New years message
Steve Young
SLTC Newsletter, February 2010
Since this is the first newsletter of 2010, I would like to start by wishing everyone in our speech and language community a happy and a prosperous New Year.
As always at this time of year, it is my pleasure to welcome new members to our Technical Committee and to thank those at the end of their term. The new members coming in are: Tom Quatieri, Bastiaan Kleijn, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Carol Espy-Wilson, Dirk Van Compernolle, Douglas Reynolds, Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo, Les Atlas, Olivier Pietquin, Simon King, David Suendermann, Kate Knill, Olov Engwall, Martin Russell, Junlan Feng, Seiichi Nakagawa, and Takayuki Arai. And those leaving are: Alistair D. Conkie, Yuqing Gao, Jasha Droppo, Murat Saraclar, Philipos Loizou, Stephen Cox, Tomoki Toda, Douglas O'Shaughnessy, Andrej Ljolje, Kay Berkling, Kuldip K. Paliwal, Roberto Pieraccini, and Thomas Hain. I would like to thank all of the outgoing TC members for the support that they have provided the Speech and Language community over the last 3 years.
The end of 2009 also marked the end of Alex Acero's very successful tenure as VP Technical Directions. One of the last tasks that Alex set himself was to reform the SPS bylaws such that all Technical Committees follow a uniform set of policies and procedures. Thankfully, our TC's existing bylaws are very similar to the new rules so we will not need to make any significant changes. One exception, however, is that the new rules require TC's to have a vice-Chair who is elected for a 2 year term and then automatically takes over as Chair for a second 2 year term. Anticipating this change, the Speech and Language TC has elected John Hansen as its vice-Chair. As a transitional arrangement, John will serve just 1 year as vice-Chair before taking over from me in January 2011. We will therefore need to elect another vice-Chair at the end of this year to work alongside John.
As well as being vice-Chair of our TC, John is also Technical Program Chair of ICASSP 2010 to be held in Dallas in March. In my last newsletter article, I described the imminent ICASSP 2010 review process. In the event, we had a total of 620 papers submitted. 510 were in speech and of these we accepted 249; the remaining 110 submissions were in the language area and we accepted 59 of these. Hence, the overall acceptance rate in the Speech and Language area was 50%. Of the 620 papers submitted, 600 received four reviews and the remainder had 3 reviews. All papers received a meta-review from a TC member to minimise the effects of reviewer inconsistency or disagreement. This puts quite a load on TC members who have to respond very quickly and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their help, especially those who were able to conduct last-minute reviews on very short notice! Whilst no reviewing system can be perfect, I believe that our TC has done as much as could reasonably be done to ensure that every paper submitted was assessed fairly. The overall process was managed by the four area chairs: Pascale Fung, TJ Hazen, Thomas Hain and Brian Kingsbury. They did a tremendous job and we owe them a great vote of thanks.
So best wishes again for the New Year and see you all at ICASSP 2010!
Steve Young
Steve Young is Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee.
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