This welcome message marks the start of the new year and comes at the tail end of a several months long busy period of the SLTC. First of all, there is the yearly election cycle, carefully administered by our election sub-committee. Please join me in thanking 12 member who retired their position at the end of 2016: Tomoki Toda, Gernot Kubin, Maurizio Omologo, Nicholas Evans, Larry Heck, Peder Olsen, Frank Seide, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Deep Sen, Svetlana Stoyanchev, Jasha Droppo and George Saon. And please join me in welcoming the class of 2019.

Dear SLTC,

As every year, this past November saw the election of new members to the Speech and Language Technical Committee to take the places of those whose 3-year terms are coming to an end.   SLTC membership is grouped by subject area, and in this year’s election (for the 2017-2019 term) we had 17 openings in 8 areas.  Current members are eligible to run for a consecutive term once.