Speech Transcript - Opening Ceremony

0:00:18	Friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen
0:00:21	I wish you a very good morning.
0:00:26	This Haizhou Li a General Chair. I'd like to say few words to kick start
0:00:30	of the
0:00:31	conference.
0:00:32	First of all I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you.
0:00:37	This is not because Singapore is warm.
0:00:40	This is also because of
0:00:42	the Interspeech fever.
0:00:45	This year is very special for me. Every year I travelled to
0:00:49	Interspeech and this year I just sit here and wait to come.
0:00:54	I remember that in 2008 one day Tanya dropped down Singapore and she persuaded me
0:01:03	to meet to place a bid for this conference. It has been six years.
0:01:08	Actually, she told me that running Interspeech is a lot of fun
0:01:12	which is true.
0:01:13	And Isabel Trancoso also told me the same thing
0:01:17	and I trust them because they ran Interspeech before.
0:01:21	And I can confirm that I enjoy very much the process.
0:01:25	But there's one thing that they
0:01:27	forgot to tell me
0:01:30	that is running Interspeech is also a bit of work.
0:01:36	I tell you that I enjoy the process.
0:01:40	Although I don't want to do it the second time.
0:01:44	Frédéric Bimbot was more helpful last year in Lyon he was
0:01:50	the General Chair and at closing ceremony he gave me a gift
0:01:54	which is this megaphone.
0:01:56	?? he never knew we will have to talk to people many times
0:02:00	and this is a utility for effective speech communication.
0:02:05	I did use it in the last year I talked to many people
0:02:09	this was the team, my team, the local team
0:02:12	and here you can see and hear that my message is clear and loud.
0:02:16	With the megaphone.
0:02:18	So the idea of the team that you will see them in next few days
0:02:22	they are helping with
0:02:23	organization and the local logistics you will see them
0:02:28	many times at different locations.
0:02:31	This is the map of the Interspeech, the warm map of Interspeech
0:02:36	and this event is very special for Singapore becaue the statistics show that Interspeech favours
0:02:43	a location that is 35 to 45
0:02:47	degrees of latitude.
0:02:50	And this time it came to the south.
0:02:53	And it is the first time it is in Southeast Asia so we
0:02:57	are very proud that Interspeech came to my home country.
0:03:02	Singapore is the city of multilingual society and we speak many languages.
0:03:09	We speak...
0:03:10	The Constitution recognises four official languages these are: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
0:03:19	For English
0:03:20	English reminds us our colonial history and of course English today actually this is
0:03:27	the most popular language in business and in politics
0:03:31	in Singapore.
0:03:34	Seventy five percent of the local population are actually ethnic Chinese this is why we
0:03:40	speak Chinese
0:03:41	Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin is a language that is
0:03:44	also very commonly used
0:03:50	and for those who don't know that the most popular is TV China that is
0:03:54	in Chinese Mandarin here in Singapore.
0:03:56	Of course we have a minority group. We have Malay who are the indigenous community
0:04:02	and we have
0:04:04	the Indian community, so we have Malay and Tamil as the official languages as well.
0:04:11	In Singapore everyday more then twenty languages are being used in the public.
0:04:18	And they make the best place to celebrate
0:04:21	the diversity of spoken language which is the theme of
0:04:25	this Interspeech.
0:04:28	This year we have this theme that is also to call for greater attention to
0:04:34	languages they are not
0:04:36	well studied.
0:04:40	The map of the world language documented about seven thousand spoken languages available or that
0:04:47	are still in use. But actually our research community have focused very much on a
0:04:52	small fraction of them.
0:04:54	I count it's about one percent of them.
0:04:56	So we have this theme: celebrating the diversity of spoken languages and to call for
0:05:02	greater
0:05:02	attention to those languages to bring our scientific
0:05:05	achievement to benefit people in different parts of The World.
0:05:10	This year the organising committee consists of a key members from Hong Kong and Singapore.
