Traditionally, speech emotion recognition (SER) research has relied on manually handcrafted acoustic features using feature engineering. However, the design of handcrafted features for complex SER tasks requires significant manual effort, which impedes generalisability and slows the pace of innovation. This has motivated the adoption of representation learning techniques that can automatically learn an intermediate representation of the input signal without any manual feature engineering. Representation learning has led to improved SER performance and enabled rapid innovation. Its effectiveness has further increased with advances in deep learning (DL), which has facilitated deep representation learning where hierarchical representations are automatically learned in a data-driven manner. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on the important topic of deep representation learning for SER. We highlight various techniques, related challenges and identify important future areas of research. Our survey bridges the gap in the literature since existing surveys either focus on SER with hand-engineered features or representation learning in the general setting without focusing on SER.

COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. At the time of writing, more than 2.8 million people have tested positive. Infections have been growing exponentially and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt to systematise ongoing data science activities in this area. As well as reviewing the rapidly growing body of recent research, we survey public datasets and repositories that can be used for further work to track COVID-19 spread and mitigation strategies. As part of this, we present a bibliometric analysis of the papers produced in this short span of time. Finally, building on these insights, we highlight common challenges and pitfalls observed across the surveyed works.