Chair's Letter - Eric Fosler-Lussier

Dear Speech and Language Processing Community,

The turn of the new year always has the SLTC hopping with two of our major activities: elections of technical committee members, followed directly by ICASSP reviews.  Our hard-working TC members manage the meta-review process; for ICASSP 2019 we had a record 770 papers in our TC to review. I’d like to thank our retiring class of TC members for going the extra mile and finishing out their term with the meta-review process: Jerome Bellegarda, Najim Dehak, Tim Fingscheidt, Thomas Hain, Emily Mower Provost, Satoshi Nakamura, Jason Pelecanos, Steven Rennie, Murat Saraclar, Björn Schuller, Mike Seltzer, Pedro Torres-Carraquillo, Junichi Yamagishi, and Dong Yu.  We also have 14 new members and 2 re-elected members on the SLTC for 2019-2021; the new members set right to work as part of the ICASSP process as well. Thanks and congratulations both are due to Nancy Chen, Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen, Xiaodong Cui, Thomas Drugman, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Kyu Jeong Han, Julia Hirschberg, Ozlem Kalini, Gakuto Kurata, Kong-Aik Lee, Yang Liu, Tomohiro Nakatani, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Odette Scharenborg, Gregory Sell, and Sabato Marco Sinscalchi.

Speaking of retiring, our previous SLTC Chair, Michiel Bacchiani, stepped down at the end of the year to become Past Chair, leaving me with the daunting task of being your new Chair.  I’ve learned a lot from Michiel over the past year and hope to emulate the excellent job that he did over the last two years. Both Michiel and Bhuvana Ramabhadran (previous SLTC Chair) have been invaluable in mentoring me over the last few months, and I’m thankful for their support.

Looking forward, we will be energizing the awards nomination process, with a goal of facilitating recognition for our speech and language community members’ achievements. Our Awards subcommittee is gearing up to draw out nominations for many different awards available through the IEEE and Signal Processing Society.  Please keep on the lookout for these announcements and consider nominating a worthy colleague!

ASRU 2019 (the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop) is coming up December 14-18; it will be held in Sentosa, Singapore.  Details on the workshop can be found at www.asru2019.org (paper submission deadline of July 1).  The 2019 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Workshop will be co-located with ASRU, scheduled for the two days prior to the workshop (December 12-13).  We look forward to having these communities together in Singapore!

The SLTC is actively soliciting proposals to host the 2020 IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT) workshop.  This bi-annual workshop brings together researchers from across all fields of spoken language technology to discuss recent advances in a community-oriented setting.  Proposers are invited to discuss their draft proposals at the SLTC meeting at ICASSP; previous proposers have found that the feedback was extremely helpful in their final submissions (which are due in June).  Please consider submitting a proposal! If you are interested, contact our Workshops Subcommittee for more information or see the call for proposals in the December newsletter. [link to CFP]

As I start this term as chair, I am hopeful that the SLTC will be working towards several initiatives.  Increasing diversity in our community and representation on the TC is important for our community’s health and growth.  Recognizing the excellence in our community, from students to senior researchers, is critical for promoting speech and language technology.  Finally, in this age where we have a convergence of different technologies, we need to connect more with our sister communities such as computational linguistics, speech communication, and audio processing.

The SLTC’s charge is to promote technical directions in speech and language processing.  If you have ideas about activities or initiatives that the SLTC might sponsor/promote, feel free to drop me an email.

Best,

Eric Fosler-Lussier

Chair of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee