I am deeply honored for this opportunity to join you in this joint BSP/GSP camporal.

It’s a nice
feeling to see young boys and girls ready to face challenging activities which will surely provide
worthy learning experiences of scouter’s life.

Our present educational system continue to provide various out of classroom activities that would
lead towards enrichment of skills necessary in the total development of our young learners.
Avenues have been explored to find ways and strategies that would respond to the needs and
aspirations of our young. While a big number of our populace claim that quality classroom
instruction is the most vital way to develop the physical, mental, and social aspect of our learners,
it can’t be denied that one becomes functionally literate when things, theories and knowledge
learned are put into actual practice in the most positive ways. It is along this aspect of argument
that one out of classroom activity that provides this opportunity to our learners is the scouting
movement. Exposure to various rich experiences challenges young mind. They become more
active, alert, responsive and responsible to their role in the group. To the organizers, I appreciate
you for this opportunity and exposure you are giving to our learners. Your programs and other
activities in the District Council will hopefully provide a framework and concept which will further
lead towards a greater sense of their aspiration and development.

As your Local Chief Executive, I am always in full support to all worthy activities for our future
leaders. What we do now are all for the benefit of this young generation who will eventually take
the frontline and future leadership and governance of our municipality. Let’s continue to prepare
their future world in this fast moving society. Build their tomorrows today.

To you young scouters, be good boys and girls at all times. You’ll make a great change in our
community in the coming years – Be effective learners then. The bright future will definitely belong
to you if you set your best foot forward in your journey towards development and success.

To the organizers, the District Commissioner, Mr. Miguelito Rodriguez, Scout Masters/Scout
Leaders thank you for your dedication and commitment for our learners. Let’s continue to be
strong partners in that mission for progress.

Young scouters – Enjoy your days in the camp.

Happy Scouting!

Very good afternoon,

colleagues and friends.
Welcome to the closing ceremony.
It has been
intensive four days.
Productive, fruitful and wonderful and technical and social programs.
And today we are here to concludes our event.
We have achieved a lot
and
I'm very glad that I still see so many people stayed behind to attend the
closing ceremony.
I already proposed Tokyo myself, big ground of the pro's.
That's the way to attract the people from outside the come in.
I'm encouraged also by the fact that the Singapore is far from .. at the
opening ceremony I said
that we are off the beaten path and it's like .. many of my friends
told me that it took them more than
twenty hours to fly and come to Singapore.
And they made this great event possible.
The theme of the conference is Celebrating the Diversity of Spoken Languages
 and I also remember that yesterday professor William Wang, he's a keynote speaker, talked
about music is actually one of the language of communications.
So, our conference is not complete without a piece of
music. Today we are glad to have invited
volunteers
or actually one from Nanyang Technological
University, and another is from the Instutute for Infocomm Research.
They are speech and language researchers
and they volunteered to
contribute a piece of music into our closing ceremony.
There are three pieces of a music today. The first one is
the Tom and Jerry Show. I think you're familiar with.
So, this is the synopsis and we are glad to invite, a research engineer from
the Natural Language
Processing Department of Institute for Infocomm Research,
Mr. Tan Zongying to come on the stage.
A piano is .. is it on?
Piano is considered the staple of the western classical repertoire. And today we have also
invited another musical instruments. Which is Erhu. I mean for the people who are from
Asia you would know Erhu
which is the violin of the East.
And that is very popular existing almost in all Chinese operas. In the composed music
you can hear the sound of Erhu. Today we are very glad to have invited
intern student from the School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological
University of Singapore. Actually he's my student, Mr. Lei Wenqiang please come to the stage.
Wenqiang and Zongying they are very dedicated members of our community. They spent their
past
a few
weeks practising and next
they're going to present a duet.
Erhu is having a dialogue with the piano.
This is a very famous piece of music. It's composed by a Japanese composer Yukiko
Isomura.
And the title is Street Where Wind Resides.