0:05:16	By myself and Bin Ma from a Singapore and we
0:05:20	have Pak-Chung Ching and Helen Meng, they are from Hong Kong.
0:05:25	You know the Singapore and Hong Kong are two competing economies in Asia. We have
0:05:31	better
0:05:32	competitors than collaborators.
0:05:35	But this time we set a example we put together the team we prove to
0:05:38	the world that
0:05:39	actually we can be wonderful collaborators.
0:05:42	In the next few days you will see the technical program which was prepared by
0:05:49	Helen under
0:05:50	the leadership of Helen and also supported by Bin Ma, the Co-Chair.
0:05:56	They had the seamless collaboration to prepare to
0:06:01	the technical program.
0:06:02	You also see the smiling faces on the staircase which is picture that was taken
0:06:09	up to all
0:06:11	the people the decision was made the TVC meeting was made in Singapore.
0:06:17	The conference is attended by
0:06:19	till yesterday it was attended by people from forty seven countries.
0:06:24	And
0:06:26	people show me, the colleagues show me this chart
0:06:29	I though was GDP ranking of The World's economies.
0:06:32	With the exception of Singapore
0:06:35	and I want to highlight that in Singapore we
0:06:37	have large community as compared to our population size.
0:06:41	I tell people that we have the highest number of speech researchers in The World
0:06:45	per capita.
0:06:49	Every speech has to be unique and different so
0:06:52	this time we are putting effort to introduce new programs.
0:06:57	Some of the programs are new and some are just new. I would like to
0:07:01	thank a group of a people, our
0:07:04	team for working together to publicise, to archive Interspeech 2014 proceedings
0:07:11	online, actually this made us available today so if you can access our ISCA website
0:07:16	you should be able to see.
0:07:18	We have streamlined the process to .. in the past this process took usually six
0:07:23	months to one year
0:07:25	before you'd see the proceedings online and we have streamlined this process and we hope
0:07:29	that the future
0:07:30	Interspeech will follow this processing that benefits the members.
0:07:38	This year we also prepared souvenirs for all the participants we have ??, ??
0:07:46	or top value payment card you can use for transportation, making payments and
0:07:53	doing many things and this is limited edition we issued this together with Singapore Metro
0:07:59	System.
0:07:59	We also jointly issued stamps with Singapore Post to commemorate this important event.
0:08:06	Everyone of you must have receiver a souvenir a paper bag that is with the
0:08:12	stamp inside.
0:08:16	One another thing. The group of ?? Ling under leadership of the Sebastian started this
0:08:24	mobile
0:08:25	app last year and we continue this. This year we grow the group by Nicholas
0:08:30	and Tilo
0:08:31	to help them make a lot of effort to adapt their app into Interspeech 2014.
0:08:37	And
0:08:38	actually you can now .. I believe you have received the
0:08:41	instructions and they're available in Google Play in app store.
0:08:49	I realise that
0:08:52	our app Interspeech 2014 was released on
0:08:55	9th September that was to day the iPhone 6 was announced.
0:09:00	So you can see the significance of our app.
0:09:04	The Singapore team added feature into the mobile app, now you can use natural language
0:09:10	to query,
0:09:11	to ask information about papers, talks and even general
0:09:18	information, tourist information in Singapore.
0:09:20	I thank the Singapore team who put together the app and to
0:09:26	encourage the ?? we put up three prizes. One each day with a cash prize
0:09:30	and we will announce
0:09:31	the winners at the end of that day. If you are the
0:09:34	user and you find this logo, this ?? appears
0:09:39	on your mobile phone, please identify yourself to the registration desk.
0:09:48	To bring up the winners and to promote the conference theme we prepared some games
0:09:53	as well.
0:09:54	We have Multilingual Telegraph Express tomorrow and the day after
0:10:00	That helps you to translate your message into Chinese, from English to Chinese and
0:10:07	postcard to your friends and we also have #Tag your badge with language tags game
0:10:14	that
0:10:15	allow you to label your language that you speak so you can greet your friends
0:10:19	and talk to your friends in your common languages.
