In 2020 the «Speech and Computer Conference» SPECOM entered the international list of top-conferences in Computer Science. So far SPECOM is the first and the only one Russian originated international conference that entered the mentioned list based on the five years long analysis of publication activity and articles citation.
The SPECOM dedicated to R&D in computer speech technologies, was pioneered in 1996 by SPIIRAS in the City of St. Petersburg, and is being run annually since then. Over its quite a long history SPECOM developed broad international activities and its returns to Russia happened in 2009 (St. Petersburg) and in 2011; since 2010 SPIIRAS worked a lot to engage international partners in the conference propagation, and its well extended geography covered Turkey, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Greece, Serbia and Czechia.
2020 added new experience to the conference organizers: for the first time SPECOM functioned completely in on-line format using Zoom service and open YouTube broadcasts. Also within SPECOM-2020 was held its satellite event the 5th International Conference Interactive Collaborative Robotics ICR-2020. Research presentation made at the conferences were selected based on the results of a rigorous peer review out of 160 articles submitted by the authors from twenty countries world-wide (the largest number of presentations were delivered by authors from Russia, Czechia, Germany and France).
Among sponsors were Huawei Corporation (General Sponsor) and «АSМ Solutions» Company. The Conference was also supported International Speech Communication Association ISCA, St. Petersburg Congress and Exhibition Bureau and Professional Conference Organizer «MONOMAX»
The Conferences Proceedings were published by Springer Nature (Switzerland), Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, and indexed by Scopus (Quartiles Q2) and Web of Science.
The following 23rd International Conference «Speech and Computer» SPECOM-2021 is planned for St. Petersburg, Russia, from September 27-30, 2021, on the SPC RAS basis and possibly in a hybrid format.