Dear ISCA members,

We wish you and the ISCA community a prosperous year with peace and happiness.  Here are several important notices at the beginning of the new year.

1. ISCA medalist 2025

Roger Moore has been selected to be the ISCA medalist 2025 for his contributions to spoken language interaction and toward understanding its underlying mechanisms. Congratulations!   His career reflects his long-standing fascination with speech and dialogue and his determination to model them with a clear vision and deep insight. He has been one of the most active and visible speakers in our community, with a broad knowledge of the directions of present and future research.  He will deliver a keynote speech in Interspeech 2025.

2. ISCA Advisory Council (IAC) members elected

The election of IAC members was conducted last November, and the following six people were re-elected: Catherine Best, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Keikichi Hirose, Lori Lamel, Satoshi Nakamura, and Douglas O'Shaughnessy.  The following seven people were newly elected: Luciana Ferrer, Kate Knill, Tan Lee, Florian Metze, Hema Murthy, Torbjørn Karl Svendsen, and Carol Espy Wilson.  We are happy to have these experienced people in IAC.

3. ISCA Fellow nominations

ISCA Fellows are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the science and technology of speech communication.  To qualify for this distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or more with a minimum of ten years of experience in the field.  Nominations may be made by any ISCA member. The deadline for nominations is March 1.  The details and the nomination form can be found on the webpage.

4. ISCA board member nomination

The ISCA Board has 15 members.  Members are elected to the Board for four years, and no member may serve for more than two consecutive terms.  This year, nine members will be elected for the 2025-2029 term. The deadline for nominations is March 15. Please be aware that the board members must have a strong commitment to the management of ISCA, including attendance at meetings, voting on many motions, and taking on roles such as conference organization and technical activities. The details and the nomination form are available on the webpage.

5. Paper submission to Interspeech 2025

Last but not least, the paper submission deadline for Interspeech 2025 is February 12.  Please check the conference website.  We are also looking for reviewers.  If you are interested in reviewing, please see the ISCA page to sign up.  We hope we will see you in Rotterdam this August.

This message was drafted by Secretary General Tatsuya Kawahara on behalf of President Odette Scharenborg.

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ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group: Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL)

Created in April 2017, SIGUL is a joint Special Interest Group of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) and of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). This year, SIGUL enters the fifth year and now has more than 300 members. The SIGUL Board is elected every two years, and last year SIGUL had a new Board officer:

Chair and ISCA liaison representative: Sakriani Sakti (JAIST, Japan)

Co-chair and ELRA liaison representative: Claudia Soria (CNR-ILC, Italy)

Secretary: Maite Melero (Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain)

SIGUL has organized various events, including the Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) Workshop Series, which has been organized since 2008, and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), which has been organized as LREC Workshop since 2014. From this year, the tradition of CCURL-SLTU will be united into one SIGUL Workshop and planned to be held as a Satellite Workshop of LREC or INTERSPEECH.

 Annual Meetings of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (SIGUL 2022) were held successively:

SIGUL2022 in Marseille (FR) on 24-25 June 2022 as Satellite Workshop of LREC 2022,

SIGUL 2023 in with ISCA as INTERSPEECH satellite workshop (https://sigul-2023.ilc.cnr.it/),

SIGUL 2024 with ELRA as LREC-COLING workshop (https://sigul-2024.ilc.cnr.it/).

The SIGUL venue  provide a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge research in NLP/SLP for under-resourced languages to both academic and industry researchers, and also offer a venue where researchers in different disciplines and from varied backgrounds can fruitfully explore new areas of intellectual and practical development while honoring their common interest of sustaining less-resourced languages.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• general research on under-resourced languages.

• transfer-learning techniques for under-resourced languages (zero-shot, few-shot training);

• unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to build applications for under-resourced languages;

• use of multilingual pre-trained language models to under-resourced languages;

• speech technologies for under-resourced languages.   

• Also position papers on methodological, ethical, or institutional issues are welcome.

 Additionally, we are currently organizing LT4All 2.0 in collaboration with UNESCO, which
will take place in February 2025. 

SIGUL Board

Sakriani Sakti

Claudia Soria

Maite Melero

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ISCA supports speech communication research activities in various languages. The individual languages have equal interest, but they may involve have different technical or scientific problems. For example, some languages are tonal, while others are not; Some languages have only one writing system, while others have several. In the ISCA community, we have 6 language Special Interest Groups (SIGs) for Chinese, French, Italian, Iberian, Indian, and Russian. Each SIG is organised by researchers who speak the language of interest as L1 and others who have a technical or scientific interest in the language. Each SIG sponsors domestic and international research activities, and representative members of the SIGs attend a Lang SIG meeting every year during the INTERSPEECH conference. In this meeting, recent activities of each SIG are reported, and new ideas are exchanged. We also review what ISCA can do for the SIGs and what the SIGs can do for ISCA. Each SIG has its own web page, and you can visit the pages here.
https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/sigs

Do you want to start a new language SIG? If so, please visit the page above and check what you have to prepare for your SIG. Although it is not yet announced, we’re going to launch a new language SIG in the near future, perhaps for your native language. If so, please support it!.

