From the IEEE SLTC chair

Steve Young

SLTC Newsletter, July 2010

July is here and for many in our community this is a relatively quiet time of year. ICASSP in Dallas seems a long time ago, the flurry of paper writing activity required to justify a visit to Japan in September is done and dusted, and the SLT submissions are on their way. So apart from the distraction of vacations, there are now a few weeks to reflect, catch-up on those research papers that you copied but never quite got the time to read and maybe chase some new ideas before the light evenings disappear and the ICASSP 2011 deadline looms.

Whilst ICASSP remains the flagship event for our community, our annual December workshop is also very important to us in providing an opportunity for more focussed presentations and discussion. For the last few years, we have alternated between the topics of Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) and Spoken Language Technology (SLT). In 2010 we will have SLT in Berkeley, California and in 2011 we will have ASRU in Hawaii. In practice, both these workshops have operated on a broader remit than their names might suggest and topics such as synthesis and dialogue systems have appeared in both. Nevertheless, our focus on ASRU and SLT leaves major topics within our area largely untouched, for example, speech analysis and perception, enhancement, coding, etc. So recently the SLTC has been considering whether or not the call for future workshops might be broader in scope allowing potential organisers to select their own focus area. We could for example simply call it the the IEEE Speech and Language Workshop and have a differing focus every year. As yet, the TC have reached no conclusion on this debate, so if you have thoughts of your own, please email me and I will circulate them to the committtee.

About this time last year, I urged everyone in our community to be proactive in nominating colleagues for IEEE Awards. In the event we didn't do too badly. Isabel Trancoso received a Meritorious Service Award and Shri Narayanan was appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer. Shri also won a Best Paper award with Chul Min Lee, and Tomoki Toda won a Young Author Best Paper award. Our congratulation go to all of the aforementioned. However, I am sure that we can do even better next year so please help your TC by suggesting candidates. I would particularly like to hear about any speech and language papers published in our transactions which you think deserve a best paper award. So whilst you are doing that catch-up reading, please make a note of any TASLP paper that really makes an impression on you and let me know.

This will be my penultimate newsletter item as Chair of the SLTC. Next year our Vice-chair, John Hansen takes over as Chair. That also means that as well as electing new members to the TC to replace retiring members, we must also elect a new Vice-chair. Yannis Stylianou and the Member Election subcommittee will be dealing with this. Any elected member or ex-member of the TC is eligible to stand, so if you have a candidate in mind, please contact Yannis (yannis@csd.uoc.gr).

Steve Young
sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk

Steve Young is Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee.