Published in TC News on 1 April 2017 by Izhak Shafran and Andrew Rosenberg (Reposted from the SLTC Newsletter) Dear Readers, Welcome to the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! We are amidst a season of changes. The changing of guards at IEEE SLTC is albeit less dramatic than the national one. No executive orders have been signed so far. Instead, we have a farewell letter from the outgoing SLTC Chair and a welcome letter from the incoming SLTC Chair. Apart from the transition of the chair, 13 new members and 4 continuing members were elected to the SLTC last fall. Andreas Stolcke gives us a peek into the process and assures us that our elections have not been tampered by any foreign influences or agents. We would also like to draw your attention to the call for hosting IEEE SLTC 2018. For more details, see the link below. Last but not least, this winter issue features the next installment of our regular column, "Getting to Know Your Fellow Researchers", highlighting Jim Glass, who leads the Spoken Language Systems Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This newsletter is an ideal forum for updates, reports, announcements and editorials which don't fit well with traditional journals. We welcome your contributions, as well as calls for papers, job announcements, comments and suggestions. You can submit job postings here, and contact the TC via this form, or send mail to speechnewseds@listserv.ieee.orgto propose articles. To subscribe to the Newsletter, send an email with the command "subscribe speechnewsdist" in the message body tolistserv@listserv.ieee.org(link sends e-mail). Izhak Shafran, Editor-in-Chief Andrew Rosenberg, Editor   Michiel Bacchiani Bhuvana Ramabhadran