Farewell from the Outgoing SLTC Chair
Roberto Pieraccini
SLTC Newsletter, January 2009
The beginning of 2009 marks the end of my two year term as the Chair of SLTC, the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee. I have to say that these two years have gone by rather quickly and smoothly thanks to the excellent support I received by everyone in the committee and by IEEE. I was very fortunate to have the priceless guidance of former chair Mazin Gilbert at the beginning of my term, the always available word of wisdom of IEEE Signal Processing Society VP of technical directions Alex Acero, and the continuous and unconditional help of all members that took their commitment to the SLTC very seriously. They have been truly terrific and my warm gratitude goes to all of them. However I would like to mention those friends and colleagues of SLTC who played a major role in several activities, who promptly and always responded to my many requests, and with whom I communicated sometimes almost on a daily or hourly basis. In particular I would like to thank Gokhan Tur who, among many other things, was in charge of making and gathering nominations for the many IEEE awards that in several occasions resulted in actual acknowledgements given to worthy members of our community. Gokhan was also an ICASSP area chair for two consecutive years, a coordinator of the student technical committees, and the student awards, and he was the speech and language liaison for the organization of ICASSP 2009.
I would like to thank Ciprian Chelba for taking ownership of the Web site and the mailing list, and for being an active ICASSP 2008 area chair. My special thanks also go to Mike Seltzer who has been leading this newsletter and chasing, every three months, potential column writers for interesting stories and articles. Many times we have been commended as one of the technical committees within the Signal Processing Society with the most extensive Web site and with one of the best newsletters. Thanks Ciprian and Mike!
Many thanks to John Hansen, who coordinated the fellowship nominations, as a result of which we got a record number of four new fellows this year. Many thanks also go to Murat Saraclar for his constant advice and for being an area chair for two consecutive years, and to Brian Mak for his hard work as one of the ICASSP 2008 area chairs. Many thanks to all the others SLTC members of the past two years—too many to mention all of them here—for their advice, hard work, and for being there when I needed them.
The main bulk of work for the SLTC comes with the ICASSP review. In 2007 we received about 620 papers in the speech and language processing areas. This year we received a total of 689 papers, 565 in the speech processing and 124 in the language processing areas. As in 2007, we required 3 reviews per paper, generally performed by external reviewers, in addition to one meta-review performed by a SLTC member. Because of the uneven allocation of papers across the various topics, some SLTC members had more than 20 papers to review in less than a month! Thanks to all of those who, in spite of the large number of reviews, the busy end-of-the year schedule, and the strict deadlines, completed their reviews on time.
Almost all of the ICASSP review organizational work is carried out by the area chairs. Each area chair is assigned a set of topics and the job to overview a number of papers—typically between 100 and 300—throughout the whole process. Among their responsibilities are the overview of the assignment of three external and one SLTC reviewers for each paper, the reassignment of papers in case of conflict, and making sure that all the papers get their reviews within the strict schedule imposed by the process. When all the reviews are in place, the area chairs are responsible for deciding a consistent acceptance criterion across topics, grouping the accepted papers into a number of sessions, and resolving other potential conflicts and issues that may appear after the authors have been notified. The overall acceptance rate was about 46%. I would like to give my special thanks to the ICASSP 2009 SLTC area chairs: TJ. Hazen, Murat Saraclar, and Gokhan Tur. They worked really hard to make sure that the process went on as smoothly as possible. And last but not least, many thanks to Lance Cotton, the man behind the curtains, the administrator of the ICASSP review Web site who was always available to make last minute changes both to the allocation of papers and to the review system software.
Finally I would like to formally pass the leadership of the SLTC on to my successor. I am very happy that Steve Young took on this responsibility, and I am more than sure he will be a great Chair and will bring a lot of value to SLTC. Steve will be in charge of SLTC during 2009 and 2010 and, as it is tradition, I will be helping him for all 2009 as a former Chair.
Happy new year to everyone!