SLTC New Members Election
Geoffrey Chan
SLTC Newsletter, October 2009
The Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee held an election in September to elect 18 new members to serve the three-year term from 2010-2012. The new members serve to fill 13 positions which will be vacated by members whose terms end in December 2009, as well as to expand the Committee by five positions to a total of 47 elected members plus the Chair. The expansion will enable the Committee to better fulfill its mandate of championing speech and language processing (SLP) activities. SLTC members are responsible for reviewing and overseeing the review of a growing number of SLP submissions to ICASSP, sponsoring various SLP workshops, nominating people engaging in SLP for IEEE awards, supporting SLP publications such as the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, and working with other organizations within and external to the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
A call for nomination was announced to the Committee in early August. By the end of August, 38 candidates were nominated, each running for a position in one of ten technical areas. The number of candidates x and positions y in the technical areas are as follows: speech recognition (x=13, y= 6), speaker recognition (4, 3), speech synthesis (2, 1), natural language processing (4, 1), dialogue systems (3, 2), speech production (3, 1), speech analysis (2, 1), speech enhancement (2, 1), speech perception (2, 1), speech coding (3, 1).
The poll was administered from the Survey Monkey web site. Voters were required to rank every candidate in every area. SLTC By-Laws stipulate that candidates must receive a majority of votes to be elected. To satisfy this requirement while avoiding time consuming run-off elections, the 2008 SLTC Member Election Subcommittee adopted a "ranked pairs" election methodology to simulate run-off elections. A program authored by Tim Hazen to implement the method was used to process the primary vote data collected on the web site.
When the poll was closed on September 14, 95% of SLTC members had cast their votes. The 18 newly elected members are as follows:
- Speech Recognition: Dirk Van Compernolle, John H.L. Hansen, Kate Knill, Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Martin Russell
- Speaker Recognition: Carol Espy-Wilson, Seiichi Nakagawa, Douglas Reynolds
- Speech Synthesis: Simon King
- Natural Language Processing: Junlan Feng
- Dialogue Systems: Olivier Pietquin, David Suendermann
- Speech Production: Olov Engwall
- Speech Analysis: Tom Quatieri
- Speech Enhancement: Les Atlas
- Speech Perception: Takayuki Arai
- Speech Coding: Bastiaan Kleijn
Lets extend our congratulations to these new members and offer our appreciation to the members who will complete their terms by December.
Geoffrey Chan is a member of the SLTC Member Election Subcommittee which includes also Yannis Stylianou and Frederic Bechet.
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