Dear ISCA members and friends,

The new ISCA board has taken up its duties. As usual, changes come with obstacles, but also with a good power for innovation.

On the low side, you might have noted that we have again been object of scamming attacks. This time, the attacker apparently has had a very wide reach, and asked for money transfer to support ISCA logistics. While we are still in the process of identifying the source, and to make the ISCA website and IT infrastructure more secure, there will be no 100% security against such attacks. We thus have to rely on the intuition of our members. In particular, beware of begging messages which appear to come from your boss, or someone in authority, in our case the ISCA president. In no way, ISCA would approach you to transfer money in whatever way (except in the process of your membership renewal).

On the positive side, there have been some activities related to our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). There is an initiative to start a new regional SIG related to Africa, and Mahadeva Prasanna has scheduled a preparation workshop for December. We received comments on the low visibility of SIGs and their activities; as a first measure, we proposed that all SIGs should start to prepare introductory notes ? just like this one ? for the upcoming ISCApads. Thus, next month, you will hopefully see the first of this series of notes at this place. We would like to encourage such introductory notes also for other activities related to ISCA: If you are member of one of the related groups, please feel free to write up some useful information to attract new members and activities, and send them to Chris Wellekens.

In the next months, ISCA will have to work on three important topics:

• Better support conference and workshop organizers, but also the internal administration within ISCA, with better electronic tools; these should include the review portal, the conference registration, as well as the membership administration;
• Refresh our communication with current and future ISCA members, and the entire community; social media will play an important role in this plan, and also our well-established ISCApad might see a new shape;
• Provide a permanent support for the technical part of conference (Interspeech) organization; this is not meant to replace the Technical Program Committee Chairs, but to provide them a steady support throughout the years

We would be happy to receive your opinion and suggestions on all of these topics.

Finally, Meg Zellers and Jianhua Tao would like to remind you that we still seek bids for Interspeech 2025. Details on the bidding process can be found on the ISCA web site, and the bidding deadline is December 15.

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

Odette Scharenborg (ISCA vice president)

Sebastian Möller (ISCA president)