Please.
Thank you, thank you.
Singapore is a place where the East meets West so
not only in speech and language, it's also in music.
Next we will go to proper program. So, we start with the President's address.
I'd like to invite the Tanja Schultz, the ISCA President, to address to us.
So, I'm not sure how it feels to you but I feel that I've just
stepped up here to do the opening
ceremony together with Haizhou. So, I feel that the conference really was over in a
blink.
To my taste it could last another four days but
I'm not sure how excited Haizhou would be about that one.
So, as I promised in the opening it's ISCA's pleasure to, as a first thing
in the
closing ceremony, to present the Best Student Paper Awards and then also the Best Journal
Paper Awards. And for this
purpose I would like to ask Alan Black, our board member for
grants and awards, and also later on Martin Cook, our board
member for publications, to come up to the stage to announce
the winners of the paper awards.
Thank you, Tanja. This is always a good part of the being on the ISCA
 board, not that the other things
are not good. You should all consider being on the board at some point. But
this is where we get the
opportunity to recognize young members of the community who are producing excellent work
and what
actually
happens for the best students.
Paper award is the area chairs and program committee actually make recommendations and
we put
together shortlist. In this case twelve papers.
And then during the conference various people are going and listening to the presentations so
we take that into account, where we actually been selecting the best papers. Now, of
these twelve
we select three as the best papers and I'd like here to announce three best
papers
from different areas within our field, so that's good. And I believe students are actually
here. For the first paper .. first paper is Sandrine Brognaux. She's actually not here
but
I can actually see her on Skype. She's sitting in the front row.
And I'd like to ask her ?? to come up here and if the laptop
can come up too, we can actually
do the presentation through the laptop.
Congratulations.
Let's shake your hand.
For the next .. there are two students involved Stephen Voinea and Chiyaun Zhang, if
they are here
I would like them to them to come up.
And for the third paper Zoltan Tuske and Pavel Golik.
If you're here please come up.
Thank you very much Alan and I would like to ask Martin Cook to come
on stage to present
the ISCA's Best Journal Paper Awards.
There are two best paper awards and these are selected by the respective editorial boards
of Computer Speech and Language, and Speech Communication independently.
As the best paper published in the
preceding three years, so the awards are gonna be for the period 2011 and 2013,
at least in the case of Speech Communication.
And so,
it's my great pleasure in
awarding
the Best Paper Award in Speech Communication
to Katherine Forbes-Riley and Diane Litman.
Now, neither of these authors are here unfortunatelly.
I have communicated my
congratulations to them both.
They are delighted of course. I don't have them, at the moment, on the laptop
anywhere unfortunatelly to congratulate
them. But next year I think I'll do that.
And so, I must .. is Rich Stern,
fellow Pittsburghian, around to
.. here he comes ..
to accept awards on their behalf.
Okay and now for Computer Speech and Language. The editors of
Computer Speech and Language have asked me to point out this award
is not just a lovely piece of paper but also carries a financial reward of
 a thousand euros, so anybody
who's got an excellent paper and wishes to gain
that award, then you're encouraged to submit it to Computer Speech and Language.
Preferably though with
perhaps few of them too ??odd\old to share the ..
to share the awardment. So, it gives me great pleasure in announcing for Computer Speech
and Language the paper by
Dan Povey et al. wins the award for the period,
in fact, of 2009 - 2013
for this particular paper. I believe that
three or four of these authors are around. Dan isn't unfortunatelly but
if you see your name on that list,
so half the room perhaps, come to the front to receive the reward.
Configurations to all authors and thank you Martin and Alan for presenting the awards.
Now, as you know
there will be .. so this Interspeech isn't over yet but we already started thinking
about the next
Interspeeches. So, what would I like to do now is to present to you the
next Interspeech events. They will be
represented by the chairs of the conferences and we'll start from the one which is
the furthest away,
that is Interspeech 2017 in Stockholm. And move our way towards 2015.
