Dear ISCA members, Dear friends of ISCA,

this is my first message as the newly elected president of ISCA. Interspeech 2021 in Brno is over, and I think it was a tremendous success. Not only that it was the first hybrid Interspeech, but also it was a very important one, as many of us did not have the opportunity to meet for such a long time. The experience might have been different for the Brno participants than for the remote participants, but I think that everyone has taken profit of the scientific exchange, had fruitful discussions and meetings, and enjoyed the social program. This success is mostly the one from Honza Cernocky, Hynek Hermansky, Lukas Burget, Lori Lamel and their entire team, who endlessly worked on making this already special Interspeech a really memorable one. ISCA is deeply thankful that you have taken up this endeavor in such a difficult and dynamically changing situation, and came out of it with such a success!

Interspeech 2021 was also the time of change in the ISCA board. Gérard Bailly, Hema Murthy, Kate Knill and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson all finished their term on the board, and we are honestly grateful for their long-term dedication and support to ISCA in their role as Workshop coordinator, Technical Committee coordinator, Secretary and Treasurer. Without your support, ISCA would not be at the position it is now. Notably, we also had the change in the presidency, as John Hansen stepped down as an ISCA president after having served in this role for two periods. I am personally very grateful for having John as a role model in the past 4 years, and for being able to count on his advice for the two years to come, as he will further support ISCA as a board member. Most members will join in thanking John for his excellent leadership skills which helped to increase diversity of our membership, improve the technical quality of our processes, and making ISCA a prospering and vibrant community. We are really grateful for you steering our association in quite difficult times!

Looking to the future, there are several plans ahead of us. We still need to further discuss these in the new board, in which our new members pick up their roles, and the transition between board periods and responsibilities is always a challenging one. Still, some ideas are on the table which should help to better support our volunteer work, and which are finally beneficial for all our members:

• Add human resources to the work of the Technical Committee so that it is able to better support the Technical Program Committees of each Interspeech conference, and will help to ensure a continuous high standard of the technical programs;

• Install better electronic tools for Interspeech and workshop organizers, helping them to better manage reviewers, submissions, reviews, papers, and session planning;

• Provide a better support for the membership administration in our growing community;

• Turn the ISCA archive into a multimodal archive, enriched by videos of presentations and other multimedia material, potentially also combined with research data management tools;

• Further develop the hybrid conference format of Interspeech 2021 and improve discussion formats in mixed on-site and virtual settings;

• Create new formats for including students and researchers from regions underrepresented in our community, thereby increasing language and cultural diversity;

• Continue to grow the diversity activities, as well as the excellent initiatives from our Student Advisory Committee (SAC) and our new Postdoc & Early Career Researcher Advisory Committee (PECRAC).

These are some preliminary ideas which will be further shaped and developed in the board. More importantly, however, we rely on your creativity and support: ISCA is a volunteer organization can only reach its ambitious goals if all members contribute with ideas, personal dedication, and hopefully with a lot of fun.

Thanks to all for making ISCA work a success!

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President