Dear Speech and Language Processing Community,

Happy new year!  I hope that you all have had a successful conclusion to 2019 and that 2020 is an even brighter year.  Indeed, our community is vibrant and growing: as we are in the middle of the ICASSP review process as I am writing this, I can report that the papers submitted to SLTC areas (encompassing Speech Processing and Human Language Technologies) grew by over 25% from the previous ICASSP.  

The Member Election Subcommittee of the SLTC is announcing the results of the elections for members filling the 2020-2022 term. In this year's election, we had 17 openings in 9 areas that took into account retirements and recent ICASSP trends.

The existence of gender imbalance in STEM fields continues to this day. UNESCO, in 2015, reported worldwide under-representation of women in STEM fields with only 30% women researchers in various fields. The key reasons of this disparity are lack of encouragement, guidance and resources.

I recently attended the NeurIPS 2019 ConvAI Workshop held in Vancouver.

Jason Williams, Kyu Jeong Han, Raul Fernandez