So, the Interspeech 2017 .. the presentation will be given by the general chair Francisco
Lacerda
and I would like to ask him now to come on stage to
present.
Stockholm University, KTH and Karolinska Institute
together with all the nordic speech community welcome you to Stockholm
for Interspeech 2017.
The conference will be on this base at the university campus
which is in a
Stockholm's Echo park, national city park, but it's only ten minutes away from the city.
And we will have our ..
we will have our poster and
oral sessions on this ??,
this long buildings.
And the plenary sessions will be on this Alma Magna
which is a building that is created to explore the
niceties of the scandinavian light and wood.
And we have plenty of space
for social activities and the congress reception
and the auditorium,
This auditory takes twelve hundred seats for plenary sessions. By the way this is the
place where the nobel prize laureates in physics and
chemistry give their lectures in december. So in
2017 they will have something to live up to after Interspeech in summer.
And this is Stockholm and we welcome you to Stockholm. And by the way this
boat is not
regular boat. It's a hostel.
And does not have enough space for all of you in there, so if you
want to
live in this nice boat in the middle of the city
you have to
take a note of the date and book it now.
Okay, sorry.
 And you can also come to San Franciso a year earlier.
When you come
you will be
visitors after a long line of visitors going back to the Gold Rush in the
1800's
and hundred years later .. let me just
say that
this is gonna be held at the Hyatt Regency which is right on the bay
at the Embarcadero, San Francisco.
It's a lovely place. I'll show you some pictures a little bit. We've got a
great organising committee.
I'll show you some folks there. We've got couple of them who are with technical
chairs ??(Shirian Tanos).
And our website is up, which is listed there.
But anyway, you will be visitors after a long line of other visitors going from
the Gold Rush and
then a hundred years later people came not looking for gold but for peace and
love.
And
that was one thing that happened and then after another bunch of years there's other
things people
associated with the bay area. There are some other
interesting people who developed company's name after fruits.
And
of course now people are older and wiser in the bay area
dressed entirely differently,
no that's not Kim Silverman.
Things are a little different.
I guess everybody knows there's a lot of great innovation happening in the bay area
and
being mere ??appendix in the middle but anyway.
But what's constant throughout all of this is that
it is a beautiful area. I think everyone will enjoy it.
There's forest nearby, the Golden Gate Bridge where we show ..,
there's mountains, there's deserts, there's a beach, not that far, not warm though,
Sailboats and so on.
So, it's a really lovely area. I think you'll enjoy it and
all around the area there's other things like the one country that to the north
and so forth.
Thanks to Alberto for these photos.
This is the organising committee. It's a great group of people.
We're already working on a lot of the stuff and
I really hope that you'll all show up.
And come in 2016 and we'll ??floor in you here.
Okay, now I have to be this one
it might be a little bit more difficult now.
Just put the slide we can find ..
I think I can find on next one. Okay, so this will be Interspeech in
Dresden. And I was wondering what I should tell you
about Interspeech in Dresden. Perhaps it's motto which is: Speech beyond Speech. So we are
looking for
contributions which go beyond what we traditionally have in Interspeech.
Which could be from the ?? side, but it could of course also be all
the other contributions
we have seen in this Interspeech and which
 may have become better and may have become nicer.
Now
what do you need to know if you want to go to interspeech? First you
would prepare your paper and I can
probably present that the call for papers is now online, since a couple of minutes
ago.
So, you can have a look of that and can check all the dates. The
most important almost
prominent date is probably the one if you want to submit a special session or
tutorial which would be
already November. So, please be prepared for that if you
want to do that. And then of course there's the usual
call for papers which is only 20 March. So if you want to submit a
paper, please prepare that
in time and then you'll need to know how to get to Dresden. So, what's
that?
We cannot start a movie here.
I can't .. do it here.
Does it work? Yes. So, how can you get to Dresden? Dresden ..
Okay, how can you get to Dresden? First thing is
you may think to go there by plane.