0:10:24	We also have the game with Shakespear's poems.
0:10:29	That allowes you, that encourage you to translate Shakespear's beautiful poems
0:10:34	into your own language to share with the other fellow participants.
0:10:43	The conference is made possible by
0:10:46	helps from all directions. I would like to especially mention three organizations: the ISCA
0:10:52	who has give us a local team of great support and guidance
0:10:55	to continue the traditions of Interspeech and I would like to thank COLIPS The Chinese
0:11:01	and
0:11:01	Oriental Language Information Processing Society of Singapore.
0:11:05	Almost every member of colleagues has contributed to the organisation in the past years.
0:11:11	I would like to thank The Institute for Infocomm Research
0:11:14	where I work and many of my colleagues are part of the committee.
0:11:19	Of course
0:11:21	I would like to thank The Meeting Matters that is here our PCO.
0:11:28	This year we received high number of sponsorships and a lot of industry players who
0:11:37	in our areas or some of them are
0:11:41	sponsors and some of them are first-time sponsors.
0:11:46	And the overwhelming support from the industry also signifies significant gain of momentum
0:11:54	in our speech technology in the industry. That's very good for community.
0:11:59	Lastly I have some housekeeping announcement.
0:12:03	You have the wireless, there is wi-fi available around this convention center
0:12:11	all the same passwords and
0:12:14	and SSID system, across the convention centre.
0:12:22	And an app I just talked about. Smoking are for those
0:12:25	who need to smoke. In Singapore we have various restrictions of
0:12:29	where you can smoke and please find the
0:12:33	smoking area that's near the poster area downstairs.
0:12:37	And today is welcome reception that starts at seven
0:12:40	o'clock in the ground floor of this building, so please join the event.
0:12:46	And finally I wish you enjoyable stay in Singapore and productive conference.
0:12:54	If I missed out anything please also you can get
0:12:57	information from our social media sites of the conference.
0:13:02	Okay next I would like to invite TPC Chair
0:13:07	Helen to give a briefing on the technical program. Let's welcome her.
0:13:27	Good morning.
0:13:29	I'm Helen Meng and I'm the Chair of the
0:13:32	Technical Program Committee of Interspeech 2014
0:13:36	and a I'm joint with my wonderful
0:13:40	Co-Chair doctor Bin Ma, who actually did most of the work, but today he has
0:13:46	a request for me.
0:13:48	He asked me to present on behalf of both of us and also to keep
0:13:52	this presentation short, so we'll stay within the time limit.
0:13:59	So Interspeech 2014 celebrates the diversity of spoken languages
0:14:04	and when we look at the languages that are mentioned in the abstract of our
0:14:09	papers we see that
0:14:11	there are over thirty languages
0:14:13	and with the top two being English and Mandarin Chinese.
0:14:17	So these come from the accepted papers
0:14:21	we have six hundred and fourteen accepted papers from over eleven hundred submissions, so I
0:14:28	our
0:14:28	acceptance rate is fifty two percent.
0:14:31	Our review process was managed by thirty six Area Chairs across twelve areas and they
0:14:38	have
0:14:39	worked very hard to ensure that every paper gets at least three reviews.
0:14:45	And the accept and reject decisions were finalised in two day face-to-face meeting in
0:14:51	Singapore. Which involved twenty three TPC members.
0:14:56	So altogether our technical program features forty two oral sessions, thirty poster sessions,
0:15:03	six special sessions, five keynotes, eight tutorials, six sattelite workshops and
0:15:07	two Show & Tell sessions.
0:15:11	These are the twelve technical areas of Interspeech 2014 together with the submission statistics.
0:15:18	So you can see that the popular areas are: Area 1 Speech
0:15:22	Perception and Production and Area 7 Speech Recognition.
0:15:28	Whereas for Area 12 Spoken Language Evaluation,
0:15:31	Standardization and Resources we have fewer number of submissions.
