Dear ISCA members,

Also on behalf of the ISCA board, I wish you all a successful, happy, safe and healthy 2024! I hope that for all of us 2024 will be a better year than 2023.

I hope all of you managed to find some holiday time or was able to work in a more relaxed way than usual (because others were on holiday), so that you can start 2024 full of energy. 2024 will bring us a new Interspeech, this year on the beautiful island of Kos, Greece. The paper deadline is approaching fast (2 March). I wish everyone good luck with their research and the paper writing. I hope to again see a large number of paper submissions as is customary the past few years.

But the start of a new year is also a good moment in time to reflect on the past year. 2023 saw a successful and fun Interspeech 2023 in Dublin, many ISCA endorsed workshops, SIG activities, Distinguished Lecturer, ISCA-SAC and PECRAC activities, and monthly updates from our community through the ISCAPad, to name but a few. I wish to sincerely thank all organisers, reviewers, and participants of ISCA events, authors of the countless papers sent to our events, the ISCAPad editor, our ISCA staff and board members, and everyone else involved in our amazing community. Our community exists because of and for you!

January is also the time for nominations for ISCA Fellow and Distinguished Lecturer! Please consider nominating one of your amazing colleagues who has made significant contributions to the field of speech communication. Nomination forms and information are available at our website: http://www.isca-speech.org. The deadlines are 31 January for the Distinguished Lecturers and 10 February for ISCA fellow.

Regarding our website: as you know, behind the scenes many people have been working hard and long to move our website to a new server and management system (WildApricot). The move is planned from 23 January to 1 February, during which ISCA services, including the website, the member profiles and the membership renewal will not be accessible. If you intend to renew your membership, please do so before 22 January or after early February through our new website.

Finally, we encourage you to consider hosting/inviting our Distinguished Lecturer Professor Visar Berisha, School of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, USA, to visit your university to give a talk! We especially encourage schools or regions which may not have as many visitors/conferences in the field of speech communications to send a request. More information can be found at: https://www.isca-speech.org/iscaweb/index.php/distinguished-lecturers. And a big thank you to our previous Distinguished Lecturer Professor Reinhold Haeb-Umbach, Communications Engineering, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany!

Odette Scharenborg

ISCA President