And I think I have told you several times that we might have a new
airport at that time in Berlin.
I've told that two years ago I think and I've told that one year ago.
And it was already expected two years
ago but we are still at that stage.
And they now renounced of announcing new opening date for the airport. So, we are
in little bit same
situation as you were with the Formula 1.
Luckily we have all already two airports in Berlin. So, there is no problem of
arriving in Berlin.
So, don't worry if you don't feel that you might not come there, but then
you are only in Berlin and the question is, how
can you get from Berlin to Dresden. First thing might be
that you think there are flights. Yes, there are flights to Dresden, no problem. And
then of course
you could also take the train. If they're not on the strike. Unfortunately at the
moment they are on strike but
I think that this issue will be resolved and then you might take the train.
Or of course you might be more willing to take profit of nice German highways
without
any speed limit. Which is true, there's no speed limit but sometimes it doesn't help
you a lot because there
might be little bit crowded and some people might have the same idea as you
had.
We have some experience with unforeseen situations. You may remember some years ago
there was a problem that Berlin was blocked and we had this very nice ..
called ??Ziehmbomber
which were kindly a staffed by the Americans, so we are inventive in finding something
to get you there and
to get your food there. So, we assume that you have come over to Dresden
So, Dresden
some people might still remember it
looked like this but hopefully or luckily they have rebuilt some of the old historical
panoramic view.
 The conference centre will be closely located to the town
centre, so everything is within easy walking distance.
And it has really nice panoramic view. It's all on the river, which is called
river Elbe and sometimes
the Elbe may surprise you little bit. We had that couple of years ago.
There were some floodings and actually they spread all over the
entire historic town center in Dresden. This is now being resolved
but you may want to know that our conference centre is directly located on the
board of this river.
So, it might give you some ideas if you can't reach Dresden, for example by
train or something
like that you might want to find different ways to do that.
For example taking the boat. Why not?
Okay, let's assume you've arrived there and you have
reached this very nice conference centre. It's really nice. It's very modern stylish architecture
and
from this nice glass windows, which you see on the right-hand side, you have beautiful
view over the
Elbe river. And that's actually where we will do our poster sessions. So, be prepared
that many people look to the other
side and not to you posters.
But we know that from some other conferences, I'm remembering the Sydney, it just has
been the same way.
That's our conference center. Now, you know we have well organised conference, you want to
plan your
sessions and so on and as you know we have provided already the
Interspeech App, by the way if you have used it during this conference,
there is a little questionnaire you might want to fill in order to give us
more feedback so that we
can prepare even better for next year and then there might even the third version
available next year.
Many of you should use this electronic tools and plan you program and then of
course you
interested in the scientific content and you might want to know
that Dresden has always been a little bit inventive in the past and that's for
historical reasons.
Should be some sound here but I can
play like this. So, since a couple of centuries Dresden has been very inventive with
lots of different
technologies. Yeah, what was considered to be technology at that time.
We want you to know that also Dresden is not only known for these
items here but it has also been known in speech science, in acoustics, in audiology,
so
Dresden was the hometown of ?? and people
working in speech recognition might remember the ??.
So, this has been named after him. And there is also very nice museum about
speech
historical instruments and this museum will be visitable during the conference and there will
also
be satellite
workshop related to the history of speech science and technology.
And we will remind you of these items
from month to month as Interspeech approaches. So, you'll get some update on this.
Otherwise of course Dresden is known for high tech
as you've seen in right here, so we are very confident that you will not
 only see the history in Dresden but that you will
also see high tech latest advances in science and if I say we
that's our team, which you can't see here for whatever reason.
Okay, that was our team. Our team isn't visible in
the room here, so please stand up. That's all the people with blue shirts here.
If you want to recognize a German person that's not only by its shirt, but
it's also
by this little piece of metal which you have here. Some of you might already
have grab one from our booth.
