SLTC Newsletter - December 2018

Welcome to the final Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter of 2018!

We have had a busy conference schedule this quarter. Our community had a big presence and NeurIPS 2018. Xiaodong Cui has written us a speech-centric recap of the conference. NeurIPS also hosted a workshop on Interpretability and Robustness in Audio, Speech, and Language hitting on a number of particularly timely topics at the intersections of machine learning, speech, and language.  Finally, many of you are currently attending IEEE SLT 2018 in Athens. While I'm not there myself, I'm told it's going very well!

Looking to 2019 activities, in May, we'll be in Brighton, UK at ICASSP 2019 and then ASRU in Singapore! Just in time for the holidays, ICASSP reviewing is underway this week. We'll have a variety of calls for ASRU coming early next year.

With SLT 2018 not even complete, the conferences and workshops committee is currently accepting proposals to host IEEE SLT 2020. Haven't you always dreamed of organizing an international workshop? Isn't it time one of your two favorite bi-annual workshops was located in your favorite venue? Put together a proposal over the winter break and make it a reality!

In this edition of "Getting to Know Your Fellow Researchers" we are getting to know Sadaoki Furui of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His accomplishments and service are overwhelmingly impressive. He is a fellow of the IEEE, IEICE, Acoustical Society of America and ISCA. He won the Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. He has authored multiple best-paper winners. He was the President of ISCA. He has chaired IEEE ASRU... twice!  The list goes on.  Given this experience and esteem, his perspective on the past, presence and future of our field are very much worth reading.

The Signal Processing Society announced best paper awards since the last newsletter for articles in IEEE journals.  Highlighting those from Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, we have two winners! Both are strongly recommended reads for a cold winter's night.

* Yong Xu, Jun Du, Li-Rong Dai, and Chin-Hui Lee, "A Regression Approach to Speech Enhancement Based on Deep Neural Networks" IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2015

* Hamid Palangi, Li Deng, Yelong Shen, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong He, Jianshu Chen, Xinying Song, and Rabab Ward, "Deep Sentence Embedding Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks: Analysis and Application to Information Retrieval", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume 24, Number 4, April 2016

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 to listserv@listserv.ieee.org.

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

Patrick Nguyen, Editor

Asli Celikyilmaz, Editor