all of those who joined as ISCA Members and participated in ISCA Interspeech-2019, WELCOME! ISCA strives to embrace the diverse field of speech communication, including science, technology, and all aspects relating to human speech production, human-to-machine, and human interaction/communications. We especially encourage you to get involved and participate in some of the ISCA SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS (SIGS), the many supported ISCA Workshops, Summer/Seasonal Schools, as well as considering having an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer visit your institution/organization.

ISCA Board 2019-2020: For 2019, we completed the election process, and during ISCA INTERSPEECH-2019, we officially ushered in the new 2019/20 ISCA Board.

I would again like to recognize and thank those ISCA Board Members who completed their service:

   Lori Lamel: responsible for overseeing: Student Activities Committee, and ISCA

Technical Committee

  Satoshi Nakamura: responsible for overseeing: Special Interest Groups (SIGs) - Languages,

Distinguished Lecturers Program

   Kay Berkling: responsible for – Communication, especially working with Phil Green on

SCOOT, and other outreach efforts for support of education.

I would like to welcome our newest ISCA Board Members who will be contributing to next year’s ISCA activities:

Margaret “Meg” Zellers

Nobuaki Minematsu

Jianhua Tao

We thank our newest Board Members for their willingness to serve and contribute to the goals of ISCA.

Interspeech-2019: [http://www.interspeech2019.org/] (September 15-19, 2019), in Graz, AUSTRIA: A sincere thank you to the INTERSPEECH-2019 Organizing Team, especially General Chairs:Gernot Kubin and Zdravko Kačič, and Technical Program Chairs: Thomas Hain and Björn Schuller, whose commitment to the countless organizational logistics ensured that this was one of the most well organized and memorable INTERSPEECH events to date. The theme of: Crossroads of Speech and Language, was echoed throughout the technical and social program. With the incorporation of creative music in the opening and closing sessions, including innovative artistic performances that highlighted the creative use of speech and music and synthesis – providing a great opportunity to experience speech and language processing in a country which produced one of the first major published speech works by Wolfgang von Kempelen’s on his speaking machine.

The conference broke all records, with 2056 attendees (the largest to date for any Interspeech), as well as diverse representation based on gender (75% male/25% female), work employment (58% Academic; 38% Industry; 3% Government/Other), as well as a good balance between speech science and speech technology (attendees who completed the survey noted: 48% “Speech Science” = 5 Most Important, and 65% “Speech Technology” = 5 Most Important).

We also recognized and honored seven leaders in our field, with the following seven pioneers being recognized as ISCA Fellows for 2019. This brings the total number of ISCA FELLOWS recognized to date to 75 (starting from 2008).

Martine Adda-Decker

Mark Gales

Yannis Stylianou

Douglas O'Shaugnessy

Jennifer Cole

Valerie Hazan

Christian Wellekens

In addition to the ISCA Fellows program, we also awarded the ISCA MEDAL for Scientific Achievement, the highest technical honor bestowed from our society to

Prof. Keiichi TOKUDA for his “pioneering statistical parametric approaches in speech synthesis, and for leadership in the provision of enabling software tools”. Congratulations to Prof. Tokuda for his remarkable accomplishments to the field!

For those of you who attended, the conference banquet was remarkable! Held in a magnificent venue which included, again with the same IS-19 theme, a range of live music performances, as well as professional dance exhibitions. I also noted that many hopefully checked off a once in a life-time “to-do” of dancing the Viennese Waltz in Austria! Very happy to see the many participants in this event – including many ISCA Board Members who showed their dance skills in this wonderful venue!

The technical progam was equally balanced, technically innovative, and efficiently executed. There were many attendees, yet the well organized space, options for coffee breaks spread out, and exhibits made it very enjoyable.

I  would be remiss of me not to mention the creative design for the poster sessions – which as most conference attendees would confirm, you can never have too much space between posters! One of the most innovations for IS-19 was the design of the poster spaces themselves. The organizers were able to get the school of design at the Technical Univ. of Graz, to develop sound absorbing space units which actually contributed to suppressing conversations between posters, in addition to configuring the poster setups to face the conversations away from each other. This resulted in both compact poster space with maximum sound suppression between posters. Really an innovative idea for this meeting!

