Dear friends of ISCA,

The month of August is normally amongst the hottest in the northern hemisphere, and it is also a hot month regarding the preparation of Interspeech. Many of you will already have booked your travel to Incheon, and indeed we hope that the majority of participants will be able to attend our flagship conference in person. Others are hesitant or unable to travel, and the organizers will do their utmost to ensure that also for them Interspeech 2022 will be a great experience.

ISCA is changing as well. Following a request from organizers and TPC Chairs of Interspeech 2021 and previous conferences, as well as observations we have made during the past years with increasing paper submission numbers, requiring more streamlined review processes, ISCA came to the conclusion that we need to have more continuous support for future conference organisers within ISCA. This is why the board decided to fund a continuous, half-time position for someone to organise the scientific coordination of Interspeech conferences. To be clear, the scientific part of the review process will remain in the hands of the TPC Chairs, Area Chairs, and reviewers, but the myriad processing steps will in the future be coordinated and supported by a continuous scientific coordinator employed by our association.

I am very happy to announce that Antoine Serrurier has agreed to take up this role from September 2022 onwards. Antoine is actually a long-standing member of our community: He obtained a PhD in speech sciences from the University of Grenoble, France, in 2003, for his work on 3-dimensional modelling of the speech organs from MRI images for nasal production. Since then, he worked in several institutions in France, UK, and Germany, in the domain of speech sciences, covering among others speech production, articulatory modelling, acoustics, phonetics, medicine, anatomy, palaeoanthropology, medical imaging, synthesis, and machine learning. He has published in many journals and at several conferences, including Interspeech, successfully managed international research projects, and organised international workshops. He is very keen on taking up his new role for ISCA, although he will for the time being stay connected to his own research at the Clinics for Phoniatrics, Paedaudiology and Communication Disorders of RWTH Aachen University. I am very happy that Antoine has joined our team, and will – in addition to Emmanuelle Foxonet (Manu), be the second employee in the 34 years of history of ISCA.

Apart from that, I hope that you can regain your forces after such a long period of Covid19-related restrictions, and that I will see most of you in person at Interspeech 2022 in Incheon, Korea. I wish you a good read of this month’s ISCA pad, as always nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA president

Sebastian Möller

ISCA President