0:15:37	So huge thanks go to all our Area Chairs. We have thirty six Area Chairs,
0:15:42	three per area, among whom we
0:15:45	have invited one being the Coordinating Area Chair and
0:15:49	they are acknowledged by having a star next to their names.
0:15:52	So they have really helped us immensely and responded to our requests immediately even on
0:16:00	weekends.
0:16:02	Our special sessions were coordinated by Dr. Tomi Kinnunen and he helped us with
0:16:08	coordinating the assessments of all the special session proposals leading to twelve shortlisted proposals.
0:16:16	These brought in a hundred and five papers that were peer reviewed and the review
0:16:20	process
0:16:21	of the special session papers were consistent with the regular papers.
0:16:25	So eventually we had six special sessions that were retained primarily based on having a
0:16:31	sufficient
0:16:31	number of accepted papers and we have fifty papers total.
0:16:37	Many thanks also go to our nine hundred and fourteen reviewers and crash reviewers and
0:16:42	again their
0:16:43	reviews were submitted on time. Our crash reviewers actually came in to fill in all
0:16:51	the missing
0:16:52	reviews and we thank all of them for making
0:16:55	important contributions to our review process.
0:17:00	So you will see that our technical program has a marvellous lineup of keynote speakers.
0:17:07	There're
0:17:07	shown here. Starting with today where our keynote will be
0:17:12	delivered by our ISCA medalist of 2014.
0:17:16	And the identity of the speaker will be revealed shortly by our ISCA President.
0:17:22	And we thank a professor Brian Mak our Plenary Session Chair for coordinating plenary sessions.
0:17:28	Our tutorials are coordinated by professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah.
0:17:33	And thanks to him we have eight tutorial wiht three hundred attendees covering a diversity
0:17:39	of topics.
0:17:42	Our workshops were coordinated by Dr. Chai Wutiwiwatchai and we have six workshops as sattelite
0:17:48	events with three hundred and ninety attendees.
0:17:52	A thanks also go to professors Eng Siong Chang and Lei Xie.
0:17:56	Also Show & Tell sessions intel sessions Chair Dr. Alvina Goh
0:18:00	and our TPC has been very fortunate because we have leaders from previous Interspeech conferences
0:18:06	who are with us all the way and ?? times they will give us very
0:18:11	kind reminders of
0:18:12	very important issues that we might have forgotten.
0:18:15	So special thanks go to professor Isabel Troncoso and especially to
0:18:20	our Interspeech 2013 Technical Chairs Dr. Lori Lamel and Prof. Pascal Perrier.
0:18:26	So they were with us all the way and gave us many good advice and
0:18:30	answered are numerous
0:18:31	questions with very prompt answers, so thank you very much.
0:18:36	And we'd also like to thank all the authors for submitting high quality papers to
0:18:40	our conference.
0:18:42	So we did a bit of analytics on paper submissions. So what we did was
0:18:50	to automatically
0:18:51	discover the topics based on the paper titles and the abstracts of all our papers
0:18:58	that were submitted.
0:19:00	And we ran LDA - latent Direchlet allocation for up to twenty topics
0:19:04	and for each topic we've got we generated a work cloud, four of which are
0:19:09	shown here, so that the size of
0:19:12	the keyword and work cloud is proportional to the probability of the word in that
0:19:18	topic, so you can see here
0:19:20	in that word clouds which are representative of the automatically discovered topics, they sort of
0:19:26	have some correspondences with our technical areas.
0:19:30	So as a reminder these are our technical areas and in fact the area titles
0:19:36	can be enriched by the
0:19:38	titles of the sub areas. So for example in the Area 1 Speech Perception and
0:19:43	Production we have nineteen
0:19:45	sub areas, so what we did was to try to match the keywords in our
0:19:49	work cloud, we have
0:19:50	up to two hundred words per topic that was automatically discovered and we try to
0:19:56	match
0:19:56	using a maximize F1-measure and
0:20:00	you may guess, so for example
0:20:03	if we try to match the topics to the areas
0:20:07	for example topic one was matched to area three Speech and Audio Analysis and some
0:20:12	of the
0:20:13	keywords with prominence include VAS and whisper which is interesting. Topic two is obviously Area
0:20:21	6
0:20:21	Synthesis and Spoken Language Generation.
