A message from John H.L. Hansen, Vice-President of ISCA

Dear ISCA Members,

Greetings and Welcome to the January edition of ISCApad! I also wish to express my sincere thanks to the membership for your support in being elected, and having the opportunity to serve on the new ISCA Board. I will be serving as Vice-President for ISCA, and help oversee new initiatives and support Haizhou Li, our ISCA President, for continued advancements for the speech and language community.

In this newsletter, I would first like to pass along Greetings and a very Happy New Year for 2016 to all! There are a number of advancements and events which are coming in 2016 as part of ISCA. First, the next Interspeech-2016 Conference planning is already activity underway!

• Interspeech-2016: [http://www.interspeech2016.org/] will take place Sept. 8-12, 2016 in San Francisco, CA USA. The deadline for paper submissions is March 23, 2016. Show and Tell Demonstrations submissions are open until March 30^th. A number of Satellite Workshops are also being planned, including (i) the 5^th WOCCI – Workshop on Child Computer Interaction [http://www.wocci.org/2016/home.html , planned for Sept. 6-7], and (ii) the 2^nd Language Teaching, Learning and Technology workshop [https://sites.google.com/site/l1teachingandtechnology/, co-located with WOCCI-2016 for Sept. 6-7], as well as several others which will be announced later in Jan. 2016. These two workshops emphasize education for children, and language education in general and would be great opportunities for the ISCA membership to explore new emerging science and technology in these fields.

I would also like to encourage industry to consider both Interspeech sponsorship, and participation as an Interspeech Exhibitor. ISCA is a non-profit organization and conference Sponsorship is critical for supporting the meeting and allowing students to participate.

• ISCA Communications – the communications from and to ISCA has always been active, but new advancements are being explored this coming year! ISCA Board Member Kay Berkling, who is taking on the responsibility as Chair of ISCA Communications, will be exploring with the ISCA Board opportunities to expand and enrich the potential learning opportunities in speech and language science and technology. While these are still in their early stages of discussion, the areas would offer improved educational support for developing programs and countries, as well as foster communication about research problems in a transparent manner, between students, labs, data-suppliers and computational resources around the world. Stay Tuned for More in the ISCApad!!

• Challenges & Competitions – there is an increasing number of competitions and challenges this past year and coming in 2016. While many of these offer great opportunities for research laboratories and students to participate in more realistic data in speech and language processing, the number of these events is growing rapidly! I offer a suggestion here, asking those who are considering future challenges to contact ISCA to help coordinate such emerging events, and ensure we do not saturate the research community! We would very much like to see significant participation in these events, and many require an extensive time and human resource commitment for participation.

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and Interspeech-2016!

John H.L. Hansen