Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee Newsletter
February 2010
Welcome to the Winter 2010 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter.
In this issue we are pleased to provide another installment of brief articles representing a diversity of views and backgrounds. This issue includes articles from 15 guest contributors, and our own 6 staff reporters. Also, in this issue, we welcome Tara N. Sainath, at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, who joins us as a staff reporter.
We believe the 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 reach us at speechnewseds [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.
Finally, to subscribe the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body to listserv [at] listserv (dot) ieee [dot] org.
Jason Williams, Editor-in-chief
Pino Di Fabbrizio, Editor
Chuck Wooters, Editor
From the SLTC and IEEE
From the SLTC Chair: New Years Message
Steve Young
News from our TC: election of new members and a vice-chair, and ICASSP review results.
2010 Signal Processing Awards
Philip Loizou
Two researchers from the SLTC community have won IEEE awards: Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan for Distinguished Lecturer (2010-2011), and Isabel M. Trancoso for Meritorious Service Award.
IEEE SPS Board of Governors Nominations Open
Jason Williams
IEEE SPS Nominations Open for Two Director Positions
Jason Williams
IEEE Signal Processing Society Newsletter
The IEEE Signal Processing Society, our parent organization, also produces a monthly newsletter, "Inside Signal Processing".
CFPs, Jobs, and book announcements
Calls for papers, proposals, and participation
Edited by Chuck Wooters
Job advertisements
Edited by Chuck Wooters
Book announcements
Edited by Jason Williams
Articles
Cloudy with a chance of ... speech
Danilo Giulianelli and Giuseppe (Pino) Di Fabbrizio
This article provides a quick introduction about speech processing into the cloud to support the scalability challenges of speech-enabled applications running on mobile devices.
A Brief Overview of Meeting Understanding Tasks
Dilek Hakkani-Tür
This article gives an overview of the main tasks of meeting understanding: Meeting summarization, Action item detection, and Decision detection.
Linguists targeted for Redundancy at King's College London
Ruth Kempson
As part of a restructuring program, King's College London may eliminate several positions held by well-known researchers..
Setting up the Interaction Lab
Oliver Lemon
Setting up a new research group presents special challenges and opportunities. This article describes the work of the Interaction Lab, and some of the main issues we considered when setting up this new research facility.
Text Analysis Conference 2009: An Overview
Annie Louis
The 2009 Text Analysis Conference (TAC) was held at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland as a two day event from 16-17 November, 2009. TAC covers a variety of shared tasks organized every year. The participant systems are evaluated at NIST and the workshop brings together researchers and participants to share their experiences and ideas. This article provides an overview of this year's tasks.
Researchers developing way to synthesize speech with a brain-machine interface
Matthew Marge
Advances in brain-machine interfaces are now allowing a paraplegic patient to control a real-time speech synthesizer using a BMI that reads the neural signals that relate to the production of speech.
ISCA Student Activities Update
Samer Al Moubayed, Marco A. Piccolino-Boniforti, Antonio Roque, Sylvie Saget, Sunayana Sitaram, Marcel Waeltermann
The ISCA Student Advisory Committee (ISCA-SAC) was established in 2005 by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) to organize and coordinate student-driven projects. We were especially active in 2007 and 2008, we were pleased to continue our efforts in 2009, and we look forward to 2010.
Memories from ASRU 2009, Merano, Italy
Giuseppe Riccardi and Renato de Mori
The IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, held in December 2009 in Merano Italy, published 96 papers and attracted 180 international attendees.
Island-Driven Search
Tara N. Sainath
Island-driven search is an alternative method to better deal with noisy and unintelligible speech. In this article, we discuss past research in island-driven search and propose some future research directions.
eNTERFACE Workshops on Multimodal Interfaces: A success story
Albert Salah and Thierry Dutoit
The eNTERFACE workshops are the largest activity of the SIMILAR European Network of Excellence on multimodal interfaces. Their aim is to gather a team of leading professionals in multimodal man-machine interfaces together with students in one place, to work on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4 complete weeks.
Second Life as a research platform
Svetlana Stoyanchev
Second Life (SL) is a virtual social environment with over 11 million registered users. This article describes some of the projects that use Second Life environment for research.