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

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

We have collected several updates for this edition from the challenges, conference support, workshops, member election, and awards sub-committees.

==In Memory of Prof. Sadaoki Furui==

by Dong Yu

We were informed, with great sadness, that Professor Sadaoki Furui passed away on July 31, 2022. He was a pioneering researcher and inspirational leader in speech processing and helped many of us in his fruitful career. He will be remembered.

==Challenges==

by Jun Du

SPeech Enhancement for Augmented Reality (SPEAR) challenge 2022.

The SPEAR challenge offers the opportunity for researchers to benchmark existing speech enhancement algorithms and try out new ideas in the context of head-worn microphone arrays where positional information is available to the algorithm.

(https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/spear-challenge/)

SLT-CODE HACKATHON - LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD

If you have an interesting idea on how to improve speech technology (for example, building an app that can truly transcribe an under-presented language, computing a model that can be easily tuned for African languages, or building a machine translation system for your under-represented community), then come and join us! 

https://slt2022.org/hackathon.php

==Conference Support==

by Rohit Prabhavalkar

We added a total of 55 new reviewers to the reviewer pool for ICASSP 2023. The conference support committee would like to thank everyone for their help in spreading the word and nominating new reviewers.

==Member Election==

by Ebru Arısoy Saraçlar

IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Nominations 2022

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is seeking nominations for new SLTC Members for a 3-year term (2023-2025). Nominations should be submitted by filling out the web form at https://forms.gle/c9mLQrJ5AUe4katW9. The form asks for a short bio, a list of professional volunteer work and leadership activities, and a position statement as well as nominee information. The nomination deadline is September 15th, 2022.

New member candidates can be self-nominated or nominated by current SLTC members. Members will serve a term of three years. Past SLTC members are eligible to be nominated for a second term. Current SLTC members may also be nominated for a second consecutive term, but would then not be eligible to vote in this new member election for their nomination areas. Additional terms are allowed after leaving the SLTC, but at least a 3-year gap in service is required.

Each nominee must also submit a one-page position statement and/or vitae.

New members must be willing to review papers that are submitted to the Society's conferences within the area of the SLTC, review papers for workshops owned or co-owned by the SLTC, serve in the subcommittees established by the SLTC, and perform other duties as assigned. SLTC members will be elected by the members of the SLTC itself based on the needs of the SLTC. The election results will be finalized by October 5, 2022.

The rights and duties of an SLTC member are described here:  http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/sl-tc/

The following are nominee requirements:

1. The candidate must be a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

2. The candidate should be willing to serve if elected. This means active participation including prompt paper reviews for 4 ICASSPs (2023-2026), active participation in accomplishing SLTC sub-committee duties, and best efforts to attend meetings and respond appropriately to action items. While the formal term is 2023-2025, because of the timing of the ICASSP review cycle, ICASSP review duties will begin almost immediately upon election prior to the term (October-December 2022) and conclude after the formal term (January-February 2026).

==Awards and Membership Honors==

by Douglas O'Shaughnessy

Recently, the Awards Subcommittee solicited and submitted nominations for many IEEE SPS awards this year, including several for Best Paper, as well as ones for Society, Technical Achievement, Sustained Impact Paper Award, and Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award.

In May 2022, the Awards Subcommittee submitted two nominations for Distinguished Industry Speaker, and three for Distinguished Lecturer.

SPS will announce the awards in the upcoming months.

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)