Dear friends of ISCA,

this president’s message reaches you from Israel, where we are currently checking the conference site for Interspeech 2024 in Jerusalem. In fact, Emmanuelle Foxonet, Jean-Francois Bonastre and myself had a visit of the conference center and discussed with the organizers, in order to ensure that your conference experience in 2024 will be as perfect as you expect it – perhaps with a slightly more oriental flavor.

More urgently, Interspeech 2023 in Dublin is approaching at a fast pace. The TPC did a tremendous job in deciding upon a near-record number of submissions at its TPC meeting on May 10-11, thanks to the excellent preparation and technical innovations introduced by the TPC Chairs Simon King, Kate Knill and Petra Wagner – some of them will have a longer-lasting impact on ISCA’s processes. Thanks a lot to the Dublin team led by Naomi Harte for hosting us in this beautiful city – most of you will hopefully experience soon!

On the association side, ISCA members elected new board members for the period starting at this Interspeech. As you will read further down in this ISCApad, three new board members were elected, and three others (former president John Hansen, current secretary Torbjørn Svendsen and myself) will leave the board after having served for two periods. You will be able to meet old and new board members at Interspeech 2023, especially at the General Assembly on August 26. Besides that, we are still working on new software tools; these include, amongst others, a new membership management system and a new website. Although we expect the new system to be only up and running after Interspeech, we hope to overcome several of the technical problems we have experienced recently.

I wish you a good read of the ISCApad, as always nicely compiled by Chris Wellekens.

Sebastian Möller

ISCA president