Chair's Letter - October 2020

Dear SLTC community,

This is likely my last chair’s letter to you all as my term comes to an end.  I’m looking forward to supporting Dong Yu in my new role as past chair next year – Dong and I have been working to make the transition a smooth one, and I’m looking forward to his leadership going forward.  We’re about to buckle down for the ICASSP review process; last year the SLTC handled 986 papers and I suspect we will likely top 1000 for ICASSP 2021.

The SLTC has undergone some structural changes over the last two years in order to help better serve our community.  We have combined some functions of subcommittees and addressed some new needs; subcommittee teams have been pretty energized.  Our teams have been hard at work behind the scenes;  I’d just to highlight a few subcommittees that are working in new ways by describing some work-in-progress:

Conference support:  This committee is a combination of the previous EDICS and Meeting Support committees, and is tasked with supporting the ICASSP, ASRU, and SLT review processes by both evaluating paper categorization (EDICS) and reviewer pools.  I’m pleased to see that the team has improved our process for gathering qualifications of potential reviewers.

Awards and membership honors: Formed from the Awards and Fellows committees, this committee works to promote our members in the various SPS awards categories.  The energy of this subcommittee has already brought forth fruit in various awards categories, which will be made public soon.

External relations: The renewed charge for this committee is to find ways for the SLTC to better reach out to the community.   The committee chairs have started to work with the SPS Education arm to develop plans for education and community-building activities; we hope to have some new initiatives soon to better connect people, especially in this pandemic time.

I’d like to thank the members of the technical committee for dedicating time and effort to improving our community, and particularly for helping manage the upcoming ICASSP review process.  The TC members do an excellent job of helping meta-review papers and provide the crucial expertise in assimilating reviewer opinion of papers.

If you are interested in joining the TC, our annual elections are coming up with nominations closing on October 20th.  Information on how to self-nominate (or have someone else nominate you) is provided in this newsletter.

Be safe, be well, and happy ICASSP paper writing!

Best,

-Eric