IEEE SLTC Newsletter - September 2018

Welcome to the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter!

Attentive readers will notice that it has been longer than usual since the last edition of the newsletter.  I apologize and am totally responsible for the mistake.  In penance, we have an extra large edition this time.  

Since we last talked, both ICASSP 2018 and Interspeech 2018 have taken place.  We have a review of ICASSP in Calgary, Canada from Carlos Busso and a review of Interspeech in Hyderabad, India from Anton Ragni.  

At ICASSP, the Speech and Language Technology Committee held its annual meeting.  We’ve got a recap of that meeting.

At Interspeech, Awards for the best papers in Speech Communication and Computer Speech and Language were announced.   I’m not going to make you click through to find out what they are (but you should read them all). The Best Paper published in Speech Communication (2013-2016) is Evaluating the Intelligibility Benefit of Speech Modifications in Known Noise Conditions by Martin Cooke, Catherine Mayo, Cassia Valentini-Botinhao, Yannis Stylianou, Bastian Sauert, Yan Tang in Speech Communication, Volume 55, Issue 4, May 2013, Pages 572-585.   The best papers in Computer Speech and Language are Automatic speaker age and gender recognition using acoustic and prosodic level information fusion by Li, M., Han, K. J., & Narayanan, S. (2013) in Computer Speech & Language, 27(1), 157–167  and The PASCAL CHiME speech separation and recognition challenge by Barker J., Vincent E., Ma N., Christensen H., Green P. (2013) in Computer Speech & Language, 27 (3), 621-633.  Huge congratulations to all of the authors, this is a significant achievement!

In this edition of "Getting to Know Your Fellow Researchers" we are getting to know Lori Lamel of LIMSI.  She is an ISCA Fellow and has been involved in an impressive number of speech recognition research activities including US and European research programs, and the development of seminal corpora like TIMIT, BREF and TED.  

Looking to the future. IEEE SLT 2018 is coming up in December.  General Chair, Yannis Stylianou has a last update with a lot of reasons to go to Athens in a few months.

Bids were taken, committees consulted, and a decision was made.  The location of IEEE ASRU 2019 will be Singapore!  Stay tuned for many more updates and calls as we near this workshop.

If you are receiving this email, you are a good candidate to serve on the Speech and Language Technology Committee. Nominations are currently open for members to serve between 2019 and 2021. Self-nominations are welcome.  Being part of the SLTC is a great way to stay connected to our world-spanning research community.   The deadline is October 20, but do yourself a favor, and just do it today!

I am happy to welcome two new members to the Newsletter staff -- Patrick Nguyen and Asli Celikyilmaz. 

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 tolistserv@listserv.ieee.org.

If you want to stay connected to the IEEE SLTC between newsletters, we are on twitter @IEEE_SLTC.    

Andrew Rosenberg, Editor