Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of ISCApad for April 2020! As always, this edition has a number of updates from the community including upcoming meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak is still the major news impacting the world – and certainly many of our ISCA colleagues, researchers and friends. So, I ask that we all continue to practice safe social distancing – and stay safe and healthy! We know COVID-19 is impacting many logistics for conference/workshops worldwide including INTERSPEECH, as well as all forms of human engagement – including speech communication & interaction.

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 26-29, 2020), will still take place in Shanghai, China. The ISCA Board, as well as INTERSPEECH-2020 Organizing Committee continue to monitor and track developments of COVID-19, in an effort to ensure all attendees for IS-2020 as well as satellite workshops are safe and able to participate. INTERSPEECH will still take place this fall in Shanghai, China. We will keep all updated via emails, postings on ISCA Facebook & Twitter feeds. We continue to monitor the WHO (World Health Organization) status on COVID-19 [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019]. For this month, we do not have any new information, other than to say that we wish to encourage ALL to submit papers for ISCA INTERSPEECH-2020, knowing that we are committed to following the rigorous steps needed to establish a full technical program. The conference will take place on Oct. 26-29, 2020 at the Shanghai International Convention Center, with tutorials on Oct. 25. The submission and review process has also been updated with the following timeline:

 May 8, 2020 Paper submission deadline

 June 6, 2020 Show and tell submission due

 July 24, 2020 Paper acceptance/rejection notification

 Aug 10, 2020 Notification about ISCA Travel Grants

 Aug 24, 2020 Early-bird registration deadline

 Sep 23, 2020 Standard registration deadline

Authors who have a paper accepted to INTERSPEECH-2020 will have the option either to attend physically, or to attend remotely. Remote attendance would also be associated with a reduced registration fee.

INTERSPEECH-2020 PROCEEDINGS: In the event that the ISCA INTERSPEECH-2020 physical conference would need to be canceled due to COVID-19, ALL accepted papers will be published in the standard format in the Proceedings of INTERSPEECH-2020 as usual (i.e., including release on ISCA Archive). The INTERSPEECH-2020 Organizing Committee has established an internationally respected Technical Committee, and as commitment to our ISCA Membership, we encourage all researchers in the field to submit your papers for consideration for IS-2020.

2020 ISCA MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT:

Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing the recipient of the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement. Again, please join me acongratulating

Prof. Janet Pierrehumbert (Oxford e-Research Centre; Oxford Univ.), who is our recipient this year! This is the highest ISCA award for science achievement, and certainly well deserved for the remarkable contributions Prof. Pierrehumbert has made to the field of speech communications, and in particular to Phonology.

2020 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:

So, now I would like to include additional positive news! Over the past few months, the ISCA Fellows Selection Committee has worked to seek out nominations and endorsements for this year’s ISCA Fellows selection. The ISCA Fellows Selection Committee maintains a rigorous process of collecting and evaluating all nominations (more details are found on the ISCA webpage at: https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/fellows). After extensive evaluations and reviews, the following six distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA FELLOW for 2020. Their citations as well as affiliations are highlighted below. Please join me in congratulating these well deserving colleagues for their research contributions to the field of speech communications! All will be recognized at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2020 this fall.

Prof. Paavo Alku (Finland) 'For contributions in voice source analysis and its applications.'

Prof. Catherine Best (Australia) 'For contributions to non-native speech perception, bilingualism, and language acquisition.'

Prof. Martin Cooke (Spain) 'For contributions to speech perception modelling, robust speech recognition and objective intelligibility models.'

Prof. Thomas Hain (United Kingdom) 'For leadership in the field of automatic speech recognition.'

Prof. Satoshi Nakamura (Japan) 'For contributions to research on multi-lingual and cross-lingual spoken language communication systems'

 Prof. Bjorn Schuller (United Kingdom) 'For contributions to computational paralinguistics, and research and leadership in the speech processing community.'

Workshops and Challenges surrounding INTERSPEECH-2020: we are continuing to work with organizers of the numerous workshops and challenges which surround the INTERSPEECH-2020 conference. The IS-2020 Organizing Committee as well as the ISCA Board are well aware of these satellite events, and are working with the organizers to facilitate an effective transition to the new dates in Oct. 2020.

