Full papers are now available for ISCA members at the ISCA online archive.

Interspeech 2005 - Closing Remarks

INTERSPEECH 2005-EUROSPEECH was the 9th biennial conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and the 6th in the annual series of INTERSPEECH events, after Beijing, Aalborg, Denver, Geneva and Jeju. It was held September 4-8 in Lisbon, Portugal, at Centro Cultural de Belém, located in the city's most renowned historic area.

The conference followed the typical format of INTERSPEECH events, with parallel oral and poster sessions, and a first Tutorial Day program featuring six in-depth tutorials from world-class experts in their field. We also had three brilliant keynote speakers: Prof. Graeme Clark, the ISCA Medalist for 2005, Prof. Fernando Pereira, and Prof. Elizabeth Shriberg. This year's theme was Ubiquitous Speech Processing, a long-term goal for this new millennium, which was also the topic of the panel of our 4th and last plenary session.

This conference would not have been possible without the hard work of the members of the Technical Program Committee -- selecting 774 papers out of 1261 regular submissions was not an easy task at all (61% acceptance rate). For that, we also need to thank all the reviewers who provided us with such valuable feedback on this record number of submissions.

This year's conference also achieved a record number of proposals for special sessions (27). This enthusiastic response resulted in 118 extra submissions which have been reviewed and organized into 10 special sessions and 2 panels. Altogether, the conference included 867 papers.

The truly interdisciplinary nature of INTERSPEECH events is demonstrated by the wide range of topics covered in regular and special sessions, gathering a community of speech scientists, engi- neers, phoneticians, computational linguists, academics and industrials working on spoken language processing and related fields. Altogether we received submissions from 2821 different authors, making these conferences the major international spoken language processing events. We had 1287 registered participants, originating from 45 different countries, of which 32% were students. This growing community also makes us anticipate the next editions in Pittsburgh, Antwerp and Brisbane.

The Science Quiz was one of the novelties of INTERSPEECH 2005. If you miss the closing session where the winner was announced, check our website for the answers to this exciting quiz.

We hope you enjoyed the conference, as much as we enjoyed welcoming you here. We've just created a "PHOTOS" webpage, to share with you some photos of the conference, most specially of the social events that we organized for you: the Welcome Reception, at the cloisters of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, the Scientific Review Committee Reception, at the Castle, the Student Reception, at Docas, the Banquet at Kais, and the FADO, at the end of our closing session. If you have any conference photos that you would like to share with other Interspeech participants, just send the link to these photos to "info at interspeech2005 dot org".

A final word of thanks to our sponsors. Their support has made it possible for us to be able to organize the kind of event we wanted to share with you all. We particularly would like to thank His Excellency the President of the Portuguese Republic, Jorge Sampaio, for the high Patronage of this event, and for all his efforts to promote the Portuguese Language.

We hope that you will keep many fond memories of Interspeech 2005.
See you at Interspeech'2006, in Pittsburgh!

Isabel Trancoso
On behalf of the Organizing Committee of Interspeech 2005
(Including the Orange Team)