Dear friends of ISCA,

I am writing this message to tell you about the student advisory committee of ISCA (ISCA-SAC) and the initiatives we promote. As you may know, ISCA-SAC’s main goal is to increase the interaction among students and senior researchers. To this end, we organise a series of events during the annual Interspeech conference, including the Doctoral Consortium, Students Meet Experts, and two mentoring initiatives.

Let me tell you more about these events. The Doctoral Consortium gives PhD students the opportunity to receive feedback on their ongoing dissertation project from a panel of experts, and to meet other PhD students working on related topics. On the other hand, Students Meet Experts consists of a Q&A panel discussion with experts from academia and industry, with the most diverse questions, ranging from career planning to mental health. Finally, the mentoring initiatives, co-organized with the Mentoring Committee, connect mentors and mentees in informal small round tables, or one-to-one mentoring sessions. At the last Interspeech, in 2022, we had over 64 mentors from 21 countries.

Besides these events, we also host the Speech Pitch podcast. The idea started during the pandemic, when we were lacking social interaction and platforms to get to know other researchers in the community. Currently, we have released six episodes, where we chatted with Iona Gessinger, Odette Scharenborg, Nicholas Cummins, Shri Narayanan, John Hansen, and Pascale Fung. We talked about their work, their stories, their ideas, and lessons learnt during their careers. So far, we have had listeners from 44 different countries, but we hope these (and future) episodes can reach many more people! 

ISCA-SAC has been continuously growing, and we hope to be able to reach more students from the most diverse backgrounds this year, and in years to come. Thus, I would like to invite everyone to join us – join with your ideas and feedback, join our events at Interspeech, join as a mentor, join as a podcast listener, join the SAC or the Mentoring Committee as a volunteer to help plan the events for Interspeech 2023, or simply join us through our social media!

Finally, as I will soon leave my role as General Coordinator of ISCA-SAC, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all ISCA-SAC and Mentoring Committee members, all the researchers that contributed to our events either as mentors, panellists, and podcast guests, and all participants that took part in the activities. It has been a true pleasure to contribute to this community, and learn from all of you.

I wish you all the best for 2023!

Catarina Botelho

General Coordinator of ISCA-SAC