Latest Updates: Please keep informed of the latest events on the ISCA Webpage, INTERSPEECH-2020 webpage, and ISCA Facebook and Twitter feeds (@ISCAFOX).The Board and the IS-20 Organizers will continue to monitor the situation and will communicate any further changes as soon as possible. Our goal is to ensure a safe and technologically invigorating conference experience. We look forward to welcoming you this October – with the safety of our membership at the forefront.

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and INTERSPEECH-2020! Until the next ISCApad, be safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)

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Dear ISCA Members,

The ISCA board has been closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation in Shanghai and considering its ramifications for Interspeech 2020. After discussion with the organizers, we have determined to keep the location in Shanghai, but to shift the dates of the conference and the associated deadlines, in order to allow more time for the situation to settle down, as well as providing the organizers with additional time to make their preparations.

Interspeech will now take place on 26-29 October 2020 at the Shanghai International Convention Center, with tutorials on 25 October.


The submission and review process has also been updated as follows:

May 8, 2020 Paper submission deadline
June 6, 2020 Show and tell submission due
July 24, 2020 Paper acceptance/rejection notification
Aug 10, 2020 Notification about ISCA Travel Grants
Aug 24, 2020 Early-bird registration deadline
Sep 23, 2020 Standard registration deadline

Authors who have a paper accepted to Interspeech 2020 will have the option either to attend physically, or to attend remotely. Remote attendance would also be associated with a reduced registration fee. More information will be provided soon.

The change in dates is likely to have an effect on Satellite Workshops as well as Challenges associated with Interspeech. We will be working with the organizers of these events and will let you know of any updates to key dates ASAP.

Further details regarding the conference will be forthcoming. The board and the organizers will continue to monitor the situation and will communicate any further changes as soon as possible.


Best regards,
John H.L. Hansen, ISCA President

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We encourage all members tokeep contact with ISCA via our social nets. Also you will bde kept informed about all events on our website. 

This is particularly important in this time where due to the coronavirus, many modifications may be brought to the conference.

ISCA Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/iscaspeech/

ISCA Twitter : https://twitter.com/ISCAFOX

ISCA SAC Student Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/groups/98794207409/

 website : www.isca-speech.org

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The deadline for bids for Interspeech 2023 has been postponed to February 28, 2020.

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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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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www.afcp-parole.org

Appel à candidatures

Prix de thèse AFCP 2019

Depuis 2004, l'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP) décerne un prix scientifique

récompensant la grande qualité d'un travail de thèse francophone du domaine (ou

anglophone issue d’un laboratoire francophone), afin de promouvoir les recherches en

communication parlée, fondamentales ou appliquées, dans le domaine des technologies de la

communication, des sciences humaines et de la vie. Ce prix permet de soutenir et diffuser les travaux de

jeunes chercheurs du domaine.

Le prix est décerné par un jury composé des chercheurs élus du conseil d'administration de l’AFCP. Il

sera officiellement remis lors des prochaines Journées d’Etudes sur la Parole.

Le ou la lauréat(e) se verra remettre la somme de 500 euros et sera invité(e) à présenter ses travaux

à la communauté de la communication parlée lors des prochaines JEP (inscription offerte à la

conférence). Il/elle se verra également offrir l’opportunité de publier sa thèse sous la forme d’un livre

dans la collection « Recherches en PArole » (éditions CIPA).

CALENDRIER

Date limite de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2020

Décision du jury AFCP : avril-mai 2020

Remise officielle du prix : JEP 2020

CONDITIONS DE CANDIDATURE À CET APPEL

Peut candidater au présent appel : tout docteur dont la thèse, préparée dans un laboratoire francophone, et

rédigée en français ou en anglais, a été soutenue entre le 1er janvier et le 31 décembre 2019. Toute

candidature est limitée à une seule édition du prix. Seuls les dossiers complets de candidature seront examinés.

CANDIDATURE

Pour candidater, il suffit de :

(1) Envoyer un e-mail déclarant votre intention de candidater, avec vos nom, prénom, titre de la thèse,

directeur de thèse, et date de la soutenance à : camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. Vous recevrez un accusé de

réception.

