This past December saw the annual election of new members to the Speech and Language Technical Committee. The purpose was to fill the places of those whose 3-year terms were coming to an end. SLTC membership is associated with subject areas, and in this year's election (for the 2018-2020 term) we had 19 openings in 10 areas. In addition, on a biannual cycle, we needed to elect a new Vice Chair (who automatically takes over as Chair upon conclusion of the current Chair's term).
The nomination and voting process for SLTC elections was described in an previous newsletter article, and remains essentially the same. Thanks to work by Olivier Siohan, the voting process was streamlined using a Google Form rather than SurveyMonkey, as this was simpler to set up and provided direct access to a spreadsheet holding the votes. Also, the candidate information could be referenced directly in the voting form, which is a major convenience for the voters. All SLTC members were asked to rank all candidates in each technical area, with members running for re-election excluded from voting in their own respective areas. We received nominations from a total of 53 candidates, as well as from 4 candidates for the Vice Chair position.
Without further ado, here are the new and re-elected members by area:
Vice Chair - Eric Fosler-Lussier
Dialog Systems - Jason D. Williams, Chiori Hori
Natural Language Processing - Ani Nenkova, Asli Celikyilmaz
Speaker Recognition - Ville Hautamäki
Speech Analysis - Mounya Elhilali
Speech Coding - Takehiro Moriya
Speech Enhancement - Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, Takuya Yoshioka
Speech Production and Perception - Sadao Hiroya, Visar Berisha
Speech Recognition Acoustic Modeling - Patrick Nguyen, Jinyu Li, Erik McDermott
Speech Recognition Other - Marc Delcroix, Koichi Shinoda
Speech Synthesis - Andrew Rosenberg, Raul Fernandez, Masami Akamine
Congratulations to all, and many thanks to all those who were willing to serve on the Committee and run in the election. We especially encourage those who were not elected this time around to run again next year, as the SLTC can only function with the continued active participation of our research community. We thank the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley for hosting the nominations web page, and SLTC Chair Michiel Bacchiani for general support.
The Member Election Subcommittee (Andreas Stolcke, Olivier Siohan, Doug Reynolds, Steve Renals, Takehiro Moriya)
