Oct. 5, 2020

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad – for which I am including my message for October 2020.   In this issue you will find updates for meetings, job postings, and announcements. COVID-19 pandemic continues to impacts the world, so please do all you can to ensure the safety of yourselves, colleagues, family and friends. Research and advancements in the field of speech communication, and especially supporting our families, friends and colleagues is even more critical in the current times we are all facing for our society.

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 25-29, 2020)

Technical Program & Papers: the INTERSPEECH-2020 Technical Program Committee has finalized the technical program with our upcoming ONLINE CONFERENCE. Careful planning has gone in to the logistics of coordinating a worldwide participation for our membership, ensuring balanced time participation across the globe with a majority of three major continental regions (Europe, North/South America, Asia/Australia). As I previously noted last month, IS-2020 received 2140 paper submissions, and has now finalized a total of 1020 conference paper acceptances which include all technical areas as well as approved special sessions. An overall Program-at-a-Glance with time zones can be found a this website: http://www.interspeech2020.org/Program/Program/. The Conference will be run with a number of parallel Zoom Rooms – and there will be an Opening Ceremony, ISCA General Assembly (presentation and overview of the state of our society including finances), Technical Sessions, and Closing Ceremony. I have included brief snapshots here for the 5-day technical program (including Tutorial day, 4 program days), along with world time zones (see the weblink above for details).

PAPER Oral Presentations: For Interspeech-2020, all accepted papers will be oral (i.e., no distinction between oral and poster presentations). By now, you should have completed your 90-sec and 15min presentation videos. The 90 sec (1.5min) videos will be played as part of the main program for each session – and the full 15min presentations will be made available to all attendees approximately 7-10 days before the conference for you to see presentations in detail. During all Oral Sessions, the 90sec overviews will be presented followed by a Q&A session for each paper. So, please take time view the full presentations beforehand and join in on the session for overviews and Q&A for each paper.

Keynote Speakers: This year, there will be four keynote presentations from world recognized experts in the fields of speech communication. These presentations will be from the follow speakers:

• Janet B. Pierrehumbert, University of Oxford (recipient of the ISCA Scientific Medal)

• Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Carnegie Mellon University

• Lin-shan Lee, National Taiwan University

• Shehzad Mevawalla, Amazon Alexa

We thank these distinguished researchers for their contributions to the technical program for Interspeech-2020 and look forward to their presentations and follow-on Q&A sessions.

2020 ISCA MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT:

I again note here and congratulate the recipient of the 2020 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement: Prof. Janet Pierrehumbert (Oxford e-Research Centre; Oxford Univ.): “For contributions to Phonology”!

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.

ISCA Special Service Medal: This year, the ISCA Board has been spending time to review the impact of a number of individuals for our society. While ISCA was born out of the combined collaborative efforts of two previous societies, ESCA – European Speech Communication Association, and PC-ICSLP: The Permanent Council of the Inter. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing. ISCA is now a worldwide organization dedicated to the advancement of research, education, training, and understanding of all forms of speech communications for all people. Since our inception in 2000, we have only awarded the ISCA Special Service Medal four times, in part because the primary focus has been on service for ISCA. However, as our society has grown, service has had to take on a wider range of activities, opportunities, and commitments to support our membership. As such, the ISCA Board has reviewed the remarkable service, leadership and educational contributions made by a number of our ISCA members, and this year we will be recognizing four recipients this year who will each receive the 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal. As a non-profit society, the technical/scientific impact, research, and educational accomplishments come from our community of volunteers. Please join me in congratulating this year’s recipients, as we pay special recognition to these noteworthy contributors at the INTERSPEECH-2020 conference.

 Prof. Isabel Trancoso: “For sustained service for ISCA and the Speech Communication community in terms of leadership, outreach and society recognition”

 Prof. Julia Hirschberg: “For help in shaping the Speech Communication community and advancing gender diversity in terms of membership and recognition in the field of speech communication”

 Prof. Roger K. Moore: “For service in the establishment, leadership, and international growth of ISCA”

 Prof. Sadaoki Furui: “For inspiring leadership and building bridges across the international Speech Communication community”

 We hope to see you all at INTERSPEECH-2020 later this October 2020. Until next month, stay safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)  President)

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The safety and well-being of our participants is of paramount importance to ISCA. The Organizing Committee of INTERSPEECH 2020 has been monitoring closely the dynamic developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. After careful consideration and in light of the global health emergency and pervasive travel restrictions, ISCA has made the difficult decision to convert INTERSPEECH 2020 to a fully virtual conference. We were looking forward to seeing everyone at INTERSPEECH in Shanghai, but we are excited about the opportunity to innovate by creating an engaging virtual conference that will be rewarding for both presenters and attendees. We thank those who have submitted papers to INTERSPEECH 2020. More information for authors and questions about registration and participation are provided on the INTERSPEECH 2020 website : http://www.interspeech2020.org/ Please check also this ISCApad issue (message from our President John Hansen : https://www.isca-speech.org/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=21791&back =p,270 We send our best wishes to all our members and the Speech Communication community at this difficult time.

The ISCA Board

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Dear ISCA community,

The Student Advisory Committee of ISCA (ISCA-SAC) is pleased to announce three student VIRTUAL events in the context of Interspeech 2020. 6th Doctoral Consortium The event provides an opportunity for PhD students, especially those early in the process of identifying a thesis topic, to present their research and discuss it with a panel of experts. The discussion includes feedback on the evolution and progress of their research. It helps them to identify a road-map toward refining their thesis. Application required. Submit extended two-page abstract until August 22, 2020 (extended deadline). For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events 2nd Mentoring The event gives PhD students the opportunity to engage in a discussion with early-career and senior researchers from academia and industry. ISCA-SAC aims at providing a warm environment for discussing questions concerning a variety of topics, such as research in academia and industry, equal opportunities, publishing, and professional development. Application required. Participants will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events 7th Students Meet Experts The event consists of a panel discussion with experts from industry and academia, in which the questions of the student audience are discussed. All Bachelor, Master, and PhD students are invited to join! Registration requested. We collect questions for the experts during the registration process. For more information on how to sign up, please visit www.interspeech2020.org/Student_Events For more information about ISCA-SAC, please visit: www.isca-students.org We are looking forward to your participation!

Iona Gessinger

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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-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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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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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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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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 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 SProSIG Members,

I am pleased to announce that Speech Prosody 2022 will be held in Lisbon,  May 23-26, 2022.

Thanks to all who voted: 315 members from 46 countries.  Although the vote for Lisbon was decisive (41%), it was good to see strong support also for the bids for Aix (33%) and Nijmegen (26%).
 
Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair
Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

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Dear Speech Prosody SIG Members,

We welcome announcements of prosody-related events, *including virtual ones*.

(In the past, we've been more restrictive, mostly publicizing only events designed to welcome international travelers.  But lately even many national or regional events are virtual, and so can probably, without much extra work, be made open to the world.  So, if you're hosting or organizing such a workshop, special session, etc., on any aspect of prosody, please consider informing either of us, so we can announce it at sprosig.org and/or via the mailing list.) 

Plinio and Nigel   pabarbosa.unicampbr@gmail.com   nigelward@acm.org

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