Welcome from the New SLTC Chair

Steve Young

SLTC Newsletter, January 2009

First of all, I would like to wish everyone in our speech and language community a happy and a prosperous New Year. Given the general economic doom and gloom, such a greeting might appear to many to be hopelessly optimistic. However, there are reasons to be hopeful in 2009. Speech and language technology continues to make inroads into the main-stream and new developments in areas such as voice search, multi-modal interfaces, expressive speech and speech translation provide good reasons for commercial and government support to continue. In research, there are also exciting new developments which should continue to entice enthusiastic grad students to enter our field.

Closer to home we have an excellent ICASSP in prospect in Taipei which for the first time this year will include a number of thematic symposia designed to showcase specific technology areas and encourage collaboration between technical areas. Then later in the year we will hold our biennial workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding which this year will be in Merano, Italy. I think I am the first ever British chair of the SLTC so I am going to use that as an excuse to also plug a non-IEEE event: Interspeech 2009 will be in Brighton, UK and with the pound sinking fast, it will not only be very good, it will also be very cheap! So forget the doom and gloom, there is much to look forwards to in 2009.

As we start the year, we have 14 committee members retiring and I would like to thank them all for the valuable contributions that they have made. We also have 22 new members starting. So as you can see we are expanding the committee to accommodate the growing demand. Not only do we have more ICASSP paper proposals to deal with, we have been actively working to improve the quality of the ICASSP review process itself. No peer review procedure can be perfect but recent changes which include a target of 4 reviews per paper and a meta-review process to handle cases of reviewer disagreement mean that final accept/reject decisions are now being made with a very high level of confidence.

In addition to ICASSP reviews, SLTC members serve on a variety of sub-committees which are busy working on a whole range of topics. We have a new Newsletter team led by Jason Williams, and a new Communications team led by Doug O'Shaughnessy. We will try to keep improving these to ensure that our community continues to be well-informed. However, to make them really useful, we need everyone in the community to become involved. So if you have some news, or an idea, or an opinion that you want to share, then send it to Jason. If you have ideas for improving our web-site, then send them to Doug. If you look at the full list of sub-committees on our web site, then you will see that there are lots of other behind- the-scenes activities including organizing and promoting workshops; liaising with cognate organizations; promoting educational activities; and ensuring that we continue to recognize the achievements of our members via award and fellow nominations.

Being elected Chair of the SLTC is a great honor but it is also a significant responsibility and a considerable challenge. Fortunately, I am not alone. I have a great team to help me and I have the benefit of all the solid foundations laid by my predecessors. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to the excellent job done over the last two years by the outgoing SLTC chair, Roberto Pieraccini. Roberto has worked hard to ensure that our TC is a shining star of the Signal Processing Society. And best of all, he will stay on the committee for one final year to hold my hand.

So best wishes again for the New Year and see you all at ICASSP 2009!