Newsletter - January 2020

Welcome to the First edition of Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter of 2020!  

Eric Fosler-Lussier is helping us bring in the New Year with a Chair’s Letter.  Want to start the year inspired? Grab a warm beverage, read Eric’s reflections on 2019 and hopes for 2020 and be refueled for the New Year.

The speech and language community has new IEEE Fellows!

• Paavo Alku, for contributions to analysis, synthesis and quality improvement of speech signals 
• Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, for contributions to robustness of automatic speech recognition 
• Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, for contributions to speech processing of under-resourced languages 
• Patrick Naylor, for contributions to signal processing for speech dereverberation and analysis 
• Tanja Schultz, for contributions to multilingual speech recognition and biosignal processing 
• Gokhan Tur, for leadership in spoken language understanding and applications to virtual personal assistant products
• Bowen Zhou, for leadership in human language technologies 

This is a tremendous achievement.

We have results from the IEEE SLTC 2020 Elections! Thank you and congratulations to all who will be serving on this committee over the next 3 years. A particular congratulations to Dong Yu who will be Vice Chair for this year, taking the Chair’s role over from Eric Fosler-Lussier next year.  Thank you to the SLTC Elections sub-committee, Sadao Hiroya, Koichi Shinoda, Andreas Stolcke, Takehiro Moriya, Olivier Siohan, for all of their effort and care in this process. 

This edition of the Newsletter focuses our conference attention on reflections from two focused events hosted in association with ASRU and NeurIPS. 

• IEEE ASRU 2019 included a Young Female Researchers Mentoring meeting. Berrak Sisman shares her experiences of the event as an organizer and participant.  I hope to see this and similar events continue to be part of conferences.
• Mihail Eric brings us a recap of ConvAI workshop at NeurIPS 2019 a focused, high-profile venue for research at the intersection of dialog and machine learning hosted in Vancouver.   

IEEE SLT 2020 will be held in Shenzhen, China on December 13-16!  Special session proposals are due in May, and papers will be due in July.  I’ll be back with more announcements about this in the March edition.

The IEEE ASRU 2021 Call for Proposals is available now.  Proposals are due on June 8, 2020, but proposers are encouraged to reach out to the SLTC prior to April 17, 2020 so they present in-person at the IEEE SLTC Meeting at ICASSP 2020 in Barcelona.

As ever, we'd like to draw your attention to our community's upcoming conferences and workshops and job postings.  

And in case you didn’t know:

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 mail 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.

Happy New Year on behalf of the SLTC!

Andrew Rosenberg, Editor