Dear ISCA Members,

This month, my message will be very short as you are all certainly very busy to finalize your Interspeech 2012 papers, as I am myself!

This month, ISCA is very happy to announce the first call for our new 'ISCA Training Schools'. We believe, in the ISCa board, that this program will become one of the flagship activities of our association. I want to thank particularly Yannis Stylianou for the work done in this field. You will find more details in Yannis's message and on our website.

You will also find some further information from the board and, specifically, about ISCA's financial situation. Finances are always an essential point, but they are particularly important this year for two reasons. First, ISCA launched several programs this year, including the Training Schools and our action on lowering Interspeech registration fees. Second, our Association is at a crossing point (due to both the fact that ISCA moved in few years from a quite small European association to a large worldwide association taking place into an quickly moving scientific world and because ISCA has now a different financial situation, which opens new opportunities) and we will have to think about the future of our association. As I already said in my new year message, The General Assembly, which will take place during Interspeech 2012, will be the occasion to review together our new programs and to exchange about our views for our association.

Best,
Jean-Francois Bonastre
ISCA President

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Dear ISCA Members,

As our president, Jean-Francois Bonastre, pointed out in his message
in ISCApad 2/2012, our association is financially healthy and has been
so for a number of years. This is primarily owed to the success of our
Interspeech conferences, which have attracted an increasing number of
participants, reaching an all-time peak in Florence 2011 with 1435
submissions and 1250 delegates, as well as to the generosity of some
Interspeech organizers who have donated their profit to the
Association.

The ISCA board has been trying to create new ways in which our members
can benefit from the good financial situation. JF Bonastre already
explained that the Portland team has succeeded in lowering
significantly the registration fees for Interspeech 2012, based on an
agreement with the ISCA board that increases the financial risk taken
by ISCA in the organization of conferences. We have also reduced by
50% the fixed share due to ISCA for each student Interspeech
participant, and raised from 20 to 40 the number of student travel
grants.

In addition to these measures, the ISCA board has started several new
initiatives, including the ISCA Lectures Program and ISCA Training
Schools in Speech Communication. We will lend significant financial
support (EUR 10,000 each) to a maximum of three Training Schools per
year. We are also investing into a new segment of the ISCA archive by
having the keynote lectures at Interspeech conferences video-recorded
and post-processed, with synchronization of talker and slides, by a
professional producer. This material will be made available as the
ISCA Video Archives and thus complement the popular archive of
proceedings compiled by Wolfgang Hess.

Please contribute by sending us your ideas for further investments in
our thriving research community.

Sincerely,
Bernd Möbius

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Sadaoki Furui (66), an emeritus and specially appointed professor
at Tokyo Institute of Technology, was selected as a recipient of
the 63rd NHK Broadcasting Cultural Award on March 1.  He is
the only recipient from academia.  The main contribution was
to develop a innovative translation system of speech-to-text on TV.
The award will be given on March 22 with 5 other distinguished
singer, actress and composer.

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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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ISCA is really glad to let you know that its training division has launched 

two important programs: 

1. ISCA Training Schools
       There is even a call for the next ISCA Summer School with
deadline April 15th
2. ISCA Lectures
       This is an open call.

The above programs are described in full details:
http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/outreach/training

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Dear ISCA Members:

The ISCA Archive now contains another series of
ISCA-supported workshops: IWSLT 2004 through IWSLT 2011.

The IWSLT series (International Workshop for Spoken
Language Translation), an annual workshop since 2004, covers
the field of speech-to-speech translation. Each workshop is
accompanied by an evaluation campaign.

The workshop series was initiated by the
'Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research (C-STAR III),
which is an international partnership of research laboratories engaged
in automatic translation of spoken language' (Introduction to the 2004
workshop) and its successor consortia. Consequently, the evaluation campaigns
'are organized in the manner of coopetition. While participants compete
for achieving the best result in the evaluation, they come together
afterwards and discuss and share their techniques that they
used in their systems. In this respect, IWSLT proposes challenging
research tasks and an open experimental infrastructure for the scientific
community working on spoken and written language translation.'
(Foreword to IWSLT 2011).

'The contributions cover theoretical and practical issues in the field of Machine Translation
(MT), in general, and Spoken Language Translation (SLT), including Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) and MT, in particular:
▪ Speech and text MT
▪ Integration of ASR and MT
▪ MT and SLT approaches
▪ MT and SLT evaluation
▪ Language resources for MT and SLT
▪ Open source software for MT and SLT
▪ Adaptation in MT
▪ Simultaneous speech translation
▪ Speech translation of lectures
▪ Efficiency in MT
▪ Stream-based algorithms for MT
▪ Multilingual ASR and TTS
▪ Rich transcription of speech for MT
▪ Translation of non-verbal events'
(Foreword to IWSLT 2011).

The papers (and presentations) that have been freely accessible
in the web at the various labs where the workshops took
place, are now together in the ISCA Archive as well.

Great thanks to Joseph Mariani (LIMSI, France), Michael Paul (ATR, Japan),
and Alex Waibel (KIT, Germany, and CMU, USA)
for giving permission to reprint this workshop series in the
ISCA Archives and for making this possible.

Enjoy the Archive!
Wolfgang Hess, ISCA Archive Coordinator
February 2012

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