0:20:25	Some more examples here topic five
0:20:30	matched to Area 1 Speech Perception and Production and it seems that keyword articulatory
0:20:36	and production have prominence there. So it may indicate that speech production is regaining popularity
0:20:43	and topic six matched to Area 7 Speech Recognition
0:20:49	and apparently DNN is very popular there.
0:20:58	So topic nine for example matched to Area 3 and we see for example reverberant,
0:21:05	reverberation.
0:21:05	So reverberant speech has some prominence there.
0:21:12	Topic fourteen matched with Area 11
0:21:16	Spoken Language Processing, Translation Information
0:21:19	Retrieval and keyword term, detection, STD has some prominence there.
0:21:24	Finally the last batch
0:21:29	for example topic sixteen matched with Area 2 Prosody, Phonetics and Phonology and the extra
0:21:35	linguistic information like age,
0:21:38	child and gender have some prominence there. So what we did was to plot the
0:21:43	matches between the
0:21:44	twenty topics with the areas that we are matched with them and this bar graph
0:21:49	shows the run that I've
0:21:51	just presented to you with twenty topics for one run and we see that none
0:21:56	of the topics
0:21:57	were matched to Areas 9 or 12, so
0:22:01	just to remind you nine is one of the three Speech Recognition topics and twelve
0:22:06	is the last
0:22:07	one Spoken Language Evaluation and Resources.
0:22:10	So what we did to cross-check is to run LDA for over eighty runs and
0:22:15	plot the same plot again and here
0:22:18	we vary the number of topics that we try to discover automatically, but by ??
0:22:23	lash the trend line shows
0:22:24	that the profiles are the same. So again still topics nine and twelve seem to
0:22:29	be weaker.
0:22:30	And we tried to compare with be papers that are submitted across the twelve areas,
0:22:34	so these are areas
0:22:36	declared by the authors and we see that basically again Area 12 tends to be
0:22:41	weaker but if we compare the
0:22:43	three paragraphs across Area 7, 8 or 9
0:22:46	for Speech Recognition we see as we compare with between
0:22:50	green bar graphs here there is redistribution on both sides across these three areas.
0:22:57	We also did some analytics on the reviews where we have four aspects of the
0:23:02	reviews: importance,
0:23:03	novelty, correctness and clarity. And these are rated on a four
0:23:06	point scale and you can see the distributions shown here.
0:23:11	This is the distribution of the overall ratings coming
0:23:14	from a reviewers. These are rated on a six point scale.
0:23:20	And we also did LDA on the review paragraphs submitted by our reviewers and we
0:23:25	ran it up to six
0:23:27	topics, as shown here. You can see that the work clouds tend to be more
0:23:31	diffused, but by ?? large if you look at
0:23:33	for example topic zero it relates with the layout, the format and the organization of
0:23:38	the paper.
0:23:39	Topic one a bit on the methods and the proposed approaches. Topic two on the
0:23:45	writing, whether the writing
0:23:46	is interesting. Topic three on performance and results and then topics four and five are
0:23:52	rather diffused.
0:23:52	Possibly due to the diversity of the contents in the papers.
0:23:58	So that's a quick sum up of the technical program of Interspeech 2014. Lastly but
0:24:04	not least
0:24:05	we'd like to offer our most sincere thanks to all the authors, to our reviewers
0:24:10	and to all the
0:24:11	delegates who are here with us. And now Dr. Ma Bin and myself will respectfully
0:24:19	hand over the success of the technical program to your hands
0:24:23	and we hope you will enjoy the conference. Thank you very much.
0:24:37	Thank you Helen for the insightful briefing to the technical program.
