Dear colleagues,
Thanks to your contributions, we have received a possibly record-breaking number of 1,458 submissions to INTERSPEECH 2015, organized in Dresden on September 6-10. The TPC headed by Bernd Möbius and Elmar Nöth, together with our 40 area chairs and nearly 1,000 reviewers, are currently finalizing the review process, but we are already quite sure that INTERSPEECH 2015 will provide an exciting program of special sessions and special events, keynote speakers, show & tell demos, as well as a strong scientific oral and poster backbone program. INTERSPEECH 2015 will feature eight tutorials on Sunday September 6, ranging in topics from biosignals to deep learning techniques and speech signal processing. In addition, there will be ten satellite workshops, a Doctoral Workshop organized by the ISCA Student Advisory Committee, as well as two other co-located events, making your journey to Dresden really worthwhile.
INTERSPEECH 2015 will be staged in the recently built Maritim International Congress Center (ICD) in Dresden, Germany. As the capital of Saxony, an up-and-coming region located in the former eastern part of Germany, Dresden combines glorious and painful history with a strong dedication to future and technology. Your trip to Dresden will include both sides of this combination, as our social events will be organized in artistic buildings of the historic town center, and you will get to know also the historic heritage related to speech processing and technology; in fact, there is a series of articles about speech-historic instruments on display in Dresden which you can access through interspeech2015.org/conference/historical-review/. As an example, the historical collection (HAPS) at TU Dresden owns several cushion pipes from Franz Wethlo (1877 – 1960) in different sizes, modeling male, female, and children’s voices. A team from Dresden repeated Wethlo’s experiments with his original equipment in 2004 (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Cushion pipe from Wethlo, combined with a wooden tube model of the vocal tract (copyright: TU Dresden / HAPS)
Jumping from history to high technology, we need to mention the Silicon Saxony around Dresden – an industry association of nearly 300 companies in microelectronics with ca. 40,000 employees. Many global players such as Infineon, Globalfoundries or Intel are represented in the most significant European centre of chip production. Highly innovative companies create the future – e. g. Novaled GmbH, a leader in organic light-emitting diode (OLED) field and specialized in high efficiency, long-lifetime OLED structures for lighting and displays (Figure 2).
Figure 2: OLEDs, green technology for lighting and displays (copyright: Novaled GmbH, www.novaled.com).
If you need a short pause from history and technology or even from the conference, you should discover delightful surroundings such as Radebeul’s vineyards or the close-by City of Meissen – the home of the European porcelain. Maybe the most impressive destination, Saxon Switzerland, starts about 30 km south of Dresden including the great panorama of the deeply cut Elbe valley and the surrounding table mountains offered by the Bastei Rocks (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Saxon Switzerland, Bastei Bridge (Frank Richter), copyright: Tourismusverband Sächsische Schweiz, www.saechsische-schweiz.de.
Despite the problems with the long-announced new Berlin Brandenburg International airport (which turned into a running gag during our preparations), Dresden can easily be reached via four airports in Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin and will offer a great deal of history and culture to you. All information is continuously updated on our website interspeeech2015.org, or you can follow us on twitter (@interspeech2015). We strongly encourage you to come to Dresden and to attend INTERSPEECH 2015; it will give you a valuable and unique experience!
On behalf of the organizing team,
Sebastian Möller (General Chair), Oliver Jokisch (Publicity Chair)
Sebastian Möller is with TU Berlin. Oliver Jokisch is with HfT Leipzig.
