Speech and Language Technical Committee Fall 2021 Newsletter

Speech and Language Processing

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

We have collected several updates for this edition covering the SLTC election results, an update from the ICASSP Area Chairs, the SPS challenge program, news about upcoming conferences & workshops, and call for papers.

==SLTC 2022 Election Results==    

==by Ebru Arisoy, Sadao Hiroya, Gakuto Kurata, Antonio Bonafonte, Jan Skoglund, Yu Tsao==

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is announcing the results of the elections for members filling the 2022-2024 term. In this year's election, we had 16 openings in 8 areas that took into account retirements and recent ICASSP trends. 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). We received nominations from a total of 44 candidates, as well as from 2 candidates for the Vice Chair position.

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

Vice Chair - Yifan Gong

Dialog Systems — Yun-Nung Chen

Natural Language Processing  — Gerald Penn, Sibel Oyman, William Hartmann, Yang Liu

Speaker Recognition — Kong-Aik Lee

Speech Analysis —Jon Gudnason

Speech Enhancement —Daniele Giacobello, Emanuël Habets

Speech Recognition (AM) — Rohit Prabhavalkar, Xiaodong Cui

Speech Recognition (Other) — Gakuto Kurata, Yanmin Qian

Speech Synthesis — Berrak Sisman, Lei Xie, Qiong Hu

Congratulations to all (10 new members, as well as 6 re-elected members using alphabetical 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.

==SLTC ICASSP Area Chairs==

The ICASSP 2022 review process has been kicked off with over 18% more submissions compared to 2021. 

==SPS Challenge Program==

Multimodal Information Based Speech Processing (MISP) Challenge has been accepted as a Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) of ICASSP 2022!

The MISP challenge considers the problem of audio-visual distant multi-microphone conversational wake-up and speech recognition in everyday home environments. Both audio and video data are collected in a home TV scenario, where several people are chatting while watching TV in the living room, and they can interact with a smart speaker/TV.

Please refer to https://2022.ieeeicassp.org/call_for_grandchallenges.php for more details of ICASSP 2022 SPGC.

==Conferences, Workshops and Call for Papers==

ASRU 2021 is approaching. Updates can be found on the website: https://asru2021.org/

Self-supervised Learning for Audio and Speech Processing @ AAAI 2022

Website: https://aaai-sas-2022.github.io/

Submission Deadline: November 12th, 2021 (Anywhere on Earth, AoE)

Submission website: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/SAS2022

Contact: sas.aaai.2022@gmail.com

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing - 

Special Issue on Self-Supervised Learning for Speech and Audio Processing

Website: https://signalprocessingsociety.org/blog/ieee-jstsp-special-issue-self-supervised-learning-speech-and-audio-processing

Submission Deadline: December 31st, 2021 

Submission Website:  http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jstsp-ieee

Contact: hungyilee@ntu.edu.tw

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.

Heidi Christensen, Editor (new)

Engin Erzin, Communications Vice-Chair (in-coming)