Apr. 7, 2021

Dear ISCA members:

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

The world still addresses COVID19 Pandemic, but multiple vaccines continue to make an impact and we continue to hope that the days ahead will be better. Please believe in the science and do all you can to get your vaccine shot as well as encourage others to get vaccinated.

INTERSPEECH-2021 (Hybrid Virtual/In-Person): [http://www.interspeech2021.org/]

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

INTERSPEECH-2021 (IS-21) Committee along with the ISCA Board have continued to monitor and assess the COVID19 situation. As announced in the Feb.’21 ISCApad, the consensus from the Interspeech-2021 Organizing Committee, in cooperation with the ISCA Board, INTERSPEECH-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). 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.

Paper Submissions: thanks to the many authors who have submitted their latest work to INTERSPEECH-2021. The paper submission deadline (initial upload: March 26, Final submission: April 2) for final submission has now passed and 2064 papers have been submitted for consideration for INTERSPEECH-2021. This level of submissions confirms the communities continued efforts in the field of speech communication.

The following shows upcoming deadlines:

• April 26, 2021 Show and Tell proposals Deadline

• May 1, 2021 Paper Review Deadline

• May 12, 2021 Survey Proposals Deadline

• June 2, 2021 Paper Accept/Reject Notifications

• June 15, 2021 Final Paper Upload Deadline

• June 25, 2021 Early-bird registration Deadline

• Aug. 24, 2021 Standard/Late registration Deadline

More details are included in this issue of the ISCApad.

2021 ISCA FELLOWS Announced:

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 eight distinguished researchers will be elevated to the status of ISCA FELLOW for 2021. 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-2021 this fall.

• Prof. Mary BECKMAN (USA) “For contributions to phonology, including the phonology of intonation and language acquisition.” 

• Prof. Karen LIVESCU (USA) “For contributions to articulatory modeling, to speech representation learning, and to bridging the gaps between speech research, machine learning and natural language processing.”  

• Prof. Eric FOSLER-LUSSIER (USA) “For fundamental contributions to research and leadership in the fields of speech recognition and spoken language processing.”   

•  Prof. Maxine ESKENAZI (USA) “For contributions to phonetics, language learning, spoken    dialog systems, language resources, and for pioneering service to the community.”
  

• Prof. Jean-Francois BONASTRE (France)  “For leadership in the field of speaker recognition and sustained contributions to ISCA.” 

• Prof. Yang LIU (USA) “For contributions to speech recognition and understanding, prosody modelling, summarization, sentiment analysis, and social media research.”

• Prof. DeLiang WANG (USA)  “For seminal work in the area of speech separation and speech segregation.”
  

• Dr Dong Yu (USA)  “For research and development in deep learning-based automatic speech recognition.”

2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement:

I again note here and congratulate the recipient of the 2021 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany):

“for pioneering and seminal contributions to data-driven methods for automatic speech recognition and machine translation.”! This is the highest ISCA award for science achievement, and certainly well deserved for the remarkable contributions Prof. Ney has made to the field of speech communications, and in particular to automatic speech recognition/machine translation.

ISCA Special Service Medal: This year, the ISCA Board has also spent time to review the impact of a 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, the ISCA Special Service Medal has been awarded a total of eight times, with four recipients last year, in recognizing many in the field for their commitment to service for our society. The ISCA Board has reviewed the service, leadership and educational contributions made by a our ISCA members, and this year we recognize Prof. Martin Cooke as the 2021 ISCA Service Medal award recipient. Please join me in congratulating Prof. Cooke, who will be recognized at the INTERSPEECH-2021 conference.

Prof. Martin Cooke: “For sustained service to ISCA and the Speech Communication community for Publications and Community Support.”

ISCA STUDENT SAC (Student Activity Committee):

Get connected with the student membership of ISCA!

Finally, I would like to highlight a new point of engagement for our ISCA Student members! The ISCA Student SAC (Student Activity Committee) has created a PodCast to help offer opportunities to hear fellow students, get insights on career planning, or hear some new innovative ideas from our community membership.

