Chair's Letter - July 2020

Dear Speech and Language Processing Community,

As I sit down to write this Chair’s letter and look back at my last letter, it is clear that the world has changed significantly in a few short months.  We are all inundated by COVID-related news, so I will not dwell on this, but it is clear how crucial our technological innovations in speech and language processing have been in the midst of the global pandemic.   Audio noise suppression has been critical for video conferencing; speech to text transcription has been important for access in video calls and classrooms; a full range of dialog technologies have made virtual home assistants a regular part of our lives; language technologies are enabling new discoveries in the medical domain by drawing connections in COVID literature.  It is amazing to see the impact that our work continues to have in shaping how our world is evolving. 

At the same time, we all need to consider the disparate impact the technology we develop has on diverse communities.  Recent events in the United States have created the opportunity for conversation about the impact of bias and differential performance of artificial intelligence systems.  I recently had the opportunity to watch Shalini Kantayya’s film Coded Bias which documents how AI bias (for example, dataset bias) can impact people’s lives. While the film has a particular viewpoint that all may not agree with, at our university we found it useful for starting conversations about how AI algorithms interact with race.  Slightly closer to our technical home, the recent retraction of the MIT Tiny Images dataset because of derogatory language terms and offensive images suggests that we need to think carefully about our data and the resulting algorithms.  In this time of thoughtfulness about these issues, I’d like to encourage our community to introspect and innovate in the ethics of speech and language processing, as well as seeking to reduce and eventually remove the differential performance we see across communities.  If you have suggestions on activities that we can support within IEEE to foster diversity both for the developers and users of speech and language technologies, please reach out to me or anyone on the technical committee.   

As you may know, the Speech and Language Committee directly sponsors two workshops.  The Spoken Language Technologies Workshop is our next event, organized by Zhijian Ou and Lei Xie.  Because of conflicts in the community calendar, the workshop has been delayed from December 2020 until January 2021 (and will be known as SLT 2021).  As it is likely that global travel will not be as robust as one would like in January, it will not be possible to have the workshop in Shenzhen; the organizers have agilely shifted to a virtual format.  Please see the website http://2021.ieeeslt.org for more information.  

The SLTC recently selected the next site for the Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) workshop.   ASRU 2021 will be organized by Elmar Nöth and Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave and will be held in Cartagena, Columbia in December 2021.  Their team put together a robust proposal to hold the conference in the heart of Cartagena’s beautiful historic district, with considerations of different participation scenarios.  It will be exciting to hold our first SLTC event in South America!

Finally, a quick update on a few changes we are working on within the SLTC.  Over the last year we have restructured our subcommittees to make them more effective; we recently approved a change to create the Conference Support subcommittee, which will help improve our paper categorization and review processes for our portion of the ICASSP reviewing process.  We are also working on promotion of members of the SLTC community through the Awards and Membership Honors subcommittee, as well as looking at new ways to connect to educational initiatives through our External Relations committee.

If you are interested in helping out, I strongly encourage you to run for election as a Technical Committee member in the fall, as well as signing up on the Affiliate page: https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/speech-and-language-processing/affiliate-members.

I hope that you all stay safe and well.

Best wishes,

Eric Fosler-Lussier

Speech and Language Technical Committee Chair