0:24:42	Next I'd like to invite the ISCA President Tanja Schultz to adress us. Tanja, please.
0:25:21	Okay. Can you hear me well?
0:25:24	So on behalf of ISCA I would like to all welcome you to our fifteenth
0:25:29	annual conference the
0:25:31	Interspeech, as you know this is the flagship conference
0:25:34	of the International Speech Communication Association.
0:25:37	And as was already hinted by Haizhou it takes a really brave and active team
0:25:43	to host
0:25:43	Interspeech, to host all of us in their home country and so my first
0:25:48	and foremost thanks goes to the Interspeech 2014
0:25:52	organisation team.
0:25:53	I think they really did a great job. We just heard from Haizhou all the
0:25:57	efforts we also heard from
0:25:59	Helen Meng and Ma Bin who put together wonderful conference program.
0:26:06	And of course the thanks also go to all the Area Coordinators, to the Special
0:26:10	Session
0:26:10	Coordinators, to the scientific community, but of course also to all of you for attending
0:26:16	conference Interspeech
0:26:17	here in this wonderful city of Singapore.
0:26:22	Haizhou was very nice about saying that they have a few sponsors or a couple
0:26:26	more. I would say it's
0:26:28	really a record number of sponsorship we have here in this conference. We also have
0:26:33	a record number of
0:26:34	student grands which had been handed out in combination of ISCA and Interspeech organizers.
0:26:40	We have a huge number of exhibitors which basically had
0:26:44	been taken the exhibition places up to the limits.
0:26:50	And as was also already mentioned, we have for the first time in our history,
0:26:55	we have the
0:26:57	publications already available online and archived at the day of the conference.
0:27:02	I'm also very impressed by youe after program and I'm quite happy that you set
0:27:07	the starting date
0:27:08	of Formula 1 race to friday to not sidetrack all the attendees, so that's very
0:27:13	nice of you.
0:27:15	As we already learned from Helen, so the number of submissions was around eleven hundred
0:27:20	seventy
0:27:20	three which is slightly less then what we had before, but I'm really thankful to
0:27:25	the organisers that they
0:27:26	didn't compromise our rejection rates, so we want to keep it
0:27:31	at the level of about fifty percent. You can see from the chart here that
0:27:35	we have
0:27:36	about fifty percent acceptance rate to really keep the high quality of our conference.
0:27:42	You can also see from the next slide that this doesn't really have a huge
0:27:48	impact on our membership
0:27:49	so we have a rather stable amount of members just about eighteen hundred members which
0:27:56	we
0:27:56	have for the last four years.
0:28:00	What you can see so is that we have a fewer number of students so
0:28:03	that seems to be that the number
0:28:05	of students shrink. We are about thirty percent of our members currently of students.
0:28:11	And this might be a reflection of a more maturing community with more maturing technology
0:28:16	and
0:28:16	industrial players, so I believe in order to keep it at healthy percentage of having
0:28:22	attracting many young
0:28:24	forces and youth students.
0:28:26	We probably in the future will rely more on industrial help and also we are
0:28:32	working hard in ISCA
0:28:33	to have a lot of grants to make sure that students are able to come
0:28:38	to our conference.
0:28:40	As you may know out of these submissions and accepted papers we are selecting
0:28:46	about ten to twelve best student paper finalists
0:28:51	and I'm happy to show you here the first set of six finalists together, so
0:28:56	the first authors of our
0:28:58	students and you see the slot when they will present.
0:29:01	And as you may know
0:29:04	the competition of the finalists also includes the talk that people were given and it
0:29:11	will be assessed by a senior members of the community. So please
0:29:15	join in and make sure that you do see the talks of these students.
0:29:21	The three finalists will be announced at the closing ceremony together although with
0:29:27	the two best journal paper award which we will give out at a closing ceremony.
0:29:34	I also have to share very sad news with you, so we have a Dr.
0:29:39	Yoshi Tokura who passed away
0:29:41	at the end of last year, so lately he was the Vice
0:29:45	Director of the National Institute of Informatics.
