Dear friends of ISCA,

Interspeech 2022 is casting its shadows before us: In the last days, the Technical Programme Committee Chairs, backed up a number of Area Chairs, General Chairs and ISCA board members, have taken final decisions on a record number of submitted papers. Whereas the setting was hybrid with virtual and in-presence participants, the outcome is the usual wide choice of high-quality papers, addressing the diversity of topics you would expect from your favourite conference. Smoothly managing this huge task was only possible with a very dedicated TPC, led by highly motivated TPC Chairs, and supported by Area Chairs and reviewers that spent lots of extra hours to come to fair decisions. The work is not fully done, but you can expect to receive acceptance/rejection emails in the given time frame. Please join me in thanking Kyogu Lee, Okim Kang, Lori Lamel, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Karen Livescu for their excellent handling as the Technical Program Co-Chairs!

The selected papers will result in an interesting program, which – compared to the Brno edition of Interspeech 2021 – will follow a schedule which is closer to the one of an in-presence conference. One reason is that we expect a higher percentage of on-site participants, another is the distribution of time zones which make Korea forerunner over Europe and the Americas. Still, virtual participation will be possible through fully-virtual Life Poster Q&A sessions scheduled for the Korean evening hours, as well as streamed keynotes and ceremonies. Also, the ISCA General Assembly will be hybrid, so that both on-site and virtual Interspeech attendees can participate. The conference organizers, led by Hanseok Ko, with assistance from Co-Chair John Hansen, will come with updated information about the program as soon as this is finished.

On the association side, we identified an individual who will coordinate Interspeech organization in the long run, and be the second employee of ISCA. In addition, we plan to exchange some of our software tools which have become slightly outdated. We are happy to discuss these and further news from the board at the General Assembly during Interspeech.

With my usual thanks to Chris Wellekens for his excellent job in compiling this ISCApad, I wish you a geed read.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President