Dear ISCA members,

I am writing this 'President's message' during a break at
one of the key meetings of the year for ISCA:
the Interspeech Technical Program Committee (TPC) Meeting. This is the time when the final decisions about Interspeech submissions are taken and where the
scientific program is finalized. It involves the TPC chairs,
the area chairs, and a subset of the ISCA board.

The TPC and area chairs are critical components of the process.
They look at each submission and review to finalize the program, essential for a successful Interspeech!
At this point, it is appropriate to thank the hundreds
of reviewers (about 870 this year) who dedicated a lot of time and
attention to about 1280 submitted papers.

It is important to remind the community that the objectives of the reviewing process are not only to select the papers to be presented during Interspeech. By
carefully evaluating each paper, helpful feedback is provided to all authors. This
allows the authors of accepted papers to improve the quality of their final paper and the authors of a rejected paper to understand how their submissions could be improved.

Based on the comments of both authors and reviewers from recent conferences, ISCA has decided to change the paper format for future Interspeech conferences.
Beginning in Lyon/2013, Interspeech papers can have up to 4 full pages dedicated to the technical content plus a fifth page reserved for references. We hope this change will help the authors to better present their work while allowing proper referencing of others' contributions.

We are now all waiting for the decisions (coming soon!) and I hope we
will all meet together in Portland!

With my best regards

Jean-François Bonastre

ISCA President