It's opening beer bottles and actually we have provided some German beer bottles if you
get out of
this closing ceremony, of course we want .. please stay in for the moment, because
there are some more announcements
to be done. But afterwards, before leaving the conference please take a look at our
booth
just in front of the room and try out how these work. People will be
around to help
you with it and hope to see most of you in the Dresden next year.
Thanks a lot.
So, thank you very much to the three of you. We are very much looking
into the future I believe but we also
should maybe take a few minutes to look into now
or past conference. The one we are just about closing down.
And as you know
organising such a conference is a huge responsibility, it's a huge amount of work and
therefore the very first thing I would like to say in general. I would like
to thank very much the whole
Interspeech 2014 organising team.
And this includes the PCO. We heard a lot from Alex for example. It includes
the chairs for
workshops, the tutorials, the plenary sessions, the chairs for the special sessions, publication,
exhibition, technology show, the publicity, the sponsorship, the web, the local arrangement
committee,
the student helpers, the volunteers, the ISCA Advisory Council, the technical program
committee,
the area charis, the reviewers, the keynote speakers,
the presentors, the exhibitors and the attendees of 2014.
Now since I can't ask all of you to stage. I had to single out
a few of them and I would like
to ask them to come on stage. So, first of all I would like to
thank very much our general
conference chairs Pak-Chung Ching and Haizhou Li.
And we brought you a few presents as small token of our appreciation.
So, I can maybe briefly tell what it is. So, it's a small bottle of
wine and then we have a t-shirt
which is signed from all the board members just that you remember the conference.
Is this from Germany? Not quite.
And then we have a book for Haizhou about .. maybe you'll have time in
the future for doing some more work on
your Koi fish. So, this is all about Koi.
And the team I would like .. by the way this was the team from
jointly Hong Kong and Singapore and we have
another team of two people from Hong Kong and Singapore which I would like to
ask now to come up.
These are both technical program chairs Helen Meng and Bin Ma.
 Okay, so picture ..
And then on behalf of the local arrangement. There was a whole large committee of
local
arrangements I would like to ask the chair to come to the stage See Lan
Swee
and I hope she's here or is she still local arranging?
With this one I believe I will hand over to
some closing remarks from our general co-chair
or no, actually to both chairs.
And i hope to see you all in Dresden in case you make it there.
Hi, good afternoon everybody.
Interspeech 2014
is coming to an end.
We hope you all
enjoyed and benefit form the fifteenth
annual truly international event.
Which brings the speech community together
in promoting the advancement of speech sciences and technologies
and at the same time to live up to the standards and the status of
the profession.
We are particularly pleased to see many new faces and young researchers
attending this conference.
??They utterly brought
with supporting the society to continue to grow an excel.
In order to them recognition, to these young and outstanding scholars, we would like to
present them with several awards.
We thank to generosity of Interspeech 2014 sponsors, including Google,
Samsung, iFlytek Ltd.,
to enable us
to announce and reward th recipients of the Interspeech 2014 Student
Travel Grants. Selected basically on the technical quality of their papers.
Unlike the ISCA's travel grants this is really a merit base.
The awards will go to five students.
May I invite the foreign five students to come to the stage.
Cyrielle Chappuis.
Diandra Fabre.
Guangting Mai.
Is Guangting here?
Last but not least, Victor Soto.
Show and Tell is a special event organised by Interspeech 2014
where participants are given the opportunities to demonstrate the most recent research
findings,
developments and innovations.
This year the best Show and Tell prize
is selected based on the ??developments, originality and impact.
And the prize is sponsored by Interspeech 2014.
And I would like to thank our distinguished panel of judges including a Michael Picheny,
Alex Acero, Larry Heck, Jeff Adams and Kean Chin.
Well, they have helped the organising committee the most difficult job in selecting the winner
out of
twenty two high quality submmissions. I understand Alex is around, so may I have the
honor to invite Alex to come over to the stage and to present a prize
to the winner.
