Dear friends of ISCA,

Many of us are going through hard times. After the Covid-19 pandemic has reached its latest omicron peak in many countries, with impact on our work and family lives, political issues have led to military actions in the center of Europe, causing death and damage more than 75 years after the end of World War II. ISCA stands close to its Ukrainian members, and is willing to help them to continue their scientific and educational activities. We are aware that our means are quite limited, but we would be happy to get in contact with members impacted from the war, in order to find out ways to improve their situation.

For ISCA, we have been fighting not only with technical problems but with personal absences, causing some delay to our usual processes.

The first good news is that we have a winner resulting from the bidding process for INTERSPEECH: INTERSPEECH 2025 will be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Congratulations to Odette Scharenborg, Khiet Truong and their entire team, and thanks a lot for supporting ISCA by taking over the organisation of this event!

Secondly, we have received a number of strong nominations for ISCA Fellows, which are currently being reviewed by the selection committee. In addition, proposals are still open for the ISCA Medalist (new deadline March 20). Members of the ISCA Advisory Committee (IAC) and the ISCA Board are also still invited to propose candidates for the ISCA Service Medal (same deadline, March 20).

Thirdly, we are still inviting applications for the new ISCA Conference Coordinator position which is expected to support ISCA and its Technical Committee in the scientific management of INTERSPEECH conferences. This additional person-power, together with better electronic tools and processes, will hopefully enable the ISCA Board to better fulfill its duties, and to provide an improved service to the community. We are fully aware that we are constantly facing email problems, are sometimes slow in taking decisions, and might even be object of spam and skim attacks. Be assured that ISCA works hard on resolving these problems and providing its service on a level you expect. Hopefully, we can come up with some initial results soon.

In the meanwhile, I point you to this month’s presentation of the SIG SLT (Special Interest Group on Spoken Language Translation), as well as to all other information kindly collected by Chris Wellekens in this ISCApad. Have a good read!

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President