International Speech Communication Association ISCA elects I2R’s researcher to their Board

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Singapore, 12 Jun 2009 - A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) is proud to announce that Dr. Li Haizhou has been elected as one of the nine new Board Members of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the largest professional organization in the areas of speech communication, science and technology that has over 1500 international members. Dr Li Haizhou is one of two Asians elected for new term beginning September 2009

Dr Li, who is Department Head of Human Language Technology at I2R, will serve on the ISCA Board for a period of four years from September 2009 to 2013 as one of the 14 Board Members.

Professor Lye Kin Mun, Deputy Executive Director (Research) said, “I2R is indeed proud of Dr Li Haizhou being elected to the illustrious ISCA board. I congratulate him on this significant achievement and the recognition it has brought to the A*STAR family and fellow researchers at Fusionopolis. We thank him for his part in focusing the spotlight on I2R’s technological discoveries on the global platform.”

ISCA was founded in 1988 and registered in France. It oversees annual Interspeech scientific conferences, publishes the Journal of Speech Communication together with the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). It also has 13 Special Interest Groups covering all areas of speech communications. It selects ISCA Fellows (http://www.isca-speech.org/fellows.html), and honors ISCA Medals for scientific achievements (http://www.isca-speech.org/awards.html).

Among the 9 newly elected are Professor Jean-Francois Bonastre, Vice President of University of Avignon, France; Dr Michael Picheny, Senior Manager of the Speech and Language Algorithms Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Professor Isabel Trancoso of IST, Portugal, (Professor Isabel is the incumbent ISCA President re-elected to another term). The former Board Members from Asia were from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The purpose of the association is to promote, in an international world-wide context, activities and exchanges in all fields related to speech communication science and technology. The association is aimed at all persons and institutions interested in fundamental research and technological development that aims at describing, explaining and reproducing the various aspects of human communication by speech, that is, without assuming this enumeration to be exhaustive, phonetics, linguistics, computer speech recognition and synthesis, speech compression, speaker recognition, aids to medical diagnosis of voice pathologies.
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Background
About Fusionopolis
Fusionopolis is Singapore’s science and technology hub that brings together scientists, research engineers and technology experts from a variety of science and engineering disciplines, to find innovative solutions for technological and lifestyle problems facing society and jumpstart future industries.

Fusionopolis will have more than 1500 researchers from the public labs under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), with a broad spectrum of capabilities ranging from high performance computing to infocomm research, data storage, materials research and engineering, microelectronics, and manufacturing technology. The public labs work alongside corporate labs like those of Vestas, Thales Technology and Seiko Instruments to accelerate the development of technologies and new products, and bring them to market.

Fusionopolis is located in close proximity to A*STAR’s biomedical sciences research institutes at Biopolis, which will open up opportunities for the fusion of capabilities across diverse scientific domains, thus paving the way for multi-disciplinary research.

A whole-of-Singapore approach has been taken at Fusionopolis to enable it to jumpstart future industries. Fusionopolis will also be home to Singapore’s various industry-development public agencies such as the Media Development Authority, the Economic Development Board and SPRING Singapore.

For more information on Fusionopolis, please visit www.fusionopolis.a-star.edu.sg

About Institute for Infocomm Research
The Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R - pronounced as i-squared-r) is a member of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) family. Established in 2002, our mission is to be the globally preferred source of innovations in `Interactive Secured Information, Content and Services Anytime Anywhere’ through research by passionate people dedicated to Singapore’s economic success.
I²R performs R&D in information, communications and media (ICM) technologies to develop holistic solutions across the ICM value chain. Our research capabilities are in information technology, wireless and optical communication networks, interactive and digital media; signal processing and computing. We seek to be the infocomm and media value creator that keeps Singapore ahead. Website: www.i2r.a-star.edu.sg
About ISCA
ISCA is a non-profit organization. Its original statutes (statutes in French or their translation in English) were deposited in Grenoble, France, on March 27th, 1988, by René CARRÉ.
The association started as ESCA (European Speech Communication Association) and, since its foundation, has been steadily expanding and consolidating its activities; it has offered an increasing range of services and benefits to its members and it has put its financial and administrative functions on a firm professional footing. Indeed, over the ten years of its existence, ESCA has evolved from a small EEC-supported European organisation to a fully-independent and self-supporting international association.
At the General Assembly that took place during the last Eurospeech conference in Budapest (September 1999), ESCA became a truly international association in the global field of speech science and technology, changing its name to ISCA (International Speech Communication Association) and modifying its statutes accordingly. http://www.isca-speech.org/index.php