Dear ISCA Members,

During the last ISCA General Assembly, the ISCA board presented the financial situation of our association. In terms of finances, ISCA sounds well,  better than expected in fact, due mainly to the increasing success of Interspeech conferences. This success has only been possible thanks to the enormous efforts of past Interspeech organizers. 'Better than expected' could sound a little bit amazing when we are talking about finances... But ISCA main objectives are to help you to promote and develop speech communication. In order to reach its objectives, ISCA needs both yearly financial means and a capital base (in order to be able to face future difficulties). Owning money is not an objective by itself and we had during the General Assembly a very interesting brainstorming about the new possibilities opened by this situation.

Two aspects of the same topic were highlighted during the discussion: how to reduce the cost of our conferences and how could we have more students joining the conference?

The ISCA board decided first to increase significantly the number of student grants proposed by ISCA, knowing that this action has an underlined cost in terms of administrative duties.

Secondly, the ISCA Board has recently taken two different steps towards reducing the Interspeech registration fees: to lower by 50% the fixed price due to ISCA for each student participant
and to increase the financial risk taken by ISCA in the organization of the conferences. Concerning the last point, the board worked closely with the 2012 Interspeech organizers, which accepted to review their provisional budgets and to make several simulations in order to measure both the financial risks and the possible 'rebate' for the registration fees. I am taking the advantage of this message to thank them again for their action.Moreover, the current Interspeech organizers worked also on other solutions to further lower the registration fees, namely for students.

As a result of all these efforts, the registration webpage for Interspeech 2012 is now open and shows the lowest registration fees in 10 years.

Even if we are very happy to present these first results, it is clear that it is only a first step in the good direction and we are wishing new ideas from you!


Finally, I want to thank again the Interspeech 2010organizing committee, which donated 10,000 Euro for encouraging ISCA SIG activities.  Please, see the call for proposal in this issue of ISCAPAD.

Sincerely,
JF Bonastre

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SIG call for proposal

Dear ISCA SIG officers,

We are very pleased to announce that the INTERSPEECH 2010 (Makuhari,
Japan) organizing committee donated 10,000 Euro for encouraging ISCA SIG
activities. We take the occasion of this message to renew the thanks of the ISCA
board to the IS 2010 organizing committee.

For each SIG, the support will be limited to a maximum of 2000 Euros, in
order to open this opportunity to a maximum number of SIGs.

Proposals should be sent to'special-interest-groups@isca-speech.org'. Each
proposal should include a description of the proposed activity. All kinds of
activities are eligible as long as they serve SIG activities (like scientific event
promotion) or SIG promotion (improve or create SIG archives or SIG material
available for ISCA members).

This call for proposals is open on a continuous basis, and will end when the
donation is completely used. The ISCA board will proceed with the selection
of proposals, looking both at the objectives of the activities and at their
financial aspects.

Thanks,
Jean-Francois Bonastre, ISCA President
Michael Picheny and Satoshi Nakamura, ISCA SIG Chairs

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SIG and Industry Liaison Message

The ISCA board would like to encourage organizers of SIG conferences and workshops to submit their proceedings to the ISCA archive. The ISCA archive is the premiere community resource for speech-related events. We want to ensure it is as comprehensive as possible to provide value to the community.

We also are requesting specific feedback from Industry about Interspeech tutorials. Do these meet your needs? Are there topics you would like to see presented at future Interspeech conferences? Please respond to industry-liaison [ at ] isca-speech.org

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ISCA announces new membership portal

In our continuing effort to better serve ISCA members, ISCA Web workgroup has worked on a new 
membership portal for the past 3 months. We are glad to announce that the new membership portal 
has been completed, which went online on 25 December 2011.

The new portal provides an one-stop online service for membership application, renewal, updating of 
member profile, retrieval of password, and search of membership database. In particular, the new portal
features a comprehensive membership management system that allows all existing members, new members,
and past members to apply or renew membership online. It also comes with enhanced privacy settings that
allow individual members to personalize their profiles and to decide what to display in the membership listing. 
Furthermore, we have also  re-activated the resume posting service. 

