Dear Members,

1450 submissions for Interspeech 2013! This number constitutes a new record for Interspeech. It's new evidence of the success of our flagship conference: Interspeech is the world largest scientific event for the speech communication domain.  Now, the Organizing Committee and more specifically the Technical Program Committee and Chairs are in the most stressing time: the reviewing process. They have to deal with hundred of reviewers and thousands of reviews in order to ensure the evaluation of these 1450 submissions, with the high standard of quality characterizing ISCA and Interspeech.

I want to thank in advance the reviewers.  We know that reviewing is a difficult and time consuming task, and we know that you have to evaluate the submissions in a quite short time. We believe in you as you know that the reviewing process is one of the most important points to ensure a successful conference. Please remember also that the reviews are very important for the authors. All of them worked hard to submit their work's best paper, all of them are waiting for comments and decisions, expecting a positive decision.  Some of them will see their paper rejected. This is normal for a selection process. However, we should keep in mind that the reviewing process has two objectives. While we have already discussed the first one, the paper selection, we should emphasize the second one: to help our colleagues and particularly our young colleagues to understand where are the weaknesses of their articles and how they could improve them. This role of the reviewing process affects not only Interspeech but all our scientific area, our future.

So, another time, thanks to all the reviewers who will have in mind these two roles and who will take care to give clear and useful comments and advice when writing their reviews.

April is the end of the ISCA board elections. Please, don't forget to vote before April 30! You all received an email with the election information. If not, please contact us as soon as possible! The ISCA Secretary Douglas O'Shaughnessy, who is in charge of the election process, and myself are happy to announce that David House, as former ISCA secretary, accepted to support us as Election Scrutineer.

Interspeech is also the traditional occasion to highlight several ISCA meritorious members. In addition to the ISCA Scientific Medalist, already announced, we will welcome 6 new ISCA Fellows. I want to thank particularly Steve Young (head of the ISCA Fellows Committee), Keikichi Hirose (ISCA board member in charge of the fellow program) and all the ISCA Fellow Committee members for the work done in this field. And, of course, it is a real pleasure for me to congratulate our new Fellows:
-    Jerome Bellegarda: For contributions to statistical modeling algorithms, and leadership in their application to human language processing
-    Herve Bourlard: For contributions to research and leadership in the fields of statistical and neural network-based speech recognition
-    Daniel Hirst: For contributions to the understanding of intonation, paradoxically one of the most universal yet language-specific features of human language.
-    John Makhoul: For pioneering and sustained contributions to speech modeling and spoken language processing technology
-    Andreas Stolcke: For contributions to research and leadership in speech and speaker recognition, understanding and statistical modelling of spoken languages
-    Keiichi Tokuda: For contributions to research and leadership in speech synthesis and speech signal processing.

Best Regards,
J-F Bonastre