Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of ISCApad for July 2020!   There are a number of updates in this edition from the community for meetings, job openings, theses, and announcements, and of course the main topic on everyone’s mind is COVID-19 Pandemic and how that’s effecting people all over the world.

COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak is still impacting the world – and many of our ISCA colleagues, researchers and friends. While some countries have recognized and adopted best practices including practicing safe social distancing and the use of masks, others (especially the USA) have completely fallen behind and struggling to work out ways to stop the spread. Here, the science and medical experts with the proper experience know the right steps, even if unfortunately politicians and the government struggle to recognize the seriousness of this worldwide pandemic. At one point many months ago, I had suggested as an option that a USA city might be an alternative location for Interspeeh-2020 if a physical conference could not take place there. I’m very happy that through careful discussions between the IS-2020 committee and ISCA Board, we had clear agreement that staying in Shanghai and allowing options for physical/virtual vs. moving to another location. If Texas or Florida (USA) had been selected – it clearly would not have been a good decision.

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 26-29, 2020), while the logistics of Interspeech-2020 will still take place in Shanghai, China, it is becoming increasing complex and difficult to realize a complete physical conference this year. I will emphasize that the no official decision has yet been made, and the INTERSPEECH-2020 Organizing Committee continue to monitor and track developments of COVID-19. The ability to have large numbers of people travel from different parts of the world and participate, are increasingly difficult given travel constraints, long-term safety inside aircraft for international flights, etc. Please watch both ISCA website and Interspeech-2020 website for new updates IS-2020 as well as satellite workshops.

The INTERSPEECH-2020 Technical Program is moving forward. I thank the countless reviewers worldwide who participated and volunteered their valuable time to provide fair, constructive and balanced comments for the authors of more than 2200 papers that were submitted. The Organizing Committee is working to establish the accepted papers and organize sessions.

Again, INTERSPEECH will still take place this fall in Shanghai, China. We will keep all updated via emails, postings on ISCA Facebook & Twitter feeds. For this month, we do not have any new information, other than to say that as we move forward with the INTERSPEECH-2020 technical program, all options continue to be explored and considered. The conference will currently take place on Oct. 26-29, 2020, with tutorials on Oct. 25. The review process timeline is as follows:

• 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

Final decision on the format of INTERSPEECH-2020 will be announced soon, but rest assured that 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).

Latest Updates: Please keep informed of the latest events on the ISCA Webpage, INTERSPEECH-2020 webpage, and ISCA Facebook and Twitter feeds (@ISCAFOX). Our goal is to ensure a safe and technologically invigorating conference experience.

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

The key dates are as follows:

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 Student Events at Interspeech have been announced: see http://www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events/

Please see the Interspeech website http://www.interspeech2020.org for more information about the Conference, Satellite Workshops and Challenges associated with Interspeech.

We look forward to running IS2020 and related events in Shanghai as a well-attended conference, and will augment with remote participation by a fraction of the attendees. Details related remote participation will be announced in due course.  Under all circumstances, the IS2020 Organizers will push forward and complete the process of conference proceedings publication. Shanghai has very pleasant weather in October, and we sincerely hope that the COVID-19 threat will be over by then so we can welcome you all to Shanghai for IS2020!  In the meantime, please take care and stay healthy!

Best regards,

Interspeech 2020 Organising Committee 

http://www.interspeech2020.org/

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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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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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Dear Fellow Members of SProSIG,

Since we have no nominations other than current officers as of June 1, the Permanent Advisory Council (PAC) decided to ask current officers (Plinio Barbosa, Aoju Chen, Hongwei Ding, Martine Grice, and  Nigel Ward
(Chair)) to serve the 2020 - 2022 term.  Thank you for your kind cooperation.

Sincerely,
Keikichi Hirose
Past President of SProSIG

 ?

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The papers are already publicly available, at https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/SpeechProsody_2020/ .  To also see the videos, you can register for the conference, for only 4000 Yen, at https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sp2020_registration/vp/ .

I encourage you to contact the authors with questions, or just to let them know that you liked their work.  Since we won't be meeting physically this year, let's make the extra effort to stay connected as a community.

Many thanks to Professor Minematsu and the Organizing Committee for putting together an excellent set of papers and talks, in a time of adversity.

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair

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Dear SProSIG members,

After a successful 2020 conference, we hope to see you again in two years, in person, and your votes will determine where that happens!

We have three excellent offers to host Speech Prosody 2022, from teams in Aix-en-Provence, Nijmegen, and Lisbon.  

Each team has prepared a detailed bid, with the proposed technical program committee, conference theme, venue, and so on.  These are posted at sprosig.org, and we hope you have time to review them.

Voting is now open for the Speech Prosody 2022 venue. Please review the bids at sprosig.org, and then vote your preference via the link to a voting page with a randomized list of the choices. Voting will close on July 20th, and the results will be announced by the 25th. If you have questions you can reach us at list@sprosig.org.

Hongwei Ding and Nigel Ward, for the SProSIG Officers 


Start Survey

https://utep.questionpro.com/a/TakeSurvey?tt=NqiUmMVLUwmO8LCYyW3vp8KIFoBOpt2x

Hongwei Ding and Nigel Ward, on behalf of the SProSIG officers

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