The community working on speech science and technology in Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries has already reached world class level in many areas and has continuously increased in size for the last 15 years. In September 2005, a significant number of researchers from this community got together in Lisbon, during Interspeech 2005, to discuss the creation of a Special Interest Group in the framework of "www.isca-speech.org" that could be used to promote the advance of speech science and technology in these Iberian languages.
The main activities to be performed by our potential SIG are: design and operation of a web site; organization of conferences, schools and workshops; announcement of publications (papers, theses and dissertations) on topics related to Iberian languages and/or by authors that are members of this SIG; promotion in the international community the practice of the appropriate citation of previous papers published by members of the SIG; promotion of industry / university collaboration; offer a forum to discuss opportunities in research and industry application in the field of speech technology; and, promotion of the use of speech technology in education as a tool to reduce the digital gap and to improve teaching of second languages.
The invitation to join this SIG is open to all researchers that work on spoken language processing and speech science research in the different varieties of these two languages, independently of their country of origin: we already have a significant number of researchers from European countries (Portugal, Spain), Latin-American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba) and elsewhere (USA, Japan, The Netherlands). Please invite your colleagues to join us in this initiative and send us your suggestions of SIG activities and the type of contents that you would like to see in this (draft) website.