The closing Ceremony was equally creative and enjoyable. Recognizing all those involved in the organization and logistics for INTERSPEECH-2019. I, the ISCA Board, as well as all ISCA members express our thanks to the industry sponsors (Amazon Alexa, Apple, DiDI, ASAPP, Facebook, Microsoft, Nuance, NaverLine, Google, Alibaba, DataBaker, IBM Research, Yahoo, Uber) for the support of the conference. The INTERSPEECH-2019 Organizing Committee should be congratulated for a REMARKABLE job in this Interspeech!

Future ISCA INTERSPEECH Conferences:Some updates here are needed for upcoming Interspeech conferences.

• IS-2020: In the closing ceremony, we welcomed all to attend the next Interspeech-2020 Conference, which will take place in Shanghai, China (http://www.interspeech2020.org/). The first deadline is for Special Sessions and Challenges, which is due Nov. 29^th, 2019.

• IS-2021 will take place in Brno, Czech Republic (https://www.interspeech2021.org/)

While it was reported in the closing ceremony that IS-2022 would take place in Dublin, Ireland, a number of logistics issues unfortunately developed which resulted in the ISCA Board having to re-assess the location for 2022. As a result, the bidding process is being reconsidered for Interspeech-2022. We do hope to see a bid in the future from the country of Ireland for Interspeech.

Currently, because of the decision to re-evaluate bids for Interspeech-2022, the deadline for submissions for INTERSPEECH-2023 has been changed to Feb. 28, 2020 (it was previously Nov. 1, 2019). We would like to encourage all countries/potential host sites to consider submitting a bid to host Interspeech. Our goal is to support the field of speech communication worldwide, so please reach out to the ISCA if you have interest or any questions [send email to  conferences@isca-speech.org]; (the ISCA website https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php includes Guidelines, Bidding & Budget Templates).

ISCA Medal For Scientific Achievement: the nomination process is now open for nominating the 2020 ISCA Scientific Medal. See https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors for a list of ISCA Honors and consider nominating your colleagues and those you feel are deserving of recognition.

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-2020 next year! Until the next ISCApad, be safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President

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Possibility to re-bid for Interspeech 2022 and deadline extension for bids for Interspeech 2023

ISCA has established a bidding process for Interspeech conferences which has been successful over the past years. In this process, feedback is provided for bidders to optimize bids prior to the deadline, the received bids are discussed first in the ISCA Advisory Council and then in the ISCA Board, and finally the ISCA Board takes a decision in terms of (one or several) votings to identify the optimum bid. For the Interspeech 2022 edition, this process led to Dublin being selected to host Interspeech 2022, as it was announced at the past Interspeech conference in Graz.

Due to several circumstances, the ISCA Board has re-assessed the Dublin bid and had to withdraw this decision very recently. As a consequence, the ISCA Board now re-opens the evaluation for Interspeech 2022 since there is currently no identified location for hosting Interspeech 2022. The ISCA Board decided that priority should be given to the bidders of the first round to update their bids, in case that they are still interested and able to host Interspeech 2022, as these bids have all been quite competitive, and the decision for Dublin was a tight one. Thus, all original bidders for Interspeech 2022 have been invited to submit an updated bid for Interspeech 2022 until November 30, 2019. These updated bids will be re-evaluated in an accelerated process, and then hopefully a new host for Interspeech 2022 will be identified. Only in case that this process leads to no adequate bid, the bid for Interspeech 2022 would be re-opened to all interested parties, possibly together with the bids for 2023.

As a consequence, also the deadline for bids for Interspeech 2023 has been postponed to February 28, 2020. All bidders which had identified themselves to us have already been informed about this deadline extension. We hope that this way we can keep the integrity and transparency of the Interspeech selection process, and identify optimum places to host Interspeech 2022 and 2023.

The ISCA Conferences team

Odette Scharenborg, Margaret Zellers, Sebastian Möller

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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

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ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement Nominations for 2020

Nominations are open for the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2020.

The ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement recognizes and honors an individual each year who has made extraordinary contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Any ISCA member can make a nomination. All nominations should be submitted to ISCA Secretariat at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 15 December 2020.  The ISCA Board will select the winner by 1 February.  The Medalist nomination form can be downloaded from https://bit.ly/2NTD2K1. Unsuccessful candidates of previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy.  

More information can be found on the ISCA Honors webpage.

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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

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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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 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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