From the SLTC Chair

John H.L. Hansen

SLTC Newsletter, February 2011

This is the first SLTC Newsletter of 2011, and also represents my first contribution as SLTC Chair. I want to extend a sincere thanks and appreciation to Steve Young, the outgoing SLTC Chair for his outstanding leadership, dedication, and commitment to the Speech and Language Processing TC. His hard work has resulted in great progress for speech and language within the IEEE Signal Processing Society. I also want to extend a warm welcome to our new vice-Chair, Doug O'Shaughnessy. I look forward to working with Doug and the rest of the SLTC Members over the next two years.

Well, it just seems like IEEE ICASSP-2010 was just here, and we're now well into the ICASSP-2011 process. One of the challenges which IEEE Signal Processing Society has moved forward on this round is to better articulate the process for presenting papers at ICASSP and ICIP. The process of determining which papers were not presented has been left to the local organizers. With so many travel restrictions these days, including visa's, etc., as well as what constitutes a personal reason, it is often hard to resolve the "no-show" papers. We all expect papers which have been accepted to be presented, and the high quality of papers accepted to ICASSP (and ICIP) should result in all of these papers being presented. I am happy to say that IEEE SPS, based on feedback from the ICASSP-2010 Technical Committee, has drafted formal guidelines which make it easier to resolve these issues (if you do not know, when a paper is accepted, at least one author must be registered at the full rate, and present the paper; if he/she cannot present the paper for any reason, it is the author's responsibility to find a suitable person technically knowledgeable on the subject matter to present the oral/poster). Posting these guidelines when authors register and making this clear will help reduce conflicts and ensure all accepted papers are presented.

Now, with respect to ICASSP 2011, we are only several months away and all acceptance/rejection notes have been sent out as of last week. This year, we had 691 papers submitted to the Speech-Language areas, 582 in speech processing (Area 13) and 109 in language processing (Area 14). In total, 2,616 reviews were completed, and 96.8% of the papers had 4 or more reviews completed (plus a Meta-Review from an SLTC Member). Many thanks to all of the TC members for their work in the reviewing/meta-review process here – this has been a major accomplishment. In particular, the enormous efforts of our Area Chairs, Pascale Fung, TJ Hazen, Brian Kingsbury and David Suendermann cannot be underestimated. Over the past three months, they have been hard at work resolving countless issues. What is left to do now is determine best student paper nominees and session chairs. Many thanks to all who participated in this process!

The process of running the SLTC represents the work of many volunteers, and I ask for your continued time in seeing that we continue the advancements seen in the last three years. The number of TC members is expanded which should help in addressing the range of duties/tasks we have to accomplish. Also, the vice-Chair will help ensure that we have continuity as we move forward. I will be sending out the Sub-Committee list in the next few weeks. We need to continue to work towards having speech and language research recognized in the SPS, including paper awards, fellow nominations, and service/technical awards. The 2010 SLT Workshop in Berkeley, CA (http://www.slt2010.org/) was very successful. Finally, while speech and language continues to expand in the IEEE Signal Processing Society, one of our interests is to reach out to other parts of the world to include new members. I encourage you to renew or establish new collaborations with places that have not seen much representation at ICASSP. With +6000 languages spoken in this world, we should be able to reduce communication barriers for speech processing and language technology advancements in all languages.

I look forward to seeing all the SLTC members in Prague at this ICASSP!

John H.L. Hansen
January 2011

John H.L. Hansen is Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee.