Speech and Language Technical Committee Winter 2022 Newsletter

Speech and Language Processing

 

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

 

We have collected several updates for this edition covering an update from the ICASSP Area Chairs, IEEE SPS 2022 Awards and Membership Honors, the SPS challenge program, recognizing ICASSP reviewers, and news about upcoming conferences & workshops.

 

==SLTC ICASSP Area Chairs==

by Don Yu

 

The SLTC reviewed 1157 papers, out of which 519 (44.9%) papers were accepted. These papers, together with 8 journal papers that will be presented at ICASSP, are organized into 89 six-paper virtual sessions.

 

The review process involved 1135 reviewers who reviewed at least one paper. Each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers. On average, each reviewer reviewed 3.1 papers. The reviews were summarized by 85 meta-reviewers, who on average handle 14 papers. The 10 area chairs, who on average handle 116 papers,  then make the final decision, taking into consideration the reviews, the rebuttal, and the acceptance rate. Boundary papers are carefully evaluated and ranked, often involve the reading of the papers. This year, we get help from 66 SLTC members (including 11 retiring members) and 29 associate members as area chairs and meta-reviewers.

 

==IEEE SPS 2022 Awards and Membership Honors==

by Douglas O'Shaughnessy

 

We congratulate the following award recipients, Distinguished Lecturers and Industry Speakers, and new IEEE Fellows.

 

CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS EDUCATION AWARD

Stephen J. Young, “for contributions to education in the speech and language processing area.”

 

INDUSTRIAL INNOVATION AWARD

Tara N. Sainath, “for contributions to deep learning for automatic speech recognition.”

 

LEO L. BERANEK MERITORIOUS SERVICE AWARD

John Hansen, “for exemplary service to and leadership in the Signal Processing Society.”

 

SUSTAINED IMPACT PAPER AWARD

Mike Schuster and Kuldip K. Paliwal for “Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks”, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, November 1997.

 

BEST PAPER AWARD

Yi Luo and Nima Mesgarani for “Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time–Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, August 2019.

 

YOUNG AUTHOR BEST PAPER AWARD

Szu-Wei Fu for the paper co-authored with Tao-Wei Wang, Yu Tsao, Xugang Lu, and Hisashi Kawai, “End-to-End Waveform Utterance Enhancement for Direct Evaluation Metrics Optimization by Fully Convolutional Neural Networks”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, September 2018.

 

2022 Class of Distinguished Lecturers and Distinguished Industry Speakers

Jerome Bellegarda - Distinguished Industry Speaker

Andreas Stolcke - Distinguished Industry Speaker

Tanja Schultz - Distinguished Lecturer 

 

New IEEE Fellows: 

 

Shoko Araki, for contributions to blind source separation of noisy and reverberant speech signals.

 

Michiel Bacchiani, for leadership in commercial automatic speech recognition systems.

 

Carol Espy-Wilson, for contributions to speech enhancement and recognition.

 

Junlan Feng, for leadership in spoken dialog applications, AI platform, and network intelligence.

 

Cedric Fevotte, for contributions to nonnegative matrix factorization, source separation, and spectral unmixing.

 

Eric Fosler-Lussier, for contributions to spoken language technology by integrating linguistic models with machine learning.

 

Hideki Kawahara, for contributions to auditory-inspired speech signal processing and science.

 

Tara Sainath, for contributions to deep learning for automatic speech recognition.

 

Emmanuel Vincent, for contributions to audio source separation and challenge series methodology.

 

==SPS Challenge Program==

by Jun Du

 

The SPS data challenge information related to SLTC in 2022:

 

1. Multi-channel Multi-Party Meeting Transcription (M2MeT) Challenge (https://www.alibabacloud.com/tc/m2met-alimeeting)

 

2. Multimodal Information Based Speech Processing (MISP) Challenge (https://mispchallenge.github.io/index.html)

 

3. Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/deep-noise-sup...)

 

For more information, you can refer to this link (https://signalprocessingsociety.org/publications-resources/data-challenges) and select the topic area "Speech and Language Processing".

 

These data challenges are related to the event of IEEE ICASSP 2022 Grand Challenge (https://2022.ieeeicassp.org/grandchallenges.php)

 

==Conference Support==

by Rohit Prabhavalkar

 

Recognizing Top ICASSP Reviewers

 

This year we initiated an effort to recognize and acknowledge the efforts of the top ICASSP reviewers. These reviewers were selected based on nominations that we solicited from SLTC members as part of the meta-reviewing process, in addition to analyzing the review data to determine candidate reviewers for the award. Through this process, we have identified the following candidates; the ICASSP technical committee will select reviewers from this list to receive awards at the conference. The candidates are (in alphabetical order): 

Erfan Loweimi, The University of Edinburgh;  

Herman Kamper, Stellenbosch University;  

Javier Latorre, Apple; 

Olivier Perrotin, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GIPSA-lab; and, 

Rubén Solera-Ureña, INESC-ID Lisboa. 

 

In addition to the five reviewers listed here, we are also planning to acknowledge the contributions of all of the other excellent reviewers that made it through the nomination process. 

 

A big thank you to you all for your help!

by Rohit Prabhavalkar (on behalf of the conference support subcommittee)

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==Conferences, Workshops and Call for Papers==

by Zhijian Ou

 

Call for Proposals - ASRU 2023

https://signalprocessingsociety.org/community-involvement/speech-and-lan...

 

**ICASSP2022**

The International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022) will be held as a Tandem-Hybrid Conference, with participation possible virtually from May 7 to 13, in-person from May 22 to 27 in Singapore, and in-person in Shenzhen, China. 

https://2022.ieeeicassp.org/

 

**INTERSPEECH2022**

The 23rd INTERSPEECH Conference will take place from September 18 to 22, 2022 at Songdo ConvensiA, in Incheon, Korea, under the theme “Human and Humanizing Speech Technology”. Paper submission deadline is March 21, 2022.

https://interspeech2022.org/

 

 

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)