Hello, goodbye - 2022

[February, 2022]

It is a new year and a new season for ISCA’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC). As we do every year, we would like to thank our outgoing members, welcome our incoming members and introduce this year’s SAC board. 

We say goodbye to Yaru Wu (LIMSI-CNRS & LPP-CNRS, France), Gabriel Mittag (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany), Ravi Shankar Prasad (Idiap, Switzerland), Nils Westhausen (University of Oldenburg, Germany) and Lei Xi (LPP, CNRS - Sorbonne Nouvelle, France). Thank you very much for your work with SAC!

We welcome our new volunteers Anna Leschanowsky (University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), Guanyu Huang (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom), Heather Weston (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), Hira Dhamyal (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Sonal Joshi (Johns Hopkins University, USA) and Wenjie Peng (Beijing Language and Culture University, China). We look forward to working with all of you!

We would also like to thank the active volunteers that are staying with SAC from last year, Mariana Julião (INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal), Tina Raissi (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and Sebastião Quintas (IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, France).

On the SAC board, Catarina Botelho (INEC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal) takes over the role of SAC's general coordinator, from Jasper Ooster (University of Oldenburg, Germany), who remains an advisor to the board. Francisco Teixeira (INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal) moves to a new role as an event coordinator, while Thomas Rolland (INESC-ID & IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal) succeeds Catarina Botelho's role in her role as an event coordinator. Finally, Omnia Ibrahim (Saarland University, Germany) succeeds Francisco Teixeira as media coordinator.

We would like to highlight that SAC members will continue their work on SAC's SpeechPitch podcast, which will have four episodes very soon! We hope this podcast can help bring students and the overall speech community closer together, which we think is especially important in pandemic times, where we lack presential conferences and other social interactions.

7th Doctoral Consortium @ Interspeech 2021 - Extended Abstracts now online!

The Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA-SAC) held its 7th Doctoral Consortium on Sunday, August 29th, 2021. This event gave doctoral candidates the opportunity to present and discuss their research with a panel of experts. The discussion included feedback on the evolution and progress of the students, in order to help them identify a road-map towards refining their thesis.

The panel of experts included: 

• Prof. Alberto Abad
• Prof. Junichi Yamagishi
• Dr. Leibny Paola Garcia
• Dr. Mirco Ravanelli
• Prof. Visar Berisha

The extended abstract for each of the presentations can be found below:

7th Doctoral Consortium @ Interspeech 2021

Date: Sunday, August 29th, 2021, 4pm to 6pm CEST (Brno time)
Location: Online
Panel of Experts: 

• Prof. Alberto Abad
• Prof. Junichi Yamagishi
• Dr. Leibny Paola Garcia
• Dr. Mirco Ravanelli
• Prof. Visar Berisha

The Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA-SAC) is pleased to announce its 7th Doctoral Consortium. This event gives doctoral candidates the opportunity to present and discuss their research with a panel of experts. The discussion includes feedback on the evolution and progress of the students, in order to help them identify a road-map towards refining their thesis. All doctoral students from speech-related disciplines are invited to apply! Participants will be selected based on their submitted abstracts.

Similar to last year’s edition, this year, the Doctoral Consortium will be held online just before the beginning of Interspeech 2021.

Guidelines for Abstract Submission

Content

Applicants should submit a two-page extended abstract, briefing the research pursued towards their thesis. It may incorporate published and in-progress work. The abstract must highlight the following points:

• Research motivation;
• Key issues that have been identified and/or addressed;
• Discussion of results;
• Plans for the future and thesis road-map;
• Major contributions of your research.
  
  

Format

• Abstracts should have a maximum of two pages including all text, figures and tables, plus an additional page for references.
• Abstracts should follow the Interspeech 2021 template provided in the author's kit.
• Abstracts must have the applicant as the sole author. Acknowledgements towards supervisors, supporting agencies, and contributors to the work, can be made in a dedicated section of the extended Abstract.
  
  

Submission

• Submit your abstract in PDF format through Sessionize. Please note that:
  1. In the platform, Session Name corresponds to the title of your Extended Abstract, and Session Description corresponds to a short description of your abstract.
  2. In the speaker information-related fields, feel free to ignore the speaker photo box.
• Accepted submissions will be published on www.isca-students.org. A submission inherently indicates consent for ISCA-SAC to publish the abstract.
  
  

Important dates

• June 7th, 2021 - Submission portal opens
• June 30th, 2021 - Abstract submission deadline
• July 15th, 2021 - Acceptance/rejection notification
• July 30th, 2021 - Camera-ready abstract due
• August 29th, 2021 - 7th Doctoral Consortium
  
  

Contacts
Francisco Teixeira (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

8th Students meet Experts @ Interspeech 2021

Date: Thursday, September 2nd, 2021, 4pm to 6pm CEST (Brno time)
Location: Online
Panel of experts: 

• Helen Meng, Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Matthias Paulik, Apple
• Nikko Ström, Amazon
• Rupal Patel, VocaliD and Khoury College of Computer Sciences
• Vered Silber-Varod, Open University of Israel

After successful editions in Lyon (2013), Singapore (2014), San Francisco (2016), Stockholm (2017), Hyderabad (2018), Graz (2019), and virtually in Shanghai (2020) we are excited to announce that the Students Meet Experts event is now coming to Interspeech 2021 in Brno. We will have a panel discussion with experts from academia and industry. Depending on the format of this year's conference the event will be either virtually or in a hybrid format.

You are welcome to submit questions. A selection of the submitted questions will be answered from the panel of experts. Please keep in mind that the experts and the audience are coming from different fields, so field specific and technical questions are less likely to be presented to the panel. To submit your questions and/or register for this event, we ask you to fill in this Application Form.

All students participating in Interspeech 2021 are invited to register!

Contact: Jasper Ooster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

 3rd Mentoring @ Interspeech 2021

Date: Wednesday, September 1st, 2021, 4pm to 6pm CEST (Brno time)
Location: Online

After two successful editions of the mentoring event, at Interspeech 2019 in Graz and Interspeech 2020 in Shanghai (online), the Student Advisory Committee of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA-SAC) joined forces with ISCA’s Diversity Committee to organize the third Mentoring Event at Interspeech 2021 in Brno (online).

In previous editions, PhD students were given the opportunity to engage in a discussion with early-career and senior researchers from academia and industry, in a warm environment. This year, we will extend the Mentoring event to the entire community, i.e., we invite all researchers in any stage of their career. We will have two types of mentoring: round tables and one-on-one mentoring.

Round table discussions:

To cater for potential different needs and wishes, we will have round tables only for PhD students and round tables for a mix of people at different career stages. Each table will have an assigned topic, two mentors and 6-8 participant.

The mentors and topics for discussion are presented below.

Mentors/Discussion Leaders:

• Prof. Esther Klabbers
• Prof. Helen Meng
• Dr. Jesin James
• Dr. João Freitas
• Prof. Julia Hirschberg
• Prof. Khiet Truong
• Prof. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
• Prof. Nick Evans
• Prof. Preethi Jyothi
• Prof. Roger K. Moore
• Prof. Sriram Ganapathy
• Dr. Tamás Gábor Csapó
• Prof. Titouan Parcollet

Topics:

1) Successes, failures and imposter syndrome

2) Time management: work-life balance, combining academic career with side-projects or jobs, starting a family, ...

3) Doing research in academia vs doing research in industry

4) Professional development: planning ahead 

5) Essentials of publishing 

6) Competitive academic environment and publishing pressure

One-on-one mentoring:

Parallel to this event, we will start enabling one-on-one mentoring sessions. If you would feel more comfortable discussing certain topics in a one-on-one session, you can also register for it in the application form, and we will do our best to find a mentor matching your needs. We will then introduce mentor and participant pairs, and let you arrange the best time/place for your conversation.

Mentors: TBA

Application: Anyone participating in Interspeech 2021 is invited to apply via this Application Form. Depending on the registrations, we will assign topics mostly to PhD students, to mid-career researchers, to senior researchers or to any participant in general. We will do our best to have a place for everyone, but in case that is not possible, participants will be selected according to availability of mentors/discussion leaders and topics on a first-come first-serve basis. We will contact you via e-mail, after registration.

Contact: Catarina Botelho (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).