Contents

1 . Message from the board

 Dear members,

This year we introduce an innovation for the papers at INTERSPEECH 2008: Short and long papers.

Each Interspeech is unique in some fashion, and Interspeech 2008 is no
exception. One of the experiments being tried this year is to allow for
two types of paper submissions - single page ("short paper") and
four-page ("long paper"). Long papers have always been the standard at
Interspeech conferences and remain the preferred method of publication.
However, in the speech science community, the publication of a four-page
paper can in some cases interfere with later journal publication,
causing problems for authors who are evaluated by the number of their
journal publications. 

The speech processing area traditionally has not suffered from such
constraints. In addition, researchers in the speech processing area have
an imperative to rapidly reimplement ideas presented in other people's
papers in their own local problem / context and test out the proposed
methods. They cannot afford to wait for the one-two year review/publish
cycle.  A short paper really does not offer sufficient information for
such exercises. 

Yet  another issue is that Interspeech is hardly an intimate conference.
One cannot reasonably expect to hear most of the papers. Short papers
can be seen by all attendees in single-track conferences but not in
muti-tier conferences, especially on the order of Interspeech. 

Therefore, the combined community has a dilemma. Is it "short papers",
"long papers", or both? Should we place different requirements on
different communities? Should we indicate explicitly in the title that a
paper is "long" or "short" so that readers encountering "short" papers
in citations know in advance there will be a dearth of detail in the
published record? There are no easy answers to these questions. 

Since speech is basically an empirical area, the Interspeech 2008
committee has decided to do what most of us do in our day jobs -
experiment! This year, Interspeech 2008 will allow two types of
submissions - both short and long papers. Although the terminology
varies from conference to conference, here short papers are more like
structured abstracts.
ISCA will survey the reactions of the community and try to recommend a
course of action for future conferences. Our goal is to try to serve the
needs of a diverse community and recognize that one glove does not fit
all hands. Please give us your comments!

 

The board
 

 

 

 

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2 . Editorial

 Dear Members, 

Thanks to Helen Meng's student Laurence Liu, I now have a wonderful tool for editing ISCApad. I thank Laurence who progressively took my requirements into account. From the table of contents, you have  an instantaneous access to all subsections (topics, conferences, job openings) by clicking on the links. There is also a return the table of contents by following the link at the bottom of each subsection (Back to top).

Unfortunately I had  some problems with my PC at this month and this is the reason this  this issue is late.

One  important information is the cancellation of the ITRW  on  Evidence-based Voice and Speech Rehabilitation in Head & Neck Oncology  that was organized in Amsterdam.

There is also an important message from the board at the top of this issue: please send your reactions to Tanja Schultz  (conferences@isca-speech.org).

Chris Wellekens

Institut Eurecom

Sophia Antipolis France

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3 . ISCA News

3-1 . ISCA Scientific Achievement Medalist 2008

ISCA Scientific Achievement Medal for 2008  It is with great pleasure that I announce the ISCA Medalist for 2008 - Hiroya Fujisaki. Prof. Fujisaki has contributed to the speech research community in so many aspects, in speech analysis, synthesis and prosody, that it will be a very hard task for me to summarize his long list of achievements. He is also the founder of the ICSLP series of conferences which, being now fully integrated as one of ISCA's yearly conferences, will have its 10th anniversary this year.


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3-2 . ISCA Fellows

ISCA Fellows, Call for Nominations

In 2007, ISCA will begin its Fellow Program to recognize and honor  outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the field  of speech science and technology.  To qualify for this  distinction, a candidate must have been an ISCA member for five years or  more with a minimum of ten years experience in the field.  Nominations  may be made by any ISCA member (see Nomination Form).  The nomination  must be accompanied by references from three current ISCA Fellows (or, during the first three years of the program, by ISCA Board members). A Fellow may be recognized by his/her outstanding technical contributions and/or continued significant service to ISCA.  The candidate's technical contribution should be summarized in the nomination in terms of publications, patents, projects, prototypes and their impact in the community.

Fellows will be selected by a Fellow Selection Committee of nine members who each serve three-year terms.  In the first year of the program, the Committee will be formed by ISCA Board members.  Over the next three years, one third of the members of the Selection Committee will be replaced by ISCA Fellows until the Committee consists entirely of ISCA Fellows.  Members of the Committee will be chosen by the ISCA Board.
 
The committee will hold a virtual meeting during June to evaluate the current years nominations.
 
Nominations should be submitted on the form provided at http://www.isca-speech.org/fellows.html.  Nominations should be submitted before May 23rd 2008.

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3-3 . Google Scholar and the ISCA Archive

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    Google Scholar and the ISCA Archive 
     
    The indexing of the ISCA Archive (http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/) by the Google Scholar search engine (http://scholar.google.com/) is now thorough enough to be quite useful, so this seems like a good time to give an overview of the service.  Google Scholar is a research literature search engine that provides full-text search for ISCA papers whose full text cannot be searched with other search engines. Google Scholar's citation tracking shows what papers have cited a particular paper, which can be very useful for finding follow-up work, related work and corrections.  More details about these and other features are given below. 
     
    The titles, author lists, and abstracts of ISCA Archive papers are all on the public web, so they can be searched by a general-purpose search engine such as Google.  However, the full texts of most ISCA papers are password protected and thus cannot be searched with a general-purpose search engine.  Google Scholar, through an arrangement with ISCA, has access to the full text of ISCA papers. Google Scholar has similar arrangements with many other publishers.  (On the other hand, general-purpose search engines index all sorts of web pages and other documents accessible through the public web, many of which will not be in the Google Scholar index.  So it's often useful to perform the same search using both Google Scholar and a general-purpose search engine.) 
     
    Google Scholar automatically extracts citations from the full text of papers. It uses this information to provide a "Cited by" list for each paper in the Google Scholar index.  This is a list of papers that have cited that paper. Google Scholar also provides an automatically generated "Related Articles" list for each paper.  The "Cited by" and "Related Articles" lists are powerful tools for discovering relevant papers.  Furthermore, the length of a paper's "Cited by" list can be used as a convenient (although imperfect) measure of the paper's impact.  Discussions about the subtleties of using Google Scholar to measure impact can be found at http://www.harzing.com/resources.htm#/pop_gs.htm and http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/07/google_scholar_as_a_measure_of.html. 
     
    It's possible to restrict Google Scholar searches to papers published by ISCA by using Google Scholar's Advanced Search feature and entering "ISCA" in the "Return articles published in" field.  If "ISCA" is entered in that field, and nothing is entered in the main search field, then the search results will show what ISCA papers are the most highly cited. 
     
    It should be noted that that there are many papers on ISCA-related topics which are not in the Google Scholar index.  For example, it seems many ICPhS papers are missing.  And old papers which have been scanned in from paper copies will either not have their full contents indexed, or will be indexed using imperfect OCR technology. Furthermore, as of November 2007 the indexing of the ISCA Archive by Google Scholar is still not 100% complete.  There are a few different areas which are not perfectly indexed, but the biggest planned improvement is to start using OCR for the ISCA papers which have been scanned in from paper copies. 
     
    There may be a time lag between when a new event is added to the ISCA Archive in the future and when it appears in the Google Scholar index. This time lag may be longer than the usual lag of general-purpose search engines such as Google, because ISCA must create Google Scholar catalog data for every new event and because the Google Scholar index seems to update considerably more slowly than the Google index. 
     
    Acknowledgements: ISCA's arrangement with Google Scholar is a project of students Rahul Chitturi, Tiago Falk, David Gelbart, Agustin Gravano, and Francis Tyers, ISCA webmaster Matt Bridger, and ISCA Archive coordinator Wolfgang Hess.  Our thanks to Google's Christian DiCarlo and Darcy Dapra, and the rest of the Google Scholar team.