Interspeech (October 25-29, 2020)

This year, Interspeech was held as a fully virtual conference under the motto Cognitive Intelligence for Speech Processing. A big thank you to the organizers in Shanghai/China, who made it possible for our community to meet and exchange ideas despite the global pandemic.

Our group presented joint work with Michelle Cohn, Kristin Predeck, and Georgia Zellou from the University of California, Davis, in the session on Computational Paralinguistics: Differences in Gradient Emotion Perception: Human vs. Alexa Voices.

Our second paper, Phonetic Accommodation of L2 German Speakers to the Virtual Language Learning Tutor Mirabella, was part of the session on Accoustic Phonetics of L1-L2 and received the ISCA Award for Best Student Paper at Interspeech 2020! Here’s to you, Mirabella! 🥂 🍾

This video gives a short overview of the paper:

Proceedings of Interspeech 2020

ISCA-SAC: 7^th Students Meet Experts (October 28, 2020)

At the 7^th Students Meet Experts event organized online by ISCA-SAC at Interspeech 2020 in Shanghai/China, our panelists Sunayana Sitaram (Microsoft Research), Jon Barker (University of Sheffield), Tara Sainath (Google), and Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg; Imperial College London; audEERING) shared their insights on questions from the student audience. Thank you for joining the event and supporting ISCA-SAC’s activities!

Some take-aways to remember:

• Learn to think independently and critically during your PhD.
• Keep in touch with your mentors!
• Do not compare your thesis with the top doctoral theses in your field and try at all costs to achieve the same level.
• A good way to start the career? Organize a challenge at Interspeech!
• Your career is not a sprint, it's a marathon.
• Sometimes the much-praised freedom in the academic world seems a bit of a fantasy.
• In academia it is easier to start collaborations - more restrictions in industry.
• Don't forget to invest time in writing journal papers.
• In the future, we will have to take ethical aspects such as data protection, fairness and accountability more into account in our research work.

ISCA-SAC: 2^nd Mentoring (October 26, 2020)

The 2^nd Mentoring event was organized online by ISCA-SAC at Interspeech 2020 in Shanghai/China. PhD students had the opportunity to discuss one of the following topics with a team of two mentors per topic:

• Essentials of publishing 📖 📊
• PhD topic: focus and passion 🔎 😍
• Time management for PhD students ⏰ 📅
• Professional development: planning ahead 🖥 🌎
• How to do research in academia vs. industry 👨‍🏫 👩‍🔬

We thank all mentors and students for making this event possible!

ISCA-SAC: 6^th Doctoral Consortium (October 24, 2020)

Today eleven PhD students had the chance to present their thesis work to a panel of experts at the 6^th Doctoral Consortium organized online by ISCA’s Student Advisory Committee (SAC). Each presentation was followed by a discussion with the experts aimed at establishing a roadmap toward refining the thesis. We are happy that students and experts from many different time zones have gathered to make this possible! 🕐 🕒 🕔 🕗 🕚

P&P 16 (September 10-11, 2020)

The online version of P&P was a great success! The organizers have shown that it is possible to create real conference flair online by choosing the right platform and sending each participant a coffee break kit 🍪 ☕ in advance. Thanks a lot to Angelika Braun, Sophia Fünfgeld, Peter Knopp, Judith Manzoni-Luxenburger, and their team at the University of Trier.