Dear friends of ISCA,

I guess that many of you have been busy in writing papers for our flagship conference. The submission deadline for the abstract which was March 1^st has now passed, and the organizers have received an overwhelming number of initial submissions, confirming the enthusiasm researchers have in sharing their research findings and participating in this year’s INTERSPEECH. If you have submitted a paper, you will have noted that the submission system changed to CMT, and also the system for matching reviewers to papers has been changed. In addition, all submissions are now double-blind; we hope that these changes help us to maintain a high quality of accepted papers.

This March is a very special month for me and ISCA, as I have two important announcements to make: First, the selection process for Interspeech 2026 was successful. We are happy that we had very strong candidates, with very strong bids, and in the end the ISCA Board voted for Sydney, Australia, for hosting INTERSPEECH 2026. Congratulations to Felicity Cox, her entire team, as well as to the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA), for this success! ISCA is very happy to return to Australia after Interspeech 2009 in Brisbane, and after ICSLP 1998 also to Sydney, for running its flagship event.

The second announcement is also a very pleasant one: The ISCA Board is happy to announce that the 2023 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement – our most prestigious award – will be awarded to

Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan

for his sustained and diverse contributions to speech communication science and technology and its application to human-centered engineering systems.

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan, ISCA fellow since 2016, is known to most of you for his excellent work in areas as diverse as speech production, articulatory acoustics, speech prosody, speech and language processing, prosody modeling, speech translation, speech synthesis, spoken dialog and conversational systems, behavioral signal processing, affective computing, multimodal signal processing, as well as biomedical signal and image processing. A hallmark of Shri’s research is its inclusive nature in creating technologies that are robust and equitable in the presence of the rich diversity e.g., developmental differences in children, differences in traits or other demographic variables including psychological state, and health status.

His career, in industry (AT&T Bell Labs/AT&T Research, 1995-2000) and subsequently in academia (University of Southern California, 2000-present), has created interdisciplinary

approaches to human-centered sensing/imaging, signal and information processing, and computational modeling inspired by applications centered on human communication, interaction and behavior. His interdisciplinary scientific and engineering contributions are exemplified in over 900 peer-reviewed publications, numerous original curated datasets and tools widely-used worldwide, sustained leadership in technical projects, 18 granted patents (leading to 3 startups), over 100 invited keynote and plenary presentations worldwide, and mentoring over 80 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars.

Shri’s research has led to inventions and their commercialization with broad impact. To name just a few, the patents on voice interfaces laid the early foundation for now ubiquitous speech-based services and information retrieval on the cloud, and for mobile devices. The series of patents on automatic speech recognition for mobile devices paved the way for adaptive on-device (e.g., smartphone) speech processing and user personalization. Shri is also collaborating with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. ISCA is very proud to award the 2023 Medal for Scientific achievements to him.

For the rest of this ISCApad, I wish you a good read; as usual, it was nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA president