ISCA Service Medal

After celebrating its 10th anniversary, ESCA decided to acknowledge those scientists that were instrumental in the promotion of the Association, creating an ESCA Special Service Medal, which was later renamed ISCA Special Service Medal since 2004. In 2020, the scope of the ISCA Service Medal was increased to recognize an ISCA member who has provided extraordinary service to ISCA and/or the Speech Communication community. In 2025, the scope of the ISCA Service Medal was again increased to recognize teams of ISCA members who have provided extraordinary service to ISCA and/or the Speech Communication community. There will be two categories of ISCA Service Medal: Service and Resources.

Nominations may be made by any ISCA member. All nominations made for ISCA Service Medal of the year should be submitted to ISCA Secretariat at secretariat@isca-speech.org by 10 January.  The nomination form can be downloaded here. The ISCA Board will select the winner through an anonymous voting process for each of the two categories separately. Service Medals need not be awarded every year but upon the discretion of the ISCA Board. Unsuccessful candidates of the previous year(s) must be re-nominated to qualify for candidacy. The ISCA Service Medal is presented to the winner by the ISCA President at the Interspeech Opening Ceremony.

The criteria to which a proposal for ISCA Service Medal should adhere:

• The nominator should have been an ISCA member for at least 5 years.

• The nominee should have been an ISCA member for at least 10 years.

• The nominator should have no conflict of interest with the nominee, i.e., they should not have any papers together nor should they be collaborating in any meaningful way.

• The nominee might be an individual or a team of people. 

• In case the nominee is a team, maximally 5 people may be named as recipients in the nomination form; alternatively 1 person (the lead of the team) is nominated and is asked – when the ISCA Service Medal is awarded - to provide the names of the team members to share the ISCA Service Medal with.

• People and teams can be nominated for extraordinary service and impactful resources, where impactful means that resources are used by many different people over the course of a couple of years.

• The nomination should state whether the nomination concerns a service or a resource, and whether the nominee is an individual or a team.

  
  

The ISCA Service Medal has been awarded to:

• Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson; for services furthering diversity and gender equality within the broad speech community (2025)
• John H.L Hansen; for sustained contributions to education in speech technology, diversity of the community and the ISCA organization (2025)
• Martin Cooke (INTERSPEECH 2021, Brno)
• Sadaoki Furui (INTERSPEECH 2020, Shanghai)
• Julia Hirschberg (INTERSPEECH 2020, Shanghai)
• Roger K Moore (INTERSPEECH 2020, Shanghai)
• Isabel Trancoso (INTERSPEECH 2020, Shanghai)
• Christian Wellekens (INTERSPEECH 2018, Hyderabad)
• Hiroya Fujisaki (INTERSPEECH 2015, Dresden)
• Wolfgang J. Hess (INTERSPEECH 2007, Antwerp)
• Joseph Mariani (EUROSPEECH 1999, Budapest)