Please login to the new portal today to update your profile or to renew your membership. 
Visit the ISCA membership portal at http://www.isca-speech.org/membership/.

Professor Haizhou Li
Institute for Infocomm Research
Singapore
25 December 2011

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Dear ISCA Members:

The Archive now contains a new series of ISCA-supported workshops:
MAVEBA - Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications.
These workshops have been initiated and organized by Prof. Claudia Manfredi,
Florence, Italy. The series started in 1999.
All these workshops took place in Florence, the most recent one
(2011) as a satellite workshop of INTERSPEECH-2011. Upon proposal
by the ISCA Archive coordinator, the ISCA Board approved, and Claudia Manfredi
gave permission to include the proceedings of these workshops in the ISCA Archive.
The archive now contains five of the seven workshops, i.e., 2003 through 2011,
with more than 250 papers. We intend to include 2001 and 1999 as well.

ISCA is very grateful to Claudia Manfredi for giving permission to
include these workshops in its Archive

With respect to copyright, MAVEBA workshops are a special case since
these proceedings are commercially available as e-books and
hardcopies from Firenze University Press (FUP), and the
copyright for these volumes is (and remains) with FUP. Links
to FUP are provided in all abstracts and index files; abstracts and full papers
in the ISCA Archive, however, are freely accessible.

For those of you who are not familiar with this workshop series, let me
quote a part of Claudia Manfredi's call for papers from the 2011 workshop.

'Speech is the primary means of communication among humans,
and results from complex interaction among vocal folds vibration at the
larynx and voluntary articulators movements (i.e. mouth tongue, jaw, etc.).
However, only recently has research focussed on biomedical
applications. Since 1999, the MAVEBA Workshop is organised every
two years, aiming to stimulate contacts between specialists active in
clinical, research and industrial developments in the area of voice signal
and images analysis for biomedical applications. This seventh
Workshop will offer the participants an interdisciplinary platform for
presenting and discussing new knowledge in the field of models,
analysis and classification of voice signals and images, as far as both
adults, singing and children voices are concerned. Modelling the
normal and pathological voice source, analysis of healthy and pathological
voices are among the main fields of research. The aim is that of
extracting the main voice characteristics, together with their deviation
from “healthy conditions”, ranging from fundamental
research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related
established and advanced technologies.

Some of the relevant topics are:
- modelling of the normal and pathological voice source;
- diagnosis and classification of pathological voice;
- voice quality during rehabilitation;
- development of vocal prostheses and aids for disabled;
- protocols and reliable objective parameters;
- objective parameters extraction from vocal folds images through
videolaryngoscopy, videokymography, fMRI and other emerging techniques;
- multi-modal analysis;
- relationship between speech and neurological dysfunction; interaction with hearing impairment.

We are moving rapidly towards a time where many common speech
disorders and dysfunctions will be remediable by computer-based or
physical prosthetics, and, since speech communication is so fundamental
to human interaction, the beneficial effects to users of these devices
are likely to be immeasurable.'

The topic of MAVEBA is particularly relevant to ISCA given the focus
of the forthcoming 2012 INTERSPEECH conference, which
'... will have an area of special emphasis ('Spoken Language Processing and Biomedicine'),
inviting contributions in assistive communication, language markers for
neurological disorders, and computational cross-fertilization between
spoken language processing and computational biology.' (I'12 website).

Enjoy the Archive!
Sincerely, Wolfgang Hess, ISCA Archive Coordinator

Addendum by Claudia Manfredi:

First of all, I thank my colleagues Wolfgang Hess, ISCA archive coordinator, Isabel Trancoso and Nick Campbell, conference and workshop coordinators in the ISCA Board,  for posting the series of International
Workshops MAVEBA on the prestigious ISCA archive.
I also thank Dr. Fulvio Gautelli, Firenze University Press, for  giving permission to freely publish all the Workshop Proceedings.

I would like to dedicate the series of MAVEBA Workshops to the memory of Rob, who with great professionalism has helped me to find  a logo aesthetically appealing and original, but respectful of the  Florentine culture. In all these years he has been my main  supporter, encouraging and supporting me in many difficult times,  with great respect and unwavering love.

January 2012, Claudia Manfredi

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