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ISCApad #211 |
| Wednesday, January 13, 2016 by Chris Wellekens |
2 ISCA News
| 2-1 | A message from John H.L. Hansen, Vice-President of ISCA A message from John H.L. Hansen, Vice-President of ISCA
Dear ISCA Members, Greetings and Welcome to the January edition of ISCApad! I also wish to express my sincere thanks to the membership for your support in being elected, and having the opportunity to serve on the new ISCA Board. I will be serving as Vice-President for ISCA, and help oversee new initiatives and support Haizhou Li, our ISCA President, for continued advancements for the speech and language community.
In this newsletter, I would first like to pass along Greetings and a very Happy New Year for 2016 to all! There are a number of advancements and events which are coming in 2016 as part of ISCA. First, the next Interspeech-2016 Conference planning is already activity underway!
I would also like to encourage industry to consider both Interspeech sponsorship, and participation as an Interspeech Exhibitor. ISCA is a non-profit organization and conference Sponsorship is critical for supporting the meeting and allowing students to participate.
We look forward to your participation in ISCA and Interspeech-2016! John H.L. Hansen
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| 2-2 | A message from Kay Berkling, responsible for Communication. Dear ISCA members,
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for electing me to the ISCA board, where I have assumed the 'communication' position. Facilitating access to our community was at the center of my campaign to join the board and is the motivation behind some of the ideas that I would like to present to you for discussion. In the following, I would like to share with you a vision that is realizable with the technical infrastructure that we have today. As you read you will see that technology is not the challenge here. The real question is: Are we ready to mobilize and organize a community around an enabling platform that is self-sustainable? In addition to the website that holds static information and is updated on a regular basis, it would be interesting to create a community that initiates, nourishes and produces researchers in our field, regardless of geographic location. It is a general trend that has been supported by mobile computing and the MOOC movement in recent years. The proposed platform serves as a pipeline to get anyone up to speed on top-notch research relying 'only' on dedication, a computer and the internet. It would guide a student in a sequential manner from basic coursework and mathematical foundations to state-of-the-art papers and research problems and solutions. The goal is to enable participate at the publication level, granting access to datasets, computational power and sample code and scripts so that anyone can become a player. Vision 1: ISCA MOOC Such a MOOC platform should provide a path from beginner to expert: An ordered list of courses, representing a recommended curriculum accepted by the speech community as a guideline for building a sound base in Mathematics, linguistics, signal processing, programming, writing skills (etc.) before diving further into the field of speech science. These courses can be on any platform, such as EDX, Coursera, etc. Advanced classes on specific areas of interest that prepare the student for research or applications. Finally, at the graduate level, the platform could provide the following: Research problem statements, datasets and computational resources to be tapped online, supplied by labs. While (1) is potentially a simple organized list of links to courses that can be found online in one of the MOOCs or other formats, numbers (2) and (3) are equally important in this pipeline to produce cutting edge researchers but are more difficult to realize. Creating a MOOC is labor intensive. Not just in production but also in maintenance. A forum does not run itself and needs tutors to maintain it. These points can only be achieved through crowd sourcing in a vibrant community of industry sponsors, interested graduate students and senior researchers active in the community. How can such a community be bootstrapped? For the advanced classes: ISCA provides an 'empty' MOOC platform such as openEDX We could provide a simple start with establishing one course per distinguished lecturer Any training workshops that are sponsored by ISCA could be required to put their lectures and materials online to add additional courses Interspeech tutorials could also be placed on this platform for future tutorials Finally, people may donate additional courses on the platform Vision 2: The Research Platform: In order to foster communication about research problems in a transparent manner, between students, labs, data-suppliers and computational resources around the world, we need something different from an asynchronous self-study MOOC. We need competitions that are put up and researchers, including new-bees, to join in and prove themselves to future employers. Such a platform already exists and is called https://www.kaggle.com/: 'Kaggle is the world's largest community of data scientists. They compete with each other to solve complex data science problems, and the top competitors are invited to work on the most interesting and sensitive business problems from some of the world’s biggest companies through Masters competitions.' If you don’t know this site, take a look at it. We could spawn ideas off that platform and create our own or use the same one and build it up for speech science application competitions by creating a sort of classroom for ISCA. Labs could supply datasets, machines for students with or without resources to run their algorithms on donated computational time on remote machines. A central platform could be a simple list of labs that are interested in connecting students to their resources. Later, this platform could develop into something more dynamic and open. The above ideas are theoretical and pose a number of logistical questions. However, the realization of the vision can grow by taking small first steps. I would be interested to start a discussion on ideas that you might have on how to proceed here. The persona to have in mind as this vision takes shape is a student, interested in the topic, who has no local advisor or advanced course work at a local institution, nor the computational power to participate at the publishable research level. The goal is to get this person involved in the community. Eventually, they might publish and attend a conference remotely, but the brain, drive and creativity of such a person would not be lost to us simply because that person did not have the luck to walk into a research lab like some of us have done, lucky enough to have had the mentorship to end up where we are today. Log in and join the discussion on: http://communicationisca.freeforums.net (a temporary home for a discussion on this topic) Happy New Year (for those who celebrate end of December), Kay Berkling
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| 2-3 | Nominees for ISCA fellowship Since its introduction in 2007, ISCA's Fellows Program has recognised and honoured 51 outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Nominations are now open for the 2016 ISCA Fellows which will be presented at Interspeech 2016 in San Francisco. Any ISCA member can make a nomination.
To qualify for this distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field. A Fellow may be recognised by their outstanding technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA. The supporting case for the candidate's nomination should include up to 3 major contributions which have had impact on the speech community and/or society in general. A nomination should be supported by 4 references from ISCA Fellows and/or Board Members. Current ISCA Board members are not eligible for nomination. Fellow Selection Committee members will avoid writing references for Fellow candidates. The total number selected in any one year will not exceed one-third percent of the total ISCA membership in that year.
Nominations should be sent to 'fellows_nomination [at] isca-speech.org' by February 10. Those who plan to nominate are strongly advised to write brief information on candidates (candidate's name and affiliation) to the above address before January 10 with your names and contacting e-mail address. Further information and nomination and reference forms can be found at: http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/honors/fellows
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| 2-4 | Grants for students ISCA wants to support and encourage students and young researchers by providing grants for attending conferences, and by recognizing good research. At each INTERSPEECH, an ISCA award is given to the 3 best student papers presented at the conference, based on anonymous review of the papers and the presentation at the conference. ISCA also financially supports students and young scientists by providing a limited number of grants for young authors with accepted papers at INTERSPEECH and ISCA supported workshops. The ISCA board member responsible for Grants and Awards is Torbjørn Svendsen.
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| 2-5 | Satellites of Interspeech 2016
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| 2-6 | Videos of Interspeech conferencesVideo archives are available in
http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/archive/video-archive
where keynote speeches from IS 2007, 2010 and 2011 can be seen. Very soon we will have
the material for IS 2012 as well.
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| 2-7 | Prix de thèse AFCP APPEL A CANDIDATS
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| 2-8 | ISCA Distinguished lecturers Nominations of candidates for 2016-2017 Dear ISCA Member, Open call for nominations of ISCA Distinguished lecturers Nominations of candidates for 2016-2017 terms are now open.
Please note that the nominator must ensure the candidate is willing to serve if elected. Isabel Trancoso, head of DL selection committee.
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