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Meeting Committees
The Acoustical Society of America acknowledges with gratitude the participation of the following members in organizing Acoustics in Focus.
Meeting Organizing Committee
Andrew A. Piacsek, Chair, Anna Diedesch, Technical Program Chair
Technical Program Organizing Committee
Anna Diedesch, Chair; David Knobles, Acoustical Oceanography; Xavier Mouy, Animal Bioacoustics; David Manley, Benjamin Bridgewater, Architectural Acoustics; Kang Kim, Libertario Demi, Biomedical Acoustics; Jennifer Cooper, Amanda Hanford, Computational Acoustics: Daniel Russell, Education in Acoustics; Michael Haberman, Thomas Blanford, Engineering Acoustics; Christopher Jasinski, Peter Rucz, Musical Acoustics; William Murphy, James Phillips, Hales Swift, Noise, Joel Mobley, Physical Acoustics; Ellen Peng, Virginia Best, Psychological and Physiological Acoustics; Ryan Harne, Efren Fernandez Grande, Signal Processing in Acoustics; Susannah Levi, Christina Zhao, Rajka Smiljanic, Matthew Faytak, Speech Communication; Benjamin Shafer, Stephanie Konarski, Anthony Bonomo, Robert A. Koch, Structural Acoustics and Vibration; Karim Sabra, Underwater Acoustics; Kieren Smith, Student Council.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR LIGHTNING ROUND SESSIONS
Submission for Lightning Round presentations require title of the presentation and a brief description of the presentation (not more than 1 to 2 sentences) and permission to broadcast and record your presentation should it be accepted. Submissions must be made at the following site by the following deadlines:
24 hours before sessions: For authors who prefer to wait until the meeting (June 8 – 10), submissions must be made 24 hours in advance to give the session organizer time to organize the session. Acceptance for late entries is not guaranteed and will be accepted on a first come, first served basis. These entries will not be included on the meeting site nor in the meeting program. Contact the session chair after you have registered online
Lightning Round Sessions are as follows (note some sessions are full as noted below so no new submissions will be accepted:
Tuesday Morning, 8 June
9:30 1aBAb Instrumentation and Simulation in Biomedical Acoustics. Chair: Virginie Papadopoulou (vp407@email.unc.edu)
Tuesday Afternoon, 8 June
2:00 1pSCb Ideas Worth Reconsidering in Speech Perception and Production III. Cochairs: Matthew Winn (mwinn@umn.edu), Richard Wright
Wednesday Morning, 9 June
9:30 2aBAb Advances in Ultrasound Imaging. Chair: Karla Mercado-Shekhar (karlamshekhar@iitgn.ac.in)
Wednesday Afternoon, 9 June
2:45 2pSCb Speech Studies Conducted Remotely: Methods and Examples III. Cochairs: Sandie Keerstock, Pasquale Bottalico, Eric Hunter
Thursday Morning, 10 June
9:30 3aBA Therapeutic Ultrasound. Session Full
11:00 3aSP Recent Research in Acoustic Signal Processing. Session Full
Thursday Afternoon, 10 June
12:55 3pCA Innovative Ideas for Computational Acoustics. Session Full
2:15 3pSCb Teaching Speech and Hearing Science to Undergraduates III. Session Full
3:30 3pSCc Speech Studies Conducted Remotely: Methods and Examples IV. Cochairs: Sandie Keerstock (skeerstock@missouri.edu), Pasquale Bottalico, Eric Hunter
Questions about Lightning Round sessions should be sent to asa@acousticalsociety.org by email only.
Tuesday, 8 June 2021, 4:00 p.m. EDT
Speech Acoustics and Mental Health Assessment
Carol Espy-Wilson, University of Maryland
According to the World Health Organization, more than 264 million people worldwide suffer from Major Depression Disorder (MDD) and another 20 million have schizophrenia. MDD and schizophrenia are among the most common precursors to suicide and, according to a 2018 CDC report, suicidality is the second leading cause of death in youth and young adults between 10 and 34 years of age. While suicidality has historically been at low rates in the black community, it has recently become a crisis for black youth. It is the second leading cause for the death of black children between 10 and 14 years of age, and it is the third leading cause of death for black adolescents between 15 and 19 years of age. Our work is focused on understanding how a person’s mental health status is reflected in their coordination of speech gestures. Speech articulation is a complex activity that requires finely timed coordination across articulators, i.e., tongue, jaw, lips, velum and larynx. In a depressed or a psychotic state, this coordination changes and in turn modifies the perceived speech signal. In this talk, I will discuss a speech inversion system we developed that maps the acoustic signal to vocal tract variables (TVs). The trajectories of the TVs show the timing and spatial movement of speech gestures. Next, I will discuss how we use machine learning techniques to compute articulatory coordination features (ACFs) from the TVs. The ACFs serve as input into a deep learning model for mental health classification. Finally, I will illustrate the key acoustic differences between speech produced by subjects when they are mentally ill relative to when they are in remission and relative to healthy controls. The ultimate goal of this research is the development of a technology (perhaps an app) for patients that can help them, their therapists and caregivers monitor their mental health status between therapy sessions.
Carol Espy-Wilson is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland.
Dr. Espy-Wilson’s research is in speech communication. She combines knowledge of digital signal processing, speech acoustics, linguistics, machine learning and deep learning to conduct interdisciplinary research in speech production, speech and speaker recognition, speech enhancement and single-channel speech segregation. She also analyzes speech as a behavioral signal for emotion recognition, sentiment analysis and the detection and monitoring of mental health.
Dr. Espy-Wilson received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and her M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, Dr. Espy-Wilson was a faculty member at Boston University. Her company, OmniSpeech, translated research in her lab on noise suppression and speech enhancement to technology that improves speech-enabled technology in any device, app or platform.
Dr. Espy-Wilson is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the International Speech Communication Association, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Senior Member of IEEE. Among the other honors and awards she has received for her research contributions are a Clare Boothe Luce Professorship, a Career Award from the National Institutes of Health, two Honda Initiation Awards, an Invention of the Year Award (2010) and an Innovator of the Year Award (2010).
Dr. Espy-Wilson has served as the chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and as an elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE. She has served on the board of ASA’s Acoustics Today and as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For the National Institutes of Health she has been a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation and as a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Currently, she is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institutes of Deafness and other Communication Disorders.
Wednesday, 9 June 2021, 4:30 p.m. EDT
A Personal Perspective and Journey through DEI & STEM
Sylvester James Gates, Jr., Brown University
Abdus Salam, a 1979 Nobel Prize recipient in Physics, once told the speaker there was a possibility of “Jazz in Physics” coming into existence when the field became more diverse. This presentation will present a personal interpretation and story on the meaning of this “puzzling” comment and how it led to a citation by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Sylvester James “Jim” Gates, Jr., (born December 15, 1950) is an American theoretical physicist. He received two B.S. degrees and a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the latter in 1977. His doctoral thesis was the first one at MIT to deal with supersymmetry. In 2017, Gates retired from the University of Maryland, and is currently the Brown Theoretical Physics Center Director, Ford Foundation Professor of Physics, an Affiliate Mathematics Professor, and a Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies & Public Affairs at Brown University. While at the University of Maryland, College Park, Gates was a University System Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, the Director of the String and Particle Theory Center, and Affiliate Professor of Mathematics.
Gates served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, contemporaneously on the Maryland State Board of Education from 2009-2016, and the National Commission on Forensic Science from 2013-2016. He is known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. In 1984, working with M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, W. Siegel, Gates co-authored Superspace, the first comprehensive book on the topic of supersymmetry. In 2017, working with Frank Blitzer and Stephen Jacob Sekula, he co-authored Reality in the Shadows (Or) What the Heck's the Higgs? In 2019, together with Cathie Pelletier, he co-authored Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe. In 2006, he completed a DVD series titled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality for The Teaching Company composed of 24 half-hour lectures to make the complexities of unification theory comprehensible to non-physicists.