0:29:48	And I wanted to make sure that you're all aware of this one.
0:29:55	So now I would like to talk a little bit about the highlights of the
0:30:00	activities of the board in the
0:30:02	past year. Before I do this I wanted to state as a President that I'm
0:30:07	extremely happy and lucky to have
0:30:09	such an active board. So what you see here are all the board members so
0:30:13	we have the
0:30:14	blue ones in the blue boxes these are the active board members and the current
0:30:19	board members,
0:30:20	the green ones are ex official
0:30:23	board members and the light blue are Administrative Secretary. And I wanted to take the
0:30:28	opportunity
0:30:29	to thank all the board members for being so active for
0:30:33	doing so many good things in ISCA.
0:30:37	So thanks to the
0:30:40	let's say careful spending of our predecessors in the
0:30:44	past and thanks to a long stream of very successful conferences,
0:30:49	I believe it is safe to say that ISCA is now in a rather stable
0:30:55	financial situation. You can see
0:30:57	here from the graph so the light gray one are the current assets, so it's
0:31:01	a development of the
0:31:03	assets over the last fourteen years.
0:31:06	So this stable situation really gives us now the opportunity to roll out way more
0:31:12	activities
0:31:13	in order to benefit the community from these assets we have.
0:31:17	So we
0:31:19	tremendously expanded the activities to serve the community and among those are that we
0:31:26	significantly increased the student grant support so we went up from twenty to sixty grants
0:31:31	last year.
0:31:32	We are also in the position now to increase the loan and reduce the risk
0:31:37	for future organizers,
0:31:38	in order to make sure that they can sleep better, actually.
0:31:45	We are also continuously spending fundings for ITRs, for ?? seeks we have additional grands.
0:31:52	And we also spend a significant money on our distinguished lecture tours.
0:31:57	For the first time this year we launched summer school, so we had two ISCA
0:32:02	supported training
0:32:03	schools in 2014 and we are planning on more training schools on the next year.
0:32:10	We also started a fully funding the students' ?? route table and we are investing
0:32:16	money in tailoring
0:32:17	the start software to make it more closely to our needs.
0:32:23	So let me also go about some of the highlights for example this is something
0:32:28	which is
0:32:29	hopefully visible to the members of ISCA. We improved significantly, actually Haizhou's team improved
0:32:35	significantly the ISCA membership portal.
0:32:38	We also as was just mentioned together with Martine ?? they're now in the position
0:32:44	to
0:32:44	timely publish the proceedings on the ISCA archive and we also
0:32:51	improved tremendously the ISCA portal
0:32:54	which I would also like to thank Chris Wellekens for doing the ISCApad each month.
0:33:01	So as you may know we have also a large number of ?? seeks, so
0:33:05	we have twelve Topics Special Interest
0:33:07	Groups and seven Language Special Interest Groups and there is a lot of activity going
0:33:12	on with respect
0:33:12	to organising workshops and challenges, sharing resources, discussions and this they had also tremendously
0:33:19	reorganised the ISCA web pages.
0:33:21	In order to improve the service to the community.
0:33:25	They also came up with the online application and guideline
0:33:28	for workshops and as you can see here from the list we had a
0:33:32	large number of
0:33:33	ISCA supported sattelite workshops and also six Training and Language Schools.
0:33:40	Furthermore I'm happy to announce we have two distinguished lecture tours, so there's
0:33:46	one which started in 2013, which is a professor Hynek Hermansky and Michael Riley, who
0:33:52	travelled The World to give talks and so for this and next
0:33:57	year it will be professor Roger Moore and Catherine Best.
0:34:00	Who already started their tour.
0:34:03	All of these activities would not be possible also without the substantial help from the
0:34:09	students
0:34:10	and we have our Students' Advisory Committee, so this year we have new coordinators which
0:34:15	you see on the
0:34:16	left side on the slide and the two people who
0:34:19	completed their tour you can see on the right side of the slide.