(2) Déposer votre manuscrit de thèse en PDF sur le serveur du site web de l’AFCP :

http://www.afcp-parole.org/spip.php?page=depot_these

(3) Envoyer votre dossier complet via un courrier électronique à l’adresse camille.guinaudeau@limsi.fr. La

pièce jointe sera constituée d’un fichier unique (nommé VOTRENOM.pdf), contenant dans l’ordre : (i) le résumé de

la thèse (2 pages) ; (ii) la liste des publications ; (iii) les rapports scannés du jury et des rapporteurs de soutenance de

thèse ; (iv) une lettre de recommandation scannée du directeur de thèse ; (v) un CV (avec coordonnées complètes dont

e-mail).

___________Date de dépôt du dossier : 31 janvier 2020____________

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L'Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée (AFCP)
attribue des bourses à destination d'étudiants / étudiantes (thèse en
cours) et jeunes chercheurs / jeunes chercheuses (thèse soutenue depuis
2015) francophones dont le laboratoire de rattachement se situe hors
d'europe afin de leur permettre d'assister aux « Journées d'Études sur
la Parole » qui se tiendront du 8 au 12 Juin 2020 (JEP-TALN 2020,
Nancy, France, https://jep-taln2020.loria.fr/). Ces bourses concernent
toute personne étudiant / travaillant et résidant dans un pays
hors-europe, dont les thématiques de recherche sont liées aux thèmes
soutenus par l'AFCP : toute recherche sur la parole et la communication
parlée, fondamentale ou appliquée, s'insérant dans les domaines
scientifiques des technologies de la communication, des sciences
humaines ou des sciences de la vie.

Les candidats / candidates fourniront une lettre de motivation d'une à
deux pages décrivant leur thématique de recherche en lien avec les
thèmes de l'AFCP et l'apport que constituerait pour eux une
participation aux JEP, ainsi qu'un CV. La soumission d'un article aux
JEP sera vue positivement mais n'est pas obligatoire. Le dossier  de
candidature sera transmis à olivier.crouzet@univ-nantes.fr au plus tard
le Lundi 17 Février 2020. À l'issue d'un processus de sélection, les
lauréats / lauréates bénéficieront d'une inscription gratuite aux
JEP2020 et se verront rembourser leurs frais de mission à hauteur de
700? maximum.

CALENDRIER
Date limite de dépôt du dossier : Lundi 17 Février 2020
Décision du CA de l'AFCP : Mardi 03 Mars 2020
Date des JEP 2020 : 8-12 Juin 2020

CANDIDATURE
Par mail ayant pour sujet 'Bourses JEP AFCP', envoyé à
olivier.crouzet@univ-nantes.fr et contenant :

(1) Une lettre de motivation au format PDF (le nom du fichier
        contenant vos nom et prénoms);
(2) Votre CV au format PDF (2 pages maximum, le nom du fichier
        contenant vos nom et prénoms) avec coordonnées complètes
        dont votre adresse électronique.


 

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Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,

The constitution of the Speech Prosody SIG calls for election of officers
once every two years.  Accordingly, acting on behalf of the the Permanent
Advisory Council (PAC) of SProSIG, I welcome nominations for officers for
the 2020 - 2022 term.  The PAC has approved the following schedule and
procedure:

May 1 - June 1: Nominations for SProSIG officers may be sent to me, Past
President of SProSIG, at hirose@gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp and Mark, Past
Secretary jhasegaw@illinois.edu . Please use the nomination form at
http://sprosig.org/assets/nomination-form.doc .  Nominations must be
submitted by a SProSIG member (self-nominations are accepted), and must
include a 50-200 words statement of qualifications and vision.  The person
being nominated must be a SProSIG member, and must agree to hold the
position if elected.

June 1 - June 8: As the current officers were first elected in 2018 and are
eligible to be re-elected, and since they have all expressed the willingness
to serve another term, if there are no other nominations the Permanent
Advisory Committee will approve the current officers to serve a second term.
The current officers are  Plinio Barbosa, Aoju Chen, Hongwei Ding, Martine
Grice, and  Nigel Ward (Chair).  Otherwise,

June 12 - July 3. The Permanent Advisory Committee will post the candidates'
statements at sprosig.org and an election will be held.  The new officers
will then be announced, and decide among themselves their roles.

July 6.  The role of the new officers will be decided after election. 

Sincerely,
Keikichi Hirose
Past President of SProSIG
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