In 2012, he was named a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, only the sixth person so recognized in the system’s history. He is a past president of the National Society of Black Physicists, and is a NSBP Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics in the U.K. In 2019 he was elected to the presidential line of the APS where he is currently serving as President. He also is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, becoming the first African-American theoretical physicist so recognized in its 150-year history. On November 16, 2013, Prof. Gates was awarded the Mendel Medal by Villanova University “in recognition of his influential work in supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory, as well as his advocacy for science and science education in the United States and abroad.” President Obama awarded Prof. Gates the 2011 National Medal of Science, the highest award given to scientists in the U.S., at a White House ceremony in 2013. During 2014, he was named the Harvard Foundation’s “Scientist of the Year.” In 2019, he was invited to serve on the American Bar Assoc Steering Committee for the Annual Prescription For Criminal Justice And Forensic Science. In 2020, he began serving on the Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. He continues to broadly engage video documentaries with appearances or cameos. He currently continues his research in supersymmetry in systems of particles, fields, and strings.
Below is information and resources to help you prepare and record your presentation
by the 10 May deadline
Guidelines for Oral Presentations
Important Note: All Acoustics in Focus presenters must complete the ASA Permissions form at https://forms.gle/TN1RRhZC795BuE3w8
Questions should be sent to asa@acousticalsociety.org (Email recommended as the ASA office is still closed due to the pandemic)
Guidelines for Oral Presentations
Preparation of Visual Aids
Presentation
Preparing for recording
Making a Recording
Use the recording tools that you are already familiar with. If this is the first time you are making a recording, there are a variety of tools from which to choose.
Please note that ASA can only provide support for using the Morressier meeting platform. All other software and tools are used at your own discretion.
Zoom Recordings for ASA Oral Presentations
A simple way to record a presentation with both audio and an inset of the video of the speaker is to do so through Zoom. The benefit of this method is that it works on any platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and it is free.
2) Once you have installed the app and logged in, click on the button to start a new meeting (might say “Host a meeting”). You will start a meeting where you are the only participant and you will see yourself in the Zoom window. Adjust your video and audio until they are good enough for your presentation.
3) Prepare your slides in your presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint). Have Slide 1 ready to play.
4) Use the Share Screen button and share your entire screen. You will see yourself in a small box. You can position this box anywhere on the screen that fits with your presentation as well as change the size. Now enter full screen or presentation mode in your presentation software. Move the cursor to find the Zoom tool bar and the button “More…”.
5) When you are ready to begin your presentation, click on the More… button and select record from the menu that pops up. You can deliver your talk and when it is complete click on More… and Stop the recording.
6) Now Stop Sharing screen and press the End button. Select Leave Meeting (NOT End Meeting for All) and Zoom will then create a .mp4 file in your Zoom documents folder. The path and file name of the .mp4 are displayed during processing.
7) For more detailed instructions and additional recording options see the Zoom website instructions regarding local recordings (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362473-Local-recording).
Note: The instructions here are for Zoom but if you are familiar with other conferencing software such as (WebEx, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, etc.) similar options are available.
Other recording resources
Uploading Recordings
Refer to the message sent to you by Morressier in early April with information and instructions for uploading recordings.
If you do not have these instructions please contact Morressier immediately at support@morressier.com
Other information can be found at https://support.morressier.com/en/collections/2451475-for-presenters-and-authors
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) acknowledges the strong contributions of our ethnically and racially diverse members across the globe. Unfortunately, the U.S. has a violent history against minorities and women as seen in the recent attacks against Asians in Atlanta. ASA condemns these and all hate crimes and is committed to fostering behaviors that oppose divisiveness and support equality.
To get involved with our diversity and inclusion efforts, please visit our website: https://acousticalsociety.org/diversity-initiatives/.
Diane Kewley-Port, President 2020 – 2021