Well, the awards go to Minghui Dong, Yvonne Lee, Haizhou Li, Paul Chan, Xuejian Peng,
Jochen Walter Ehnes and
 Dongyan Huang for the contribution I2R Speech2Singing Perfects Everyone's Singing.
I'm sure you must have noticed that in this particular conference there are many smiling
faces running
around, wearing striking yellow t-shirts and
offering all kinds of assistance and support to the participants.
The organizing committee has managed to recruit seventy eight local and overseas students
joining
these student Volunteer Team for Interspeech 2014.
Twenty of them have actually came from overseas.
They have helped,
they have helped in many different tasks, including the registration, logistics, ??assure,
??teleco events, as well as social events
for the conference, you know. And many of them actually have contribute more than eight
hourse and many
of them actually have contributed more. They provided the voluntary services during
conference, as well as in the preparation of the conference.
Thanks to their voluntary services Interspeech 2014 could not be successful.
Now may I invite the eight
representatives from the volunteer teams to come up to the stage.
And I would like to in invite a
?? as well to present the certificates to them.
Computational Paralinguistic Challenge just been run as a challenge, you know,
in a special sections of Interspeech 2014 and we have received many submissions.
Well, additional organisers including Bjorn Schuller, Stefan Steidl, Anton Batliner,
and Julien Epps. They have make some ??dalju
initiative introducing two sub-challenges.
And I think many of the presentations were very interesting and at this chance
may I invite Anton to come over to the stage
and to tell us a little bit more about this challenge and how they finally
selected the winners.
Well, this year we had two tasks: cognitive load and physical load. They're both load
tasks.
The first task has three levels, so three classes and the second task
running and resting two classes.
As you heard already thirty six challenge registrations
and ten plus one, by us, accepted
papers.
So, luckily we had two winners that
could overcome the
baseline and came in first
before
the other participants.
So, the first award goes to,
that's my multilingual challenge, to Maarten Van Segbroeck, Ruchir Travadi, Colin Vaz,
Jangwon
Kim, Matthew P. Black, Alexandros Potamianos, and Shrikanth Narayanan
for their paper
Classification of Cognitive Load from Speech using an i-vector Framework.
And the second award goes to Heysem Kaya,
Tugce Ozkaptan, Albert Ali Salah and Sadik Fikret Gurgen for
the paper
Canonical Correlation Analysis and Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis based Multi-View
Acoustic
Feature Reduction for Physical Load Prediction.
So apart from a piece of paper they get a cheque with the incredible amount
 of a hundred fifty euros each.
Well, before I end this section, just a few more words.
The success of Interspeech 2014 would not be possible without the many
sacrifice and hard work of large number of dedicated individuals.
And of course first of all, first and most important
is active participation of all of you.
And the size of leadership from general, from Haizhou, from Helen is essential.
The support by the ?? student helpers made this conference very likely.
But
in addition to all this, you know, there's a large number of volunteers who have
contribute
so much, who spend up many sleepless nights working hard for this particular conference, a
selflessness
and I would like to invite all of you to join us
to give them a big round of applause.
Thank you very much. And I will finally invide Haizhou to come over and
say a few words before we say bye to each other, okay.
Okay, this will be the last part of the closing ceremony and as usual there's
a thank you note.
I need to thank many people.
First of all I'd like to thank the ISCA's Special Committee for Interspeech for giving
us
guidance in the past years.
As I said at the beginning that we started these discussions since 2008,
2009 and over the years I'd like to thank Tanja Schultz
and now the conference coordinator Keikichi Hirose.
Are you here? Yes. Committie's help and guidance over the years have made this possible.
Next I would like to take this
opportunity to share with you some statistics of the conference.
We started .. these are the picture that were taken by our wonderful photographers. They
are
two dedicated personnel who took photos of all of us. I think you may have
seen them in the last night's banquet.
So, we started by
opening and of course the lion dance reception. Many of you may not know why
lion dance.
You know in Singapore, according to Chinese tradition, lion dance is a play
in important location, as our speeches' location, to blast the events, to smooth the process.
