Speech and Language Technical Committee Newsletter

Welcome to the Summer 2025 Edition of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) Newsletter.  

We have collected several updates for this edition from the sub-committees covering the ICASSP area chairs, workshops, external relations, and awards nominations.

==ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Shinji Watanabe

ICASSP 2025 was held on April 4–6 in Hyderabad, India, with a satellite event on May 23–25 in Suzhou, China. The speech and language areas remained strong in the entire ICASSP, attracting approximately 1,200 submissions and resulting in around 550 accepted papers. While traditional areas such as speech recognition and text-to-speech continue to be well represented, recent years have seen notable growth in multimodal processing and natural language processing, driven by advances in large language models and their integration with speech and audio modalities. To reflect these evolving trends, we are actively recruiting researchers in these emerging areas as reviewers, meta-reviewers, and technical committee members, with the goal of enhancing the quality and alignment of our review process across all SLTC domains.

==Workshops==

by Bowon Lee 

The 2025 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2025) is scheduled to take place from December 6–10, 2025, in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. As a premier event organized biennially by the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, ASRU provides a collaborative space for both academic and industrial researchers to address common challenges in automatic speech recognition and understanding. The regular/special session paper submission deadline is May 28, 2025, and the challenge/demo paper deadline is June 25, 2025. We have so far selected four special sessions and two challenges. Proposals for tutorials and satellite workshops are due by July 25, 2025, and we also plan to host a Hackathon.

The Organizing Committee would like to invite your organization to support this event. Sponsors will have the opportunity to interact with academic researchers, industrial developers, and top-notch postgraduate students in relevant research fields. Your participation will increase your organization’s visibility within the speech and language research community and help the organizers provide a more engaging program.

More information about the workshop is available on the workshop website: 2025.ieeeasru.org

==External Relations==

by Hung-yi Lee

We are pleased to announce the successful conclusion of Season 1 of the SPS SLTC/AASP TC Webinar Series in 2024. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our distinguished speakers who shared their expertise and insights with the community:

• Jinyu Li, Title: End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition, Time: May 10, 2024 @ 1:00 pm EDT
• Meinard Müller, Title: Nonnegative Autoencoders with Applications to Music Audio Decomposing, Time: May 14, 2024 @ 8:00 am EDT
• Marc Delcroix, Title: Neural Target Speech and Sound Extraction: An Overview, Time: June 6, 2024 @ 7:30 pm EDT
• Timo Gerkmann, Title: Diffusion Models for Speech Enhancement and Restoration, Time: June 19, 2024 @ 8:30 am EDT
• Takuya Yoshioka, Title: Conversational Speech Processing and Recognition: Speech Separation, End-to-End Modeling, and Speaker Diarization, Time: July 23, 2024 @ 1:00 pm EDT
• Abdelrahman Mohamed, Hung-yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe, Tara N. Sainath, Karen Livescu, Shang-Wen Li, Katrin Kirchhoff, Title: The Changing Landscape of Speech Foundation Models, Time: August 6, 2024 @ 1:00 pm EDT
• Dan Stowell, Title: Computational Bioacoustics: Signal Processing & Pattern Recognition of Animal Sounds, Time: October 4, 2024 @ 1:00 pm EDT
• Tomohiro Nakatani, Title: Enhancing Speech Quality: Modern Techniques in Dereverberation, Time: November 14, 2024 @ 7:30 am EDT
• Hung-yi Lee, Title: Teaching Foundation Models New Skills: Insights and Experiences, Time: December 17, 2024 @ 10:00 AM ET
• Nobutaka Ito, Yoshiaki Bando, Title: Audio Signal Enhancement: A Weakly Supervised Deep Learning Approach, Title: January 15, 2025 @ 7:00 AM ET

Season 2 is coming soon. Stay tuned!

==Awards and Membership Honors==

by Yanmin Qian

2025 IEEE Signal Processing Society Award Nominations are now open! 

The deadline for nominations is 1 September 2025.

SPS honors its members’ contributions and accomplishments in the various signal processing disciplines and Society activities through its robust awards program. We welcome and encourage the SPS community to nominate their colleagues for an SPS-level award.

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 email 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

Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Communications Vice-Chair