Dear ISCA members and friends,

The pleasant memories from Interspeech 2021 are slowly fading out. Perhaps you had the opportunity to look through the excellent photo gallery recently provided to the participants. But ? as we say in Germany and some other countries ? after the game is before the (next) game! So, the Korean team and parts of the ISCA board are already hard at work to make Interspeech 2022 an equally great experience!

As you know, ISCA organizes Interspeech conferences around the globe, with an emphasis on places the conference, and most of the ISCA community, have never been before. We do so in order to advocate diversity in our research, address different languages and backgrounds, and reach out to communities which are not yet at the core of speech science and technology. Many of these communities are rather small, sometimes with fewer than 10 ISCA members from the country an Interspeech goes to. Still, there are a number of success stories of small communities who have organized great Interspeech conferences.

We would like to emphasize this as we actively seek bids for Interspeech 2025. Details on the bidding process can be found on the ISCA web site. The most important part of a bid is an enthusiastic and diverse team from our research community, willing to invest effort into the organization of such a conference over a period of 3-4 years. Having experience with organizing smaller-scale events (such as ITRWs or other ISCA-endorsed workshops) is a plus, as well as some visibility within our community. However, as part of the process, the ISCA board ? and in particular the conference coordinators ? are eager to offer support and feedback for the preparation of a successful bid. In fact, many bids which were not successful on their first submission are continuously improved in order to produce the best possible conference in the end.

Thus, if you are in doubt whether you can organize Interspeech, please give it careful thought, and talk to the ISCA conference coordinators to get their advice. They can be reached by email at conferences@isca-speech.org and will be very happy to organize a meeting with you and your team. The deadline for bid submissions for 2025 is December 15 of this year.

Have a good read of ISCA pad, as usual excellently compiled by Chris Wellekens.

Meg Zellers and Jianhua Tao (ISCA conference coordinators)
Sebastian Möller (ISCA president)