Feb. 8, 2021

Dear ISCA members:

Welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for Feb. 2021. In this monthly message to all our members, I will highlight some recent activities for ISCA, Interspeech events, upcoming opportunities to contribute/serve/participate in ISCA, and the announcement of ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, our highest honor.

 INTERSPEECH-2021 (Going Hybrid!): [http://www.interspeech2021.org/]

Brno, Czech Republic (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2021)

The world is still addressing the COVID19 Pandemic, and the INTERSPEECH-2021 (IS-21) Committee along with the ISCA Board have continued to monitor and assess the situation. The situation here in 2021 continues to be challenging worldwide with the number of new cases still high and restrictions on air travel and cross-border travel. After careful consideration, the consensus from the Interspeech-2021 Organizing Committee, in cooperation with the ISCA Board, IS-21 in Brno will be a Hybrid-Conference (with continued monitoring and a back-up option to move to a fully virtual conference if needed). The paper submission deadline is still March 26, and authors will be 
requested to opt for in-person or virtual participation only when covering the author's registration fee on June 15 . Those opting for virtual participation will have a reduced registration cost, and the IS-21 Committee will offer options for authors to switch if they later decide to participate virtually. Because of this switch, the venue will be moved to a smaller facility – in order to support those participating in-person. IS-21 Organizing Committee will continue to stay connected with the organizers of ISCA Satellite Workshops or Special Events to ensure effective logistics support. The IS-21 Organizing Committee, in cooperation with the ISCA Board will continue to provide timely information.

More details are included in this issue of the ISCApad.

ISCA International Virtual Seminars: Expand your Schools/Students educational experience!

To make it easier for speech labs to provide strong seminar programs, and to expand and support the educational needs of our membership, ISCA has recruited an international pool of speakers who are prepared to give online talks. This virtual seminar scheme complements our ISCA Distinguished Lecturer series (4 DLs are available to give talks now!). For details on both Virtual Seminars and ISCA Distinguished Lecturer programs, visit the ISCA Virtual Seminar page at: https://bit.ly/3cOdziZ.

ISCA Distinguished Lecturer (DL) program: Call for Nominations!

Nominations for the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers (DL) program close on Feb 14th 2021. While we are following COVID19 guidelines, we are especially encouraging DL speakers to come forward to help us continue to expand our support for regions under-represented in ISCA programs (e.g., Eastern Europe, Africa, West/South/South-East Asia, and South/Latin America). (more details in this ISCApad!).

Nominations for Members of the ISCA Board: Call for Nominations!

We would like to encourage our membership to consider nominating their colleagues or themselves to serve on the ISCA Board. The ISCA Board consists of 14 volunteers who work to support the ISCA Society addressing all aspects of operations, programs, finances, leadership, conferences/workshops, Special Interest Groups, and support for education and outreach. As a society, we cannot exist without individuals willing to commit their time, experience and expertise in supporting our society. We encourage all who have interest to consider submitting a nomination. Election for Members of the ISCA Board 2021-25 will take place in April/May. Nominations should be received by: Monday, March 1, 2021.

(more details in this ISCApad!).

ISCA INTERSPEECH-2024 (location announcement):

“A new country on the ISCA INTERSPEECH World Map!”

I would like to update all on the ISCA Board evaluation process which took place for potential sites for ISCA INTERSPEECH 2024. We received a number of highly competitive proposals which were reviewed extensively by the ISCA Conferences Sub-Committee and discussed in ISCA Board Virtual Meetings as well. The board completed voting in order to select the final entry, and I am pleased to announce that ISCA INTERSPEECH 2024 will take place in Jerusalem, ISRAEL! This represents the first time ISCA INTERSPEECH will be in this part of the world, and we are excited to have this opportunity to experience the scientific, technical, and cultural sites in Jerusalem, Israel for 2024. We all understand the challenges it takes to organize such a major conference, and in these times where uncertainty is present, we are encouraged to have outstanding teams bid to host future Interspeech conferences. We would very much encourage previous bidding sites, as well as all interested in organizing future Interspeech events to consider submitting proposals, especially for regions which have not hosted INTERSPEECH!