Now, you
know why Interspeech 2014 goes so smoothly.
And of course we have a dinners and social events
and I'm glad that most of you have participated in
the event.
We also have special events, special programs, that coincides with the theme of the
conference
to
celebrate the diversity of the spoken languages.
We have recorded
superstars
who can speak ten languages. I guess it is Richard ??Sprau. Are you here?
Congratulations, so now we know that you speak ten languages.
And we also have collagues who speak Thai,
seven languages. Wonderful.
We have the Telegraph Express.
This is actually not now in Singapore. You know in the old time when the
 Chinese colleagues come
to Singapore and they are illiterate, they don't how to write and read. So, when
they
need to send a letter home. Basically they go to street and they ask people
to write
for them as a service.
So,
it's nice that this tradition continues today in a different way.
Interspeech were participated by one thousand one hundred and two
participants from fourty seven countries.
Seventy exhibitors, seventy eight volunteers and
five hundred and eighteen people
have used the Interspeech mobile apps.
Last night there were one thousand
people ??fist, that means dinner served one thousand people.
Six hundred and fourteen papers are presented and we have
twenty two demos in two Show and Tell sessions.
This year's Interspeech were participated by members from forty seven countries.
And very importantly the statistics show that
forty eight percent of the participants are actually from Asia.
So, okay we can see that there's strong participation when the event comes to Asia
and
that's what really we want to achieve. To stimulate to the role of the community
in Asian region.
We also received the overwhelming supporte from exhibitors and sponsors.
I'd like to mention that this year we have a large number of exhibitors from
China.
And of course locally from Singapore, United States and many different other countries.
And there were also show of care of industries given to our activites.
In the past when I attended Interspeech what I .. to the papers
of course including the banquets.
But now I started to pressure
the organisers' efforts
and TPCs' effort.
So, in next ten slides I'd like to thank the individuals who have really made
great contribution to the conference. I will try to do it quickly.
So, this year we received eleven hundred and seventy four papers.
Their were all handled by technical committee chair, by Helen and Ma Bin.
I would like to invite
professor Pk-Chung Ching to
help me to give a token of appreciation to the next few individuals.
Helen and Bin Ma handled the papers with absolute accuracy
while maintaining the high
quality of the conference at low acceptance rates.
They still need to make everybody happy, the reviewers, others and ISCA board.
So, they've done a wonderful job making all this possible and would like to invite
Helen and
Bin to receive a token of appreciation.
Then we have the Workshop Chair
Chai Wutiwiwatchai.
Chai, are you here?
Okay, Chai may have left
with plane to Thailand.
So, basically he's organised six workshops and four of them already
took place in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore and
 actually tomorrow there are two other events in Singapore.
So, we move to Ambi. Ambi has also left. Ambi is Tutorial Chair. This year
we received
fifteen submissions and a committee chaired by Ambi
selected eight tutorials. Actually one of the tutorials was also presented by
using the skype. This is to test how new technology works and can help our
event.
Thank Ambi.
The next one is the Plenary Session Chair. May I know is Brian here?
Okay, so
Brian helped to coordinate all the plenaries,
balance of our speakers from different regions covering
different topics and has been receiving wonderful feedbacks.
This is Tomi at the event. Is Tomi here?
Yes, Tomi. Your picture looks
very serious.
Tomi runs all the special sessions and the review and I included Tomi to
management basically this year. In special sessions we allow
people to have a flexible formats of presentations. So, some
of the special sessions, like town hall meetings, you have a lot of interaction
saying plus a poster. Thanks Tomi.
And we have Eng Siong and Lei Xie.
Eng Siong are you here?
Eng Siong did a wonderful job this year. Including the electronic publication, the printed
publication,
and also worked altogether with ISCA as a team to make sure the proceeding is
online on the day of the conference.
And we have a Xiong Xiao.
Are you here Xiong Xiao? Please.