0:34:23	And for all the students here in the room I would like to pass on
0:34:26	behalf of ?? Zack sec that there really
0:34:28	is clear need of volunteers and new members and if you
0:34:32	are student and if you are interested to support, then please either see the
0:34:38	student members at the ISCA Pool or go to the ISCA's students' web page in
0:34:43	order to sign up for helping.
0:34:46	The students are managing their own web sites, they are also having one Interspeech event
0:34:51	which is
0:34:52	called Students Meet Experts.
0:34:54	They're very active in social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
0:34:58	And they're also promoting the students in the ISCApad.
0:35:02	So again if you are student and you're willing to help please sign in.
0:35:10	So now I'm
0:35:11	happy to announce
0:35:13	the upcoming conferences, so in 2015 we will have all of you in Dresden, Germany.
0:35:21	And the conference is chaired by Sebastian Möller and you will hear way more about
0:35:26	the future
0:35:26	conferences in the closing ceremony.
0:35:29	In 2016 we will be in Bay Area in San Francisco chaired by Nelson Morgan.
0:35:37	And in 2017 and I believe this is the first time we announce this we
0:35:41	will have
0:35:42	Interspeech in Stockholm in Sweden and as I said you'll hear about these three future
0:35:49	conferences
0:35:49	more in the closing ceremony. The chairs
0:35:52	will be there and will explain a little bit about this.
0:35:56	So now I would like to ask Kate Neil to come up on stage. She's
0:36:02	our fellow board member and she will
0:36:04	announce this year's ISCA fellows.
0:36:09	Hello. The ISCA's Fellow Program
0:36:13	recognizes and honours outstanding members of our
0:36:16	community who made significant contributions to the theory of
0:36:20	speech communication,
0:36:22	science and technology. And I am very grateful to the ISCA members. Any of you
0:36:28	can do this
0:36:29	who have nominated fellows
0:36:32	to this year.
0:36:32	And also for all the referees and fellows from Selection Committee for their work.
0:36:38	I'm delighted to announce we have six new fellows
0:36:42	I'm sure you'll all agree made many outstanding contributions.
0:36:47	First three fellows are Jim Glass,
0:36:51	the contributions to speech processing and spoken language systems technologies.
0:36:56	Unfortunatelly Jim is having his visa renewed. He can't be with us today.
0:37:07	??
0:37:11	For contributions to advanced and state of the art
0:37:14	in spoken language processing and especially for human-to-human
0:37:18	and human-machine conversational understanding.
0:37:21	??
0:37:27	And many of you are particularly interested in the work of the Chinese,
0:37:30	contributions to advanced and state of the art in spoken language processing
0:37:40	And
0:37:41	there are some people in this field who are on this slider too
0:37:44	who aren't just known by one name and the first one is Isabel.
0:37:47	Isabel Trancoso for research in speech coding and her significant contribution
0:37:52	?? it's the same contribution just,
0:37:54	speech science and technology for the Portuguese language.
0:38:02	And Jacqueline Vessie for pioneering works in clinical phonetics and her immense role of the
0:38:08	interface between phonetics, phonology and speech engineering.
0:38:17	??
0:38:19	The other significant and outstanding contributions to research in education and the processing of speech.
0:38:30	And now I'd love .. I'll see if there are present colleagues, do we have
0:38:34	Jacqueline?
0:38:35	Excellent, if you can come up?
0:38:37	And I can now started present the fellows. ??
0:40:51	So last but certainly not least it's now my great pressure to announce the ISCA
0:40:57	medal for
0:40:58	scientific achievement in 2014
0:41:01	and the medallist is
0:41:06	Anne Cutler.
0:41:40	Good Job.
0:41:42	Thank you.
0:42:00	Okay, so
0:42:02	I think I will hand over now to Haizhou and I'll do the introduction of
0:42:07	Anne and about or what
0:42:08	we're gonna talk later right before her presentation.

Opening Ceremony

Opening & Closing