On May 24th, at the opening ceremony of 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2011) held in Prague, Dr. LING Zhenhua from School of Information Science and Technology (SIST), USTC was awarded IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award of year 2010. Dr. LING attended the ceremony and received the certificate in front of the ICASSP participants from all over the world.

The paper Integrating Articulatory Features into HMM-based Speech Synthesis which was posted on IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing is the only winning paper in audio, speech, and language processing field. According to the history record provided by the official homepage of IEEE Signal Processing Society, this is also the first time that the award goes to a scholar from Chinese Mainland.

Dr. LING Zhenhua is among the first to join the Tenure-Track Talent Scheme run by SIST independently and is now an associate professor in Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Information Science. He is long engaged in research works on speech signal processing and has achieved series of original results on Speech Synthesis.

The Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the Society's technical scope and appearing in one of the Society's solely owned Transactions and who, is less than 30 years of age upon the date of submission of the paper. Judging shall be on the bases of general quality, originality, subject matter, and timeliness, and no more than six Young Author Best Paper Awards may be presented each year. Nominations may arise from a technical committee, and the award was finally determined through balloting by the Awards Board.