Fall 2022 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter

Welcome to the Fall 2022 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter.  

We have collected several updates for this edition from the ICASSP area chairs, member elections, workshops, external relations, and conference support sub-committees.

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Dong Yu, Yifan Gong

The ICASSP Area Chair subcommittee has kicked off the ICASSP 2023 review process. We have received 1568 submissions in the speech and language processing track, up 30+% more than last year. To accommodate for the additional load, the area chair committee now has 14 members, up from 10 last year. We invited 65 associate members (was 29 last year) to help with the meta-review process and more than 200 additional reviewers to help with the review of the papers. We are finalizing the reviewer assignment and expect the review to start by November 21. We will highly rely on the hard work of all the reviewers and meta-reviewers to make the process a success.

==Member Election==

by Ebru Arısoy Saraçlar, Sadao Hiroya

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is announcing the results of the elections for members filling the 2023-2025 term. In this year's election, we had 18 openings in 7 areas that took into account retirements and recent ICASSP trends. We received nominations from a total of 47 candidates.

Without further ado, the newly (re)elected members are:

Natural Language Processing — Ebru Arisoy, Haitao Mi, Jing Huang, Koichiro Yoshino

Speaker Recognition — Bengt Jonas Borgstrom, Kyu Jeong Han, Ming Li

Speech Analysis — Engin Erzin, Joseph Keshet, Yong Xu

Speech Enhancement — Jun Du

Speech Recognition (Acoustic Modeling) — Shinji Watanabe, Tara Sainath

Speech Recognition (Other) — Arun Narayanan, Zhijian Ou

Speech Synthesis — Esther Klabbers, Penny Karanasou, Yu Zhang

Congratulations to all (11 new members, as well as 7 re-elected members using alphabetic order in each category), and many thanks to all those who were willing to serve on the Committee and run in the election. We look forward to working with all of you.

The Member Election Subcommittee (Ebru Arisoy, Sadao Hiroya, Gakuto Kurata, Antonio Bonafonte, Jan Skoglund, Yu Tsao)

==Workshops==

by Zhijian Ou

The 2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2023) will be held on December 16 – 20, 2023, at Taipei, Taiwan. The workshop is held every two years and has a tradition of bringing together researchers from academia and industry in an intimate and collegial setting to discuss problems of common interest in automatic speech recognition and understanding. The conference will be an "in-person" event (with a virtual component for those that can not attend physically). The event will be held in the Beitou Area, the town of hot springs of Taipei. We encourage all to join us for this wonderful event in Taiwan; looking forward to seeing you all in Taiwan. The paper submission deadline is July 3rd, 2023.

http://www.asru2023.org/

==External Relations==

by Hung-yi Lee

Call-for-webinars

The IEEE SPS Resource Center is soliciting speakers to give 1-hour webinars on any research topic related to speech or natural language processing to form a webinar series. Recordings of the webinars will be organized in the IEEE SPS Resource Center (https://rc.signalprocessingsociety.org/).

If you want to give a 1-hour webinar for IEEE SPS Resource Center, please e-mail the following information to Hung-yi Lee (hungyilee@ntu.edu.tw).

-- Title of the talk

-- Abstract

-- Short bio

The schedule for the webinar series has not been determined by the IEEE SPS Resource Center but will likely begin in Spring 2023. The deadline for this call is January 31, 2023. The speakers are not limited to SLTC members. Any qualified speakers are welcome, so please distribute this information to your friends and colleagues. Please get in touch with Hung-yi Lee (hungyilee@ntu.edu.tw) if you have any further questions.

==Conference Support==

by Zhizheng Wu

ICASSP 2022 - Part III Report

This past October marked the ending of the 2022 ICASSP, when the part III was held in Shenzhen from Oct 27th to 28th. The 2022 edition was the first attempt to a face-to-face ICASSP conference after almost three years of virtual-only conferences, and it was also the first distributed ICASSP conference. Earlier this year, the 2022 ICASSP had its virtual part in gather.town and an in-person part in Singapore. Although the original plan was to run the Shenzhen part concurrently with the Singapore part, due to the COVID-related restrictions, the China part was delayed to October. 

The part III program included two industry keynote speeches by Xiaojun Qiu from Huawei and Shidong Shang from Tencent, five expert sessions by David Zhang, Tsung-Hui Chang, Zhi Li, Xu Tan, and Zhizheng Wu, and two tutorials on Oct 26th by Zhijian Ou from Tsinghua University and Xu Tan from Microsoft Research Asia. The topics range from active noise control, distributed baseband signal processing, and detecting manipulated and synthetic audio to speech synthesis. 

The program also included multiple parallel oral sessions, a technology & innovation forum on human-centric signal processing, an industry-sponsored workshop (Tencent Workshop), and a women's session. The exhibitions and demos, and several social events let physical attendees have networking opportunities and try the latest technologies.

Although the COVID-related restrictions were still going on in China, part III received about 700 registrations, and around 250 participants had the chance to meet face-to-face in Shenzhen. Organizers and volunteers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Tsinghua Shenzhen international graduate school made part III run very smoothly.

This newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials which don't fit well with traditional journals. We welcome your contributions, as well as calls for papers, job announcements, comments and suggestions. You can submit job postings here, and contact the TC via this form, or send an email to speechnewseds@listserv.ieee.org to propose articles. To subscribe to the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv@listserv.ieee.org.

If you want to stay connected to the IEEE SLTC between newsletters, we are on Twitter @IEEE_SLTC.

From all of us: Stay safe and do good.

Engin Erzin, Editor (new)

Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair (in-coming)