By MICHAEL L. SELTZER

Last month, the IEEE SPS Speech and Language Technical Committee elected 13 new members. These new members were selected from 35 excellent candidates nominated by current SLTC members.  New members will serve a three year term from January 1, 2007 - December 31, 2009. Primary responsibilities of members of the SLTC is to serve on the technical program committee for ICASSP, as well as serving on one of the many SLTC subcommittees that handle committee business regarding conferences, awards, workshops, etc.

These newly elected members will in part replace the 7 current members of the SLTC whose terms will expire at the end of 2006. The additional 6 new members reflect the recent growth in scope of the TC to include spoken language processing.  The election was coordinated by the SLTC membership election subcommittee composed of Tomoko Matsui, Yunxin Zhao, and Jean-Claude Junqua.

Congratulations to the newly elected SLTC members:

• Kay Berkling, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
• Alistair D. Conkie, AT&T Labs
• Stephen Cox, University of East Anglia
• Jasha Droppo, Microsoft Research
• Yuqing Gao, IBM Research
• Thomas Hain, University of Sheffield
• Andrej Ljolje, AT&T Labs
• Philipos Loizou, University of Texas-Dallas
• Douglas O'Shaughnessy,  INRS-EMT, University of Quebec
• Kuldip K. Paliwal, Griffith University
• Ganesh N. Ramaswamy, IBM Research
• Murat Saraclar, Bogazici University 
• Tomoki Toda, Nara Institute of Science and Technology

In addition, an election was held for the Chairperson of the SLTC, to replace outgoing current Chair Mazin Gilbert (formerly Rahim). The committee voted to elect Dr. Roberto Pieraccini as Chair of the SLTC. He will serve a two-year term starting on January 1, 2007. Here is a brief biography:

• Dr. Roberto Pieraccini has been in the speech and language technology field for more than 25 years, with major contributions (more than 100 papers, articles and book chapter, several patents) in speech analysis, acoustic modeling, search algorithms, spoken language understanding, machine learning, optical character recognition, spoken and textual natural language processing, and dialog systems. He spent a significant part of his career in research at CSELT (the Italian Telco research center), Bell Laboratories, AT&T Labs, and IBM T.J. Watson Research, and another significant part of it in commercial organizations, such as SpeechWorks, where he was Director of NL Dialog R&D, and currently SpeechCycle, where he is currently the Chief Technology Officer.