2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement:

As is customary at ISCA INTERSPEECH, we make several awards to recognize leadership in our community. I am pleased to announce that ISCA has selected Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney as the recipient of the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement 2021 “for pioneering and seminal contributions to data-driven methods for automatic speech recognition and machine translation.”Prof. Ney has made sustained and pioneering contributions in automatic speech recognition, statistical classification and machine learning, and statistical machine translation. Prof. Neywill deliver a plenary speech in INTERSPEECH 2021. Congratulations to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney!

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. The award of this ISCA Medal has been established since 1989. It is presented to the recipient by the ISCA President at the INTERSPEECH opening ceremony, when the Medalist also delivers a keynote speech.

We hope all of you are staying safe, and continue to work/collaborate and contribute to both the science and technology advancements in Speech Communication. We look forward to seeing you all virtually or in person at ISCA INTERSPEECH-2021 this year in Brno, Czech Republic (papers are due March 26^th!).

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!

Until next month, stay safe and stay connected to our community!

John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)

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Jack Godfrey, 78, passed away at his home in Broussard, LA on Thursday August 27, 2020. Caring, generous, and honest, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge is an understated description of Jack Godfrey, as anyone who knew him will attest. He was born John Joseph Godfrey in Queens, NY on December 19, 1941. He attended Georgetown University where he earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics. He completed his post-doctorate work at Wright-Patterson Airforce Base in Dayton, OH where he met Nina, who would become his beloved wife of 44 years. Jack worked at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at The Johns Hopkins University, the US Dpt of Defense, U.of Pennsylvania, Texas Instruments, and U. of Texas.He did research in Psycholinguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. He made significant contributions  from TI's 'Speak and Spell' to his leadership of the US Department of Defense's Human Language Technology Group at the National Security Agency.  He is survived by his wife, Nina Suru Godfrey of Broussard, La, his sons, Brian Godfrey of Pottsboro, TX, Eliot Godfrey of Broussard, LA; and Paul Godfrey and his wife, Stephanie, with granddaughters Eliza, Suru, and June Godfrey of Charlotte, NC. Jack was a man filled with energy, drive, and commitment to accomplishment, a true 'Man for Others.' He showed this every day of his private life, how he was involved in the community, and how he treated every person he met. He had a passion for travel, which brought him many memorable adventures with Nina around the world. He was an avid and accomplished fisherman who spent countless days on the water with his sons and closest friends, where he was truly happy. Speech Community misses  a highly appreciated researcher who inspired many scientists.

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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.  Authors are also encouraged to
open their code and dataset.

(2) the work does NOT include plagiarism or significant
self-plagiarism.  The work is NOT ALLOWED to be submitted to any other
conference, workshop or journal during the review process.  ISCA (and
conference organizers or journal editors) may use tools to detect
(self-)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 convene their
Ethics 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).

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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 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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For ISCA Fellows,

Now's the time of year that seminar programmes get fixed up.. please direct the attention of whoever organises your seminars to the ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS scheme (introduction below). There is now a good choice of speakers:  see

https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers/online-seminars

 Phil Green

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ISCA INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL SEMINARS

A seminar programme is an important part of the life of a research lab, especially for its research students, but it's difficult for scientists to travel to give talks at the moment. However,  presentations may be given on line and, paradoxically, it may thus be possible for labs to engage international speakers who they wouldn't normally be able to afford.

ISCA is setting up a pool of speakers prepared to give on-line talks. In this way we can enhance the experience of students working in our field, often in difficult conditions. All we need is a title, a short abstract, a 1 paragraph biopic and contact details. Speakers may pre-record their talks if they wish, but they don't have to. It is up to the host lab to contact speakers and make the arrangements. Talks can be state-of-the-art, or tutorials.

We already have the distinguished lecturer programme as a starting point, and the DLs have been asked to consider lecturing remotely, with interaction.

If you are interested in joining this scheme as a speaker, please reply to this mail, with the brief details above.

-- 
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Professor Phil Green
SpandH
Computer Science
University of Sheffield
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Applications are open for the Eleventh Christian Benoît Award

The Christian Benoît Award is given biannually to a promising young scientist in the domain of SPEECH COMMUNICATION to further their career in the field. The focus of the award's research topic may emphasise basic science or applied research projects. The award is valued at 7,500 Euros and conferred by the International Speech Communication Association and the Association Francophone de la Communication Parlée.

Application Deadline is May 14, 2021 !!   

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