The first episode of Speech Pitch, ISCA-SAC’s new podcast is located at this link: [click here]. The ISCA Community is always committed to supporting student career development and engagement. Please share and let us know your feedback! (A special thanks to the ISCA SAC for this wonderful edition – even if I am not sure if I want fingers as long as legs, or legs as long as fingers?!?)

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.

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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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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 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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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 colleagues and friends,
Dear members of SProSIG!

The pandemic has certainly kept you rather busy in the last few months, just like us here in Denmark. It definitely has messed up our academic calendar quite a bit - not only the teaching calendar, but also that of the conferences and events. My team and I should have hosted two conferences at the University of Southern Denmark in 2020, the 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI) and the 13th Nordic Prosody (NP) Conference. We were really looking forward to welcoming you here, and the first papers had already been submitted - but as we all know, things turned out differently. The Nordic Prosody has now been postponed to summer 2022 in consultation with the NP community. However, and I am very happy to be able to say that the TAI WILL take place this year, more precisely from 6.-9. December 2021! Of course, a TAI conference during the Danish summer would have been nice. But, believe me, the winter in Scandinavia, and especially in the culturally rich German-Danish border area, has its charms too. Candlelight, hot drinks of all kinds, hot and sweet cakes as well as an ice rink, sweet Danish Christmas beer, an original German Christmas Market event and a night hike are waiting for you in December (if you can take part physically, see below).

This email is intended as a save-the-date announcement and to inform you that the TAI website is now available with new dates.
https://my.eventbuizz.com/event/1st-international-conference-on-tone-and-intonation--tai--2021/detail/programs

We are very pleased that all special sessions and keynotes from 2020 could be retained. Many thanks to the speakers and organizers! We will clarify all other (more technical) things in the next days and weeks and update the website accordingly.

The new deadline for submitting abstracts for TAI is July 4th, 2020. We kindly ask those of you, who already had submitted an abstract last year, to submit it again (if it is still relevant). The easychair portal will open up again in May. Encouraged by the positive feedback, we also stick to our concept of selecting contributions for TAI 'only' on the basis of abstracts. The full 5-page proceedings papers (formatted according to the ISCA template) are to be submitted AFTER the TAI conference (on February 27, 2022). In this way, everyone has the opportunity to incorporate the feedback that s/he received during the TAI into the preparation or revision of the final full papers. As is common practice also for Speech Prosody, the TAI proceedings will become part of the ISCA archive.

Finally, I would also like to point out with great pleasure that there will be an attractive satellite event of TAI, i.e. the 2nd International Conference on the Foundations of Speech (SEFOS II). It will take place right before TAI, i.e. from December 2-4, and at the same venue as the TAI. The theme of SEFOS II is 'Articulation and Prosody: Between Interface and Integration'. Keynote speakers will be Cécile Fougeron (CNRS-Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France) and Peter Birkholz (TU Dresden, Germany). Furthermore, we are pleased that we can offer you widely visible and widely indexed open-access proceedings for your SEFOS II papers. Papers will have about journal-paper length (10-15 pages, approx. 7000 words). We will publish them in cooperation with Sciendo / deGruyter. The full-paper submission deadline will be August 1st, 2021. A paper template will follow soon. All further information can be found on the SEFOS II website: https://my.eventbuizz.com/event/2--international-seminar-on-the-foundation-of-speech-8992/detail

*** In general, note that we are currently planning both TAI and SEFOS II as hybrid events. Physical participation is therefore not a prerequisite for submitting a paper to TAI and/or SEFOS II, and there will be reduced registration fees for the virtual participants! Nevertheless, of course we hope that many of you will come to visit us this winter in Sonderborg/DK! ***

We wish you all a good start into spring!
Oliver Niebuhr
(on behalf of the organizing teams of TAI and SEFOS)

Oliver Niebuhr
Associate Professor of Communication & Innovation
Founder of AllGoodSpeakers ApS
Head of the CIE Acoustics Lab
CIE - Centre for Industrial ElectronicsDear Speech Prosody SIG Members,

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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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