So, we have the exhibition chair. This year thanks to great effort by Xiang Xiao
actually our
exhibition polls, twenty two of them, also are three month in advance.
So, I think it's also partly because of overwhelming response from
industry and also the good effort by Xiong Xiao. Thank you.
Then I have Alvina Goh who is the Technology Show Chair.
Alvina runs the events from the committee, reviews all the submissions and finally selected
twenty two showing ??tents. There will be attraction at the second floor, level two, in
the last few days.
Thank you Alvina.
And I have my master of propaganda.
This is Anthony Larcher and his involved in Interspeech 2014
is actually one of the earliest one. You may know that last year
in Lyon he helped promote event in
front-sending. Also you may have received many emails, regular updates on the conference.
They are all from the Anthony. Actually the idea of lion dancing is also from
him.
Thank you.
We have Nancy Chen. Nancy are you here?
So, this year I am glad to tell you Interspeech 2014 received the record
number or amounts of sponsorships from the industry
and this is all because of the effort by Nancy. Thank you Nancy.
And last but on least I have a web master Wang Lei. Are you here?
Yes.
Wang has made a wonderful job of keeping everybody informed through the website.
That's not the last. I still have Swee Lan. The master of the local organising
 committee. And you can see that she is
in the command center, moving the mouse and making decisions.
If you liked all the foods that you had in the banquet
you tell me, if you didn't like you tell her.
(laughing)
And of course we engaged our PCO, colleages from Meeting Matters International. They have
done
a wonderful job.
Ensuring the logistics and everything,
the venue, the contracts with all the external parties.
Thank you. Thank Cheng-Hoon, Boon-Hwang and Alex, if you are here?
And I missed out many people because actually altogether there are about fifty local
colleagues who participated in the preparation of the event. I cannot name all of them.
I would like
to thank Audio/Video team. They worked here days and nights.
And would like to thank the photographers and our registration desk,
the colleagues maintaining the registration desk. Thank you all. You are the best.
And of course
we have recruited one hundred and twenty volunteers around the world for two conferences.
Actually before Interspeech we have ISESLP which is ISCA's event. So, two conferences
together
recorded hundred and twenty people's and they are very helpful. They
make sure that the event
goes as planned.
Right,
so we're not ended tomorrow. We still have two workshops and for those who are
attending
those workshops and stay one or two more days in Singapore.
I would like to say a few words to the next organisers.
Last year Frédéric Bimpot gave me this as a gift.
He thinks .. I thought that this was French humour.
And it turns out to be a very practical tool and utility for speech communication
and thing is so useful I cannot keep it for myself. I would like to
pass on to the next chair.
May I invite ..
Sebastian Moller.
Make sure you put it into good use.
I was reminded that
having a conference in The United States will face many challenges
and .. 2016 team will need to start early. So, I prepared this.
This is like emblem of a soccer team to pass on and I hope the
organisers can hang it on the wall as a
reminder that they have to start working now.
I invite Morgan to receive this.
I hate to say goodbye.
But this is the end of the event. I wish you all a safe journey
home and see you in Dresden.
Bye bye.
closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, loving God, as we prepare to conclude this seminar, we once again lift up our hearts to
You. Our hearts praise you for your utmost wisdom in granting us solutions to the problems offered today.
The Divine Source of All Life, we thank you for the gifts that have been present within this act of
service.For the gifts of fellowship and understanding, of mutual respect and shared vision, we are grateful
for the gifts of perseverance and insight into the common concerns we share. For these and allother
graces, we are thankful. As we leave this seminar to proceed to our designated tasks, may your grace be
with us as we fulfill our duties and responsibilities. As You have blessed our coming together, now please
do bless our departure and journeys homeward. You taught us to love, to be humble and to see you in
others.May we perceive your face in each of our students, our colleagues, faculty and staff, and the
people around us. May we serve youthrough them and love them as you have loved. All these we ask, Glory
be to the father and to the son and to the holy spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen