The Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) was recently hosted in Scottsdale, Arizona from December 9-13, 2015. The conference included lectures and poster sessions in a variety of speech and signal processing areas. The Best Paper award was given to Suman Ravuri of UC Berkley for his paper "Hybrid DNN-Latent Structured SVM Acoustic models for Continuous Speech Recognition". In this article, we go through the main themes during each day.

Shanghainese, also known as the Shanghai or Hu dialect, is a form of Wu dialect spoken in the central districts of Shanghai and in the surrounding region. Wu speakers represented about 8% of the total Chinese population by 1984. Shanghainese is a proper representative dialect of Northern Wu and in English "Shanghainese" sometimes refers to all Wu dialects. With nearly 14 million speakers, it is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese. Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin.

Dear readers,

Welcome to the Spring 2016 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter, the last edition that I edited in this function as a member of the SLTC.

The IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop series focuses on promoting the progress made on the different fields of speech and language technologies and their impact on human life. The Speech and Language Technical Committee has the pleasure to announce San Juan, Puerto Rico as the venue for the next SLT 2016 from Dec 13-16. Puerto Rico, located in the Caribbean, is an amazing location and is easily accessible from the US and other parts of the world.