Dear ISCA Members,

First, a Happy New Year to all and welcome to the next installment of the ISCApad for January 2017! As we move into 2017, there are a number of activities underway for ISCA and the speech & language science/processing/technology community. Some highlights are here, and more contained in this ISCApad.

Interspeech-2017: [http://www.interspeech2017.org/] will take place Aug. 20-14, 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden. This is the second time Interspeech has been organized in Scandinavia, Interspeech-2001 which was in Aalborg, Denmark was the last one (already 16 years ago!). The theme of INTERSPEECH-2017 is Situated interaction. The deadline for paper submissions is March 14, 2017 (if you watched the very informative informational video which was presented at the closing ceremony at Interspeech-2016, you will know that expert card tricks help highlight great experiences which await us in Sweden and Stockholm, but don’t take chances and submit your papers on time!). The Interspeech-2017 Organizing Committee has already announced the Keynote Speakers for this year (James Allen, Catherine Pelachaud and Björn Lindblom). Please check the website out for more information – and I can promise the weather will be much nicer in Stockholm during August than in most places today in January (if you are in the northern hemisphere at least).

Also, 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 especially to help allow as many students and young scientists to participate (there are great spots to highlight your company Logo on the Interspeech-2017 website!).

ISCA Website: [ http://www.isca-speech.org/] Next, the ISCA Online Archive is now accessible directly from ISCA Web main page. This was in direct response to an analysis that shows that the ISCAweb is the most visited page for the ISCA Website. The archive has excellent links to all the INTERSPEECH conferences (2000-2016) including a “Logos” page! Also, past ICSLP (Inter. Conf. Spoken Lang. Processing) and Eurospeech conferences from 1987 to 1999 are also linked. Finally, there is an excellent listing of Topic-Specific Events regarding workshops as well as ISCA Challenges and Language-Specific Events. If you ever wanted to take a walk back in time for our field, this is a great spot to explore.

ISCA DISTINGUISHED LECTURERS:As a reminder from our last ISCApad, Professors Hiroya Fujisaki and Valerie Hazan have been named as the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers 2016-2017. So, if you have interest in having them visit your institution as part of the ISCA DL Lecture series, please see the ISCA DL website for DL Topics and logistics. They are available for lecture tours upon request from host institutions (many of the past ISCA DL reports are available on this page – so review some of these to see the impact ISCA DL is having). [ http://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers ]

As always, we welcome feedback and input from the ISCA community – if you have suggestions on our society or want to be involved, please let us know!

We look forward to your participation in ISCA and Interspeech-2017!

John H.L. Hansen,

ISCA Vice-President