Dear ISCA Members Worldwide,

As 2020 comes to a close, on behalf of the ISCA board, I wish to extend a sincere thanks for your membership and participation in ISCA this year.  The world continues to address the COVID19 pandemic, and at least now there are number of vaccines which are beginning to be made available, so I hope we all can turn this corner and be able to come back to a sense of human communication/engagement which helps all. There are a few announcements below which I would like to share (and will also appear in the ISCApad for Jan.’21).  I extend best wishes to all of you for a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2021! Stay safe and healthy – and look forward to your involvement with ISCA in 2021!

John Hansen, ISCA President

INTERSPEECH-2020: [http://www.interspeech2020.org/] (Oct. 25-29, 2020)
Again, we finished Interspeech-2020 in October, our first online/virtual conference. By all measures, the conference was an extremely well attended event with 1021 papers presented, and ~2000 registered attendees, plus more than 6000 visitors to the general public streamed material.  The INTERSPEECH 2020 Proceedings (link) are now available in the ISCA Online Archive (link). 

ISCA Fellows 2021 Nomination DEADLINE : Wednesday, February 10, 2021 (link)
Please consider nominating your colleagues who have made scientific, technical, and/or service impact to our field of speech communications (nomination link is included).

ISCA Educational Community & Outreach Support:
ISCA DL Program: ISCA currently has four ISCA Distinguished Lecturers for 2020-22 and 2019-21, both terms extended due to COVID19).   Please visit ISCA Distinguished Lecture page here. Consider inviting our current ISCA DLs for a talk! (2020-22: Prof. Suzanne Boyce, Univ. of Cincinnati, USA; Prof. Hemant Patil, DA-IICT, INDIA; 2019-21: Prof. Laurent Besacier, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France; Prof. Mark Gales, Cambridge Univ., UK). Specific topics are listed on our ISCA DL page.

ISCA International Virtual Seminars: In addition to our ISCA Distinguished Lecturers, ISCA Board has also taken steps to increase educational support for academic programs in the speech and language communication domains.  It is expected that such seminars will help provide support for research labs, especially students.  ISCA has set up a pool of speakers prepared to give on-line talks. Further details on speakers and topics will be available on: www.isca-speech.org.

Hope all enjoy the holidays and I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR for 2021!

Stay safe and healthy!
John H.L. Hansen (ISCA President)