Prof. Nobuaki MINEMATSU

The University of Tokyo

Japan

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The aims of ISCA SIG 'Speech and Language Technologies in Education'
 (SLaTE) are to promote interest in the use of speech and natural
 language processing for education, and to provide a platform to
 exchange ideas, present and discuss research, etc.
 SLaTE Webinar Series: ISCA SIG SLaTE is organizing a series of
 Webinars.
 Everybody can attend, but you do have to register in advance (for
 free).
 Videos are made of the first - presentation part of the Zoom meetings
 (i.e. not of the second - Q&A part), and these videos are available
 online.
 For info. about (free) registration, future and (videos of) past
 Webinars see https://sites.google.com/view/sigslate

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ISCA-PECRAC (Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee) Annual Gathering aims to provide an opportunity for postdoc & early career researchers to meet and communicate at INTERSPEECH. In the framework of ISCA-PECRAC, we would like:

• to establish link and collaboration between postdocs in different institutions and early career researchers from all over the world,

• to keep postdoc & early career researchers posted with current postdoc & tenure-track job offers,

• to provide mentoring,

• to give feedback to their major issues (in research),

• to create an environment where postdoc & early career researchers can socialize with their peers.

Contacts:

Yaru Wu (yaru.wu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr)

Berrak Sisman (berrak_sisman@sutd.edu.sg)

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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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 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 https://womennspeech.herokuapp.com/

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 TAI Standing Committee is delighted to announce that the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany, has won the bid to host the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025). Dr. James Kirby and his team will host the conference in Munich (Herrsching), Germany, during May 16-18, 2025.

With the theme of 'Variation and Change in Tone and Intonation Systems across Space and Time,' TAI 2025 aims to foster a more diverse and comprehensive understanding of tone and intonation by exploring variation in geographical as well as physical space, along with the dynamic evolution of tone and intonation across various timescales.

Please visit the conference website www.tai2025.org for preliminary information. Additionally, attendees of Speech Prosody 2024 will have the opportunity to hear a brief introduction to TAI 2025 at the closing ceremony of SP2024.

We eagerly look forward to meeting you at TAI 2025 in Herrsching!!

Kind regards,

Wentao Gu
On behalf of the TAI Standing Committee

Prosody of Uralic languages

Symposium at the Congressus XIV Internationalis
Fenno-Ugristarum, 18–23 August 2025 in Tartu, Estonia.

Following the three workshops on Uralic prosody in Tartu
2015, Budapest 2017 and Helsinki 2019 we would like to
invite you to yet another meeting on the prosody of Uralic
languages. The meeting will be organised as a symposium of
the Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum (CIFU14).
See the description of the symposium on the CIFU14
website: https://cifu14.ut.ee/symposium-b11/

The abstract submission to CIFU14 is open until 30
September 2024. Abstracts must be submitted as an
anonymised attachment (preferably word and pdf file) to
cifu14@ut.ee. Please also indicate in your email that your
abstract is being submitted to the symposium of the
Prosody of Uralic languages. Abstracts must be written in
English and may not exceed 2 pages, including references;
font size 12, line spacing 1.5, margins 2.5 cm everywhere,
A4 paper (see more details on abstract formatting and
submission here: https://cifu14.ut.ee/2nd-circular/).

Please forward this mail to anyone who might be interested.

Hope to see you in Tartu!

Pärtel Lippus (University of Tartu)
Eva Liina Asu (University of Tartu)
Katalin Mády (HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)

Nigel Ward, SProSIG Chair,

Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

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Dear SProSIG members,

The election of officers is now complete.

Thank you for voting.

Based on the results, SProSIG PAC has elected 5 officers for the term 2024-2026.

The new officers are; 

Plinio Barbosa 

Aoju Chen

Martine Grice 

Jürgen Trouvain 

Nigel Ward 

(in alphabetical order)

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Dear Speech Prosody members,

 I’m pleased to announce two upcoming events:

• Speech Prosody and Social Meaning, in the SProSIG Virtual Lecture Series, by Robert Xu, December 18

   

• Workshop on Prosody in Languages of the Middle East, at PaPE, Jun 25, 2025, Mallorca, Spain

   

 Details for both are in the ' Other Events' section

Nigel Ward, Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso

 CCSB 3.0408,  +1-915-747-6827

 nigel@utep.edu    https://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/   

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