2010 Signal Processing Awards
Philip Loizou
SLTC Newsletter, February 2010
Each year the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) submits nominations to the IEEE Awards Board for Distinguished Lecture (DL) positions, numerous society awards (e.g., technical achievement, meritorious service, etc) and best-paper awards. Nominations for the DL were solicited by the Awards SLTC Subcommittee in June 2009 and nominations for the IEEE awards were solicited in August 2009. After receiving all nominations, a poll was administered from the Survey Monkey web site. The SLTC members were asked to rank each candidate for every award. Voters with apparent conflict of interest were asked to abstain and select the “abstain” button on the web site. Over 95% of SLTC members had cast their votes. The names of the top candidates for each award were submitted to the IEEE Awards Board, who in turn selected the following:
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan for Distinguished Lecturer (2010-2011) – Dr. Narayanan’ is currently the Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Prof. Narayanan’s contributions are in the broad area of human-centric multimodal signal processing and applications spanning speech, audio, image and bio signal processing. His work uniquely bridges science and engineering through innovative interdisciplinary approaches and his contributions are at the forefront of the field integrating fundamental and applied problems in human communication. The DLs are expected to deliver “a message of importance to the technical community”, and the suggested lecture topics put forward in the nomination included: (1) Human-like speech and audio Processing, (2) Expressive Human Communication: Automatic Multimodal Recognition and Synthesis of Emotions, (3) Speech-to-Speech Translation: Advances, Open Challenges and Opportunities, and (4) Speaking and Singing Production: Data, Models and Applications.
Isabel M. Trancoso for Meritorious Service Award (shared with Arye Nehorai) – Dr. Trancoso is currently a Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, Portugal. This award honors contributions to the Signal Processing Society. Some of Dr. Trancoso’s contributions include her long and extensive service in several European associations affiliated with speech and language processing (e.g., ESCA) as well as her heavy involvement in numerous IEEE-sponsored conferences/workshops and editorships. Among others, she served as Associate Editor of Speech Communication (1993-2002) and she launched the electronic journal European Student Journal of Language and Speech, with the support of ELSNET and the associations ESCA and EACL. She served as Editor-in-Chief of that journal during the first 3 years. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Audio and Speech Processing (2003-2005) and Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2006-2008). She was elected to the ESCA (European Speech Communication Association) Board in 1993, and was re-elected in 1997 for her second 4-year term. She was elected member-at-large of the Board of Governors of the Signal Processing Society (2006-2008) and lastly served as a member of the SLTC. In summary, her contributions to the Signal Processing Society and the field of spoken language recognition are immense spanning two continents.
Let us extend our congratulations to Prof. Narayanan and Dr. Trancoso for their accomplishments and contributions to the Signal Processing Society.
Philip Loizou was the Chair of the SLTC Awards Subcommittee which also included Frank